An absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, by the
foremost historian of race and labor
The Obama era produced countless articles arguing that America’s
race problems were over. The election of Donald Trump has proved
those hasty pronouncements wrong. Race has always played a central
role in US society and culture.
Surveying a period
from the late seventeenth century—the era in which W.E.B. Du Bois
located the emergence of “whiteness”—through the American
Revolution and the Civil War to the civil rights movement and the
emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History
reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a
progressive national history. This masterful account shows how race
has remained at the heart of American life well into the twenty-first
century.
“Sometime in the
US of the past quarter-century, calling policies and the people who
dream them up racist became a worse offense than for them to be
racist. This inversion, always dressed in self-righteous indignation,
is actually part of the social evolution of white supremacy. David
Roediger’s book details in sharp and readable prose how race
survived US history. It is a must-read for all who strive to
understand—and abolish—what underlies the strangely strident
rhetoric enveloping everything from presidential contests to prison
expansion.” – Ruth Wilson Gilmore