How Race Survived Us History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon

An excellent, well-researched book on how the very concept of race was created out of fiction as an integral part of American history, including the colonial period. The concept of the "white race" didn't just happen; it took lots of work. This is a fascinating report of the twisted convolutions of laws and the thoughts of leading politicians and philosophers that were required to justify the enslavement of Africans, the destruction of Native Americans culture (they just didn't work out as slaves), and the enthronement of Europeans as the supreme race, even though the privileged Europeans had a hard time figuring out whether the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, and others were "white" or not. I thought I knew a fair amount about the creation and maintenance of race in this country but this book synthesizes so much past and recent thinking about American history. Though only 230 pages, it's dense so allow yourself plenty of time to absorb it.

In the course of any action, there has to be a reason. Roediger says the wealthy in England and the American colonies created the idea of white supremacy as the reason for slavery and taking the Indians' land away from them. He shows how that creation of white supremacy has not only persisted to this day but has been nurtured by United States law and culture for political and economic reasons. It is thoroughly depressing. The book's major fault is its lengthy, serpentine sentences, some of which clearly got away from the editors as well as the author. Its strength is negotiating 400 years of racial history in what is now the United States in 230 pages. Roediger wears leftist politics on his sleeve which will prevent some from reading this, and will have others arguing with it at every paragraph. But his politics do not detract from and even service a concise, gimlet-eyed view of the flow of U.S. history regarding race relations. Roediger concludes that the idea of white supremacy dreamed up centuries ago by entitled Englishmen to justify their brutality is so entwined and supported by current powerful economic and political interests that it will not go away for hundreds of years unless it is aggressively fought. In the age of Obama, this challenges conventional wisdom, just as the book challenges conventional U.S. histories.