North American Social History

The categories of class, race, and gender are at the heart of the analytical work of social historians. However, over the past 30 years the debate has stalled over which category trumps the other. For example, in The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that the “privileging of class over race is not always productive or meaningful” (p.8)

Perhaps then social historians should take a different approach?

Seth Rockman in Scraping By suggests what a different approach would look like. Rockman argues, “These analytical categories of historical experience were not in competition, and historians need not offer one primacy over another” (p.11) Rather Rockman notes, “historians must look for the larger system constituted at the intersection of these categories and seek the overlapping ‘relations of ruling’ that organized the lives and labors of workers of divergent subjectivities and identities” (p.11)

So, rather than arguing for one category over the other, social historians should explore how the categories of class, race, and gender intersected. Definitely food for thought. And definitely a more nuanced picture of social history.

References

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1999)

Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009)