Presented by the Humanities Program Faculty Colloquium
W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of compensatory whiteness within the American regime of racial capitalism has been enormously influential. Black Reconstruction (1935) famously argued that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage” in the 19th and early 20th century U.S., delivering to poor whites a sense of status dependent on their classification as “not-black.” This thesis has shaped many subsequent analyses of American political culture, from the landmark scholarship of David Roediger to popular debates over the “white working class” in the 2016 presidential election. In her book project, Economies of Anti-Blackness: Du Bois and the Gratifications of Whiteness in the 21st Century, Ella Myers revisits Du Bois’s important formulation of compensatory whiteness, situating it within Du Bois’s more complex, overlooked analysis of the multiple gratifications of whiteness in the early 20th century. Specifically, she examines three motifs in Du Bois’s middle period writings: whiteness-as-wage, whiteness-as-dominion, and whiteness-as-pleasure. The manuscript draws on Du Bois’s polyvalent theory to reflect on the persistence of antiblackness, and corresponding investments in whiteness, under contemporary conditions of racial capitalism.