Esch Elizabeth D. - Class, race, and Marxism

I n a book gathering work done over the course of a decade but reflecting thinking about these matters for four, acknowledgments cannot ever be adequate. I err here on the side of brevity and apologize for omissions. Everything I have written on race and class is informed by mentoring long ago from George Fredrickson, Margaret George, and George Rawick. Learning from Sterling Stuckey came early and continues to only grow. Outside of universities the Chicago Surrealist Group and especially Franklin Rosemont, Paul Garon, and Penelope Rosemont have been constant presences. Where psychology and contemporary social movements are concerned, my sons Brendan Roediger and Donovan Roediger have shared insights. Research assistance from Zach Sell, John Marquez, Stephanie Krehbiel, Martin Smith, Kathryn Robinson, and Hannah Bailey has helped greatly as has work from Edward G. Lee on web matters. I have run drafts and ideas by countless people, including Rebecca Hill, Paul Gilroy, Kevin Mumford, David Camfield, Vron Ware, Alberto Toscano, Dianne Harris, Michael Mizell-Nelson, Rachel Gugler, john powell, Joel Helfrich, Jean Allman, Jonathan Garlock, Noel Ignatiev, Nell Irvin Painter, Moon-Kie Jung, Thavolia Glymph, Richard Seymour, Tricia Rose, Robin D.G. Kelley, Joel Olson, Mark Leff, Clarence Lang, Rod Ferguson, Ferruccio Gambino, Enoch Page, Abigail Bakan, Enakshi Dua, Rose Feurer, Chad Person, John Bracey, Susan Ferber, Shawn Alexander, and George Lipsitz. At Verso Sebastian Budgen, Sophia Hussain, John Merrick, and Rosie Warren have been especially helpful. Coauthor on one of the pieces, as well as supportive and most perceptive critic on all, was Elizabeth Esch.

My research and writing benefitted from institutional support in the form of fellowships from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at University of Illinois, the Center for Advanced Study at University of Illinois, the Mellon Foundation, and from residencies at University of South Carolina and University of Londons Queen Mary University. Thanks especially to Lawrence Glickman and to Gerry Hanlon for arranging the two residencies.

The essays originally appeared in the venues below and both the editors and editorial collectives involved improved them greatly in each case. They are reprinted with thanks:

Chapter 1: The Retreat from Race and Class. Monthly Review, 58 (JulyAugust 2006), 4051.

Chapter 2: Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness: US Marxism and the Critical History of Race in Wulf Hund, David Roediger, and Jeremy Krikler, eds., The Wages of Whiteness and RacistSymbolic Capital (Berlin: LIT, 2011), 936.

Chapter 3: The White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Settings of Genius. SouthAtlantic Quarterly, 109 (Spring 2010), 22547.

Chapter 4: Removing Indians, Managing Slaves, and Justifying Slavery: The Case for Intersectionality in Sabine Ritter and Iris Wigger, eds., Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hund (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 11730.

Chapter 5: Coauthored with Elizabeth Esch, One Symptom of Originality: Race and the Management of Labor in US History. Historical Materialism, 17 (2009), 343.

Chapter 6: Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past. American Quarterly, 68 (June 2016), 22348.