The Wages Of Whiteness: Race And The Making Of The American Working Class

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towards Blacks. In Columbia,
Pennsylvania 1834, skilled workers went on riots hysterically fueled by the
threat of inter-racial sex. Again, we see that society did not
want Blacks to mix with white. This was more emphasized with white women
mixing with black men, because the white working class did not want the
physical blending of black and white people. Mobs were against black causes.
“As David Grimsted has shown, the tendency to riot against asylums for the
Black orphans carried the singling out of the defenseless for attack to a
chilling extreme” (page 109). From this quote, the white workers who
mobbed were opposed to giving aid to the innocent orphans. Thus, so far we
have seen that we have a white working class who are using all sorts of
riots in order to segregate themselves from blacks. We can conclude that
the majority of white workers were very concerned with the keeping a
boundary between black and white.
Blackface, a fragment of the antebellum era was ...

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