How the Purportedly Unpaid Wages of Whiteness Explain Support for the Criminalization of Knowledge

Several states and a presidential executive order have attempted to put formal restrictions on the teaching of racist forces in American history. A classic example of academic work highlighting racist historical forces—and target of a book ban—is Du Bois's seminal Black Reconstruction , which includes descriptions of historical processes that ironically (though not unrelatedly) provide insight into modern support for these knowledge criminalization efforts. Du Bois famously discusses a divide between White and Black laborers, describing a historically specific circumstance in which White laborers, while paid relatively low wages, received a bonus wage of sorts for being White. After the fall of Jim Crow in the Civil Rights Era, the benefits of the “wages of whiteness” became less visible. Rather than producing class solidarity, racial boundary-making persisted, resulting in a new circumstance in which many working-class White Americans simultaneously felt they deserved the privileges implicitly promised based on their racialization while simultaneously resenting what they perceived as a failure to receive those symbolic wages. This feeling was accelerated by the symbolically important election of Barack Obama as president and by the rise of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement. To explore this, we wrote a successful proposal to the American National Election Studies to include public opinion questions about the teaching of racial knowledge in schools. Our results reveal that White Americans are more opposed to schools teaching about racism than Black Americans, but that the opposition is highest at the intersection Du Bois draws our attention to: economically insecure White Americans. Opposition is also high among those possessing the modern racist views that the knowledge gained from learning about racism would challenge. The results have implications for understanding many dimensions of current racial politics and speak to strategies for achieving racial justice and addressing economic inequalities.