David R. Roediger is Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, & Working Class History (1994), The Wages of Whiteness: Race & the Making of the American Working Class (1991) and Our Own Time: A History of American Labor & the Working Day (1989) and editor of Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998).