In Black Reconstruction in America (1935) the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century whiteness provided poor white workers with a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to them a valuable social status derived from their classification as non-black. Their race, in other words, provided white workers with a set of implicit and explicit benefits that radically shaped in the positive their living and working conditions. In the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the ability of white Americans to shape the course of U.S. History once again struck a dissonant chord, as political pundits and academics alike spoke of a rising “White Tide” that swept Donald Trump into office. Separated by nearly eighty years, both DuBois’s study of Reconstruction and the election of Donald Trump seem to suggest one key principle: to understand America you need to understand the social construction of whiteness. In the early 1990s, a group of historians took Du Bois’s concept of the “psychological wage” and put it at the basis of a new study field, whiteness studies, whose aim was to explore the advantages of the social classes benefitting from race discrimination, rather than the negative consequences of those hit by racism. This approach revitalized studies of race, towards new and exciting investigations into the making of white privilege and the history of immigration. This module will explore ideas of race and class in the study of U.S. labor history. We will analyze the key tenets of whiteness studies from Alexander Saxton and David R. Roediger, the opinions of scholars who radically reject their utility, and opposing positions on the importance of race in studying the history of the American working class. Using key moments of U.S. history, such as the end of the American Civil War, the Gilded Age, the New Deal and the 1970s, we will see how race has profoundly shaped the U.S. labor movement and labor history as an academic discipline of study.