This behavior can most understood when Roediger explains, "To be a slave, even a white slave, was to be associated with degradation," (85). Even the most zealous abolitionist can read this previous sentence and empathize with whites who saw themselves being pushed into a social class that would rip away all that being a white American meant. .
In the third and fourth sections of the book, Roediger attempts to more deeply investigate what the antebellum worker's conception of whiteness was. He argues that upper middle class and working class patrons of minstrel shows, the working class minstrel performers, and Irish immigrants, were held together and maintained by an image of blackness that symbolized life in white pre-industrial society. Thus, blackness in America became both objects of playful nostalgia, as portrayed with the characters in minstrel shows, and a sort of social and economic representation of the white past.
For Roediger, minstrelsy served as a mechanism for expressing the grievances between the different classes, but he used it for focusing the struggle on race more than directly stating class grievances. Likewise, mob attacks on blacks by working class whites were seen as preferable over attacking the middle class. Roediger acknowledges that it is difficult to assess how many of the working class were involved in such riots, but agrees with John Jentz's argument. Jentz argues that the states reactions to the riots suggested a split within the working class. He saw these riots as an expression of building tension between the classes. .
Irish Americans knew that identification with whiteness was very important to their political legitimacy and to their place in the economic hierarchy. Roediger found that, as much as any other white group, the Irish identified themselves by negation- in terms of what they were not. They, like the white working class, did not want to be clumped into anything that looked like slavery.