I'm guessing you're fairly privileged because I've known plenty of black people who talk about the class gap within the black population--the black wealth gap is growing just like the white one.
As for Roediger (whose book I read long ago), I like this take by Theodore Allen, who did the groundbreaking work on the invention of white people:
"In his "Afterword" to the second edition, Roediger, with exemplary professional courage and integrity, acknowledges errors committed in the original edition. Some unspecified sections of the first edition, he notes, were "embarrassingly thin." He refers to "many shortcomings," for which he presumes others will be able to make amends without much difficulty. But there is one, major, error that he "sharply regrets," and for which he foresees no simple and easy amendment. That error, he says, was his acceptance of "the dominant assumption...[,] the unexamined and indefensible notion that white males were somehow 'the American working class.'" Reflecting on this "flat mistake," he recalls that he himself had expressed a contrary view. He frankly attributes the error to the effect of his "White Blindspot." This political disability, he goes on to say, incidentally caused the tone of the book to be unduly pessimistic."
I also like this from Du Bois's intro to the 50th anniversary edition of The Souls of Black Folk:
"I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race." —W.E.B. Du Bois, preface to The Souls of Black Folk, Jubilee Edition (1953, 50th Anniversary)
