An Ordinary White
My Antiracist Education
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A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution
Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.
With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class history and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world’s oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James.
A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.
Roediger’s knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the characterization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness. A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice.
David Roediger knows that anti-racists are made, not born. By examining his own personal history, he reveals that the path to militant antiracism is crooked, halting, bound up with the injuries of class, the perjuries of gender, and the vagaries of location. Honest, tragic, funny, An Ordinary White is neither ordinary nor white. It is blues, confronting and shaking off the devil we know.---Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
A thoroughly engrossing narrative, David Roediger's An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education is honest, warm, and nuanced. Roediger takes us from the sundown towns of his youth, through his educations—formal and political—to our current dismal time of HWCUs (read the book to find out). Yet he ends, pro-Grinch-ly, with his faith in change from below and the promise of a vital labor movement.---Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
An Ordinary White is an extraordinary memoir of a historian honing his craft while participating in grassroots organizing and establishing (or not!) the subfield of 'critical whiteness studies.' Part autobiography, cultural analysis, and social history, this book strums with honesty, humor, compassion, and insight.---Tiya Miles, National Book Award winning author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
This intellectual autobiography is a treasure. Roediger lived through times and locations in which race has been a fundamental site of social struggle, contest, transformation, and retrenchment. His observations and analyses are moving, affecting, and important.---Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents
In this expansive memoir, David Roediger reveals how ordinary white lives include many invitations and opportunities to reckon with the pervasiveness of white advantage, to see the ways in which the dominant racial order can make even those with advantages miserable, and to learn from racialized communities ways to build a new, better, and more just world.---George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
Bursting with humor, insight, and a sprawling cast of characters, An Ordinary White illustrates how ideas and radical activity shape and reshape each other across the terrain of everyday life and during much rarer moments of radical mass upheaval.---Daniel Widener, author of Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity
In a time when racism in the United States is being loudly denied by the White House and employees of government agencies are being dismissed wholesale by white supremacists solely because their employment is the result of laws designed to increase equity in federal hiring practices, David Roediger’s memoir becomes an even more important book than it already was.---Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch
An Ordinary White is class analysis that leads to heartbreak—heartbreak for the academic system that gave Roediger his voice and is now deteriorating, heartbreak over the oppression our system inflicts on everyone at a basic level.---Los Angeles Review of Books
Preface: Becoming Fathomable | ix
1 Born and Raised: Abandoned Cities and a Sundown Town | 1
2 Saved | 34
3 Higher Educated: Coming of Age on the Left | 48
4 Schooled by the City and the Left | 68
Interlude One: Brush with Genius—C. L. R. James | 99
5 The Craft of History and the History Business | 103
Interlude Two: Brush with Genius—Radicals and the Countryside | 132
6 Present at the Unmaking: Critical Studies of Whiteness and Critical Race Theory | 138
Interlude Three: Brush with Genius—Toni Morrison and Angela Davis | 171
7 Caring for the Historically White Failed State University | 178
Afterword: What Good Is Being Fathomable? | 213
Further Reading | 221
Photos follow page 118
