Challenging the Dominant Paradigm

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. Titled An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education, Roediger’s text combines tales of his youth in sundown towns and other mostly white environs with descriptions of his later work against US racism in academia and the greater world. It is also a tale of his affiliations with the Chicago Surrealist Group, Charles H. Kerr Publishing and other literary, left and anti-racist organizations and people. Although hesitant for much of his writing life about “writing autobiographically,” Roediger realized that doing so could provide a more organic conversation about history and politics. A sentence in his preface includes this observation: “the main attraction of writing autobiographically has remained conveying how everyday life animates radical critiques of racial capitalism.”(xv) For many of this review’s readers, that observation will certainly ring true.

Born and raised in Missouri, Roediger’s childhood was a classic white kid’s childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. He spent most of his summers in Cairo, a city in southern Illinois known for its racism and its location on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Indeed, it is the place where Huck Finn and his companion Big Jim plan to escape to freedom. It is also a town where over ten thousand people encouraged and assisted in the lynching of William James in 1909. In the late 1960s, the city remained under the control of white supremacist forces, and after a nineteen-year-old Black soldier home on leave died in a jail cell after allegedly hanging himself, the town erupted into an insurrection. After this incident was repressed, white racists formed vigilante groups and began patrolling and harassing Black residents. More rioting broke out in 1969 that ended only after the National Guard was sent in. Roediger’s response was to join others at the high school he attended in Columbia, Illinois in using the underground newspaper to solicit funds for the Black United Front in Cairo. The high school administration shut that down.

Given his working class background, Roediger seemed headed for a life as a worker in a factory or retail. His salvation from such a future was his academic prowess. Instead of having to look towards a life he dreaded and one that most certainly meant either drudgery or allowing oneself to be co-opted and corrupted into management, he began getting accepted into various summer programs at different colleges. His world expanded politically, culturally and otherwise. He began to consider a future that meant going to college and becoming a teacher. Although he first set his sights on Yale, he ultimately decided to attend Northern Illinois University, partly because of a scholarship he received for his tennis-playing ability and high college admissions test scores. The decision to attend a land-grant public university instead of an Ivy league school would be an important element in his future intellectual life as a founder of what became known as whiteness studies.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Roediger was on college faculties and quietly developing what would become known in some circles as whiteness studies. This field of critical studies evolved from the early writings in the filed of critical race theory and essentially came from the idea that race is a social construct specifically used by the capitalist power structure to divide and ultimately control those not in the ruling classes. Whiteness studies takes a look at how people “became white” in western capitalist societies, especially the United States. For example, Irish immigrants came over and were treated almost as badly as the Blacks, only recently legally emancipated; a similar scenario plays out with Italian immigrants and, ultimately, Jewish arrivals. Each succeeding group of immigrants to the United States has eventually become considered “white” by the bulk of the US population. This happens because of the insistence on keeping Black residents of the United States on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. In essence, this dynamic is what created and maintains what has become known as white privilege, a concept which (like whiteness studies themselves) because of its ambiguity, has meanings which have become the opposite of its intended meaning. As Roediger writes, whiteness studies is about unmaking whiteness, not celebrating it.

To be clear, Roediger does not focus on the debates around critical race theory and whiteness studies here. After all, that is a debate he has contributed plenty to in other publications more appropriate than a memoir. Instead the reader finds out about labor struggles at the university, the fragile nature of special departments in academia devoted to anti-racist work and history, and the class struggle as it plays out on campus and in the neighborhoods surrounding these institutions. Equally, if not even moreso, are Roediger’s stories describing his involvement with the Chicago Surrealist Group and the longtime radical publisher Charles H. Kerr. As a writer and editor who has self-published, worked with small anti-profit and for profit presses and done so out of a love for the printed word and a desire to stimulate the intellectual curiosity of the people, I could easily relate to Roediger’s discussion of his years involved in similar work. Something about it makes it seem like the most worthwhile undertaking one can take besides raising children. Perhaps it’s the fact that one undertakes these roles out of love, knowing there will not always be any reward beyond the fact of the undertaking itself.

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