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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.
Contents
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
