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Q&A: What it Means to Be ‘An Ordinary White’ [1]
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Date: 2025-08-08
David Roediger is a historian of race and class in the United States, and a professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. He’s the author of crucial historical works on the construction of race, including the 1991 book Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. This interview follows the publication of his memoir this past March, in which he writes about growing up in small-town southern Illinois and his long teaching career in midwestern state universities. Enjoy our conversation about what it means to be “an ordinary white,” below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: I was hoping that we could start with the title of your memoir, An Ordinary White, My Anti-Racist Education. Can you tell me how you decided to open the book with that insistence upon your own “ordinariness,” or tell me a bit about why it’s important to foreground the fact that a typical white upbringing can in fact produce an anti-racist politics?
David Roediger: The phrase “ordinary white” comes from South Africa. It’s a much more common phrasing in South Africa. It means poor, working class whites, still extraordinarily privileged people in South Africa. But I picked it up from being there. The import of ordinary for me is exactly what you said, that it’s important to realize at a time when rural and poor and working class whites are sometimes vilified as the very source of Trumpism and as “deplorables” and whatever else they’re called, that there’s a lot else going on in these lives. Rather than try to make this an autobiography in which I came up from something – up from a sundown town, or up from racism, I wanted to try to explore what it is that is ordinary in my life, that has been shared by a lot of people. I was lucky enough to encounter some things, some movements that changed my life more, maybe, or more suddenly anyway, than other people. But I think that it’s important that we realize that whatever the votes are and whatever else, there are a lot of different currents and values that arise among “ordinary whites.”
DY: That that really comes through, I think, in the sections of the book where you’re talking about people you went to high school with all dispersing and going off and many of them getting good paying jobs and having new and interesting experiences like you did. I could see you writing against that Hillbilly Elegy kind of narrative, which might have emphasized more of the differences that emerged between you and the community you grew up in.
DR: I decided to write this book as my mother turned 100 and then died at that age. I was back in the small town that I grew up in for a lot of the last two years of her life. Most of my friends had long gone. But some of the tenor of the town still remained and a few friends remained. It really made me want to insist upon the fact that I was still, in some ways, a product of that town.
DY: Can you describe for your readers a little bit about your two hometowns? And maybe venture into the distinct political lessons that you learned from each one.
DR: I grew up mainly in a town called Columbia, Illinois, which is about 15 miles from St. Louis, then rural but now kind of a suburb – a town that was built around a quarry and a grain mill.
It was a farm town three miles from the Mississippi River, very beautiful along the bluffs and with a lot of common area forests and lakes. That town was, however, a sundown town. The term identifies an all-too-common type of Midwestern community in which Black people weren’t allowed into town after sundown. Illinois is historically the leading state for the production of such sundown towns. And Columbia was one of them. It had a six o’clock whistle that marked the timing of when people of color supposedly had to vacate to town. I don’t think there was a law. I think there was just a custom in policing that enforced these sundown exclusions where I lived.
It was just a very, very insular German-American, but also militantly white, town. One oddity about race though, was that it was so saturated with Black culture. We were near St. Louis and our musical heroes, and certainly our sports heroes were all African-American, but we had no face-to-face interaction with Black people at all. In fact, knowledge of race consisted of the racist stories that people who worked at a factory that had Black workers would come back and tell.
The second place that I grew up is right at the southern tip of Illinois, where the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers meet, a town called Cairo. At that time the town was half African-American and half white, and had gotten, in the mid-1960s, a very late swell in the Black freedom movement, particularly around the struggle to integrate schools and to integrate the swimming pool. But by the time those struggles came about locally, the idea of Black Power was breaking out. So I got to live around a social movement that was, to a teenager, extraordinarily exciting. Because I was made to go to mass on Sundays as a Catholic, I started going to the little Black mission church, which happened to have a shorter church service. But that church turned out to be the hub of the Civil Rights movement in Cairo.
So when I say ordinary whites have a lot of these contrary thoughts, contrary to Trumpism, contrary to conservatism, contrary – at that time – to Goldwater-ism, I had all those from an encounter with a radicalizing Catholic Church, and from my family’s involvement in the labor movement. But being around that church and movement in Cairo was also a kind of just a stroke of great, great luck for me.
DY: I was really struck by the way that you described Cairo as feeling like a city to you, despite your spending most of the year 10 miles outside of St. Louis. You note that it had a movie theater, a swimming pool, a newsstand, and a tamale vendor. Today, if you go all the way down to the very tip of Southern Illinois, Cairo is extremely depopulated. But I just thought it was interesting that your description of public institutions in a place like Cairo sort of tracks with your story of changes in public higher education.
DR: That’s an interesting point that, you know, the first time that I witnessed a school system being abandoned and dismantled because of conservative, in this case, white supremacist values, and really a conscious decision not to have public goods if they really were going to be available to everyone – including Black people – was in Cairo. I lived about a block from the high school in Cairo for some of that time. But even more than the schools, the swimming pool was a great symbol of forfeiting good public things to racism. Cairo’s pool had always been a whites-only pool, even though it was built with public New Deal money in the 1930s. When the courts ruled in the 60s that it had to be integrated, there were fierce street battles around demonstrations trying to integrate the pool. But ultimately, what the city fathers did was just abandon the pool. So, you know, I hadn’t really thought of it that way before. But what we’re kind of seeing with public higher education, where if it’s at all influenced by egalitarianism, powerful people are willing to just abandon it, was something that I experienced in a different way when I was a young teenager.
DY: So I think that’s the other big topic that I wanted to make sure and hear from you about, that if you’re involved with a university at all right now, then you’re hearing a lot of discussion about attacks from the Trump administration on race and gender studies, on scientific research funding, on international students. And I think a lot of people agree about the unprecedented nature of some of these threats from the Trump Administration, but then also, I think, clearly, there has been an erosion in the country’s commitment to public higher education over many, many years. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit just from your perspective of working in all of these flagship Midwestern campuses throughout your career, what this focus on the present crisis misses about the way that public K-12 and higher education has changed.
DR: My mother was a public grade school teacher for 49 years and a teachers union militant. I made, without having to think about it much, a commitment in my career to be in public rather than private universities. And at the time, that seemed like just a solidly left thing to do. But it’s turned out to be harder and harder to inhabit those public spaces, especially in Republican states like Kansas, where I now teach. The timing of the book is important in this connection, because I wrote it actually before Trump was reelected. In fact I wrote it very much thinking that he wouldn’t be reelected.
So I was talking in the book not so much about Trump as about the crisis in public education that had incrementally grown in a bipartisan way, the most outrageous statements often coming from Republicans, but the cuts being supported by Democrats, as well. This left me in a situation where I wrote what I thought was a very, very hard hitting critique of what’s happening in higher education, and the threats, and then Trump comes into office, and has exceeded even those dire predictions of mine, that I thought might happen over the next 10 years. They happened in six months.
But I still think it’s important to look at that chapter. It’s the last substantive chapter in the book. It does give us a sense that the crisis is not just about Trump, it’s about a long defunding of public education. It’s about a long series of attacks on speech, and on the ability to say things, particularly when it’s about race. The book was originally going to be titled, The Autobiography of a Critical Race Theorist. My idea was to first lecture about it only on campuses where it was illegal to speak about critical race theory.
But what’s happened is that, if we’re to believe the Trump administration, critical race theory is impermissible everywhere. So I did end up only speaking in places where the very idea of being able to say these words is under attack.
I don’t think that’s only happened in the last six months. I think we have to be able to say that it’s a long process. And the interesting thing, from my point of view, is that it turns out that to transcend public education so that the attacks on Ivy League schools are also tremendous and fundamental, and those tend to be about funding and speech as well.
So there’s not really a safe place. For a while I wished that my career would have ended in a private school, partly because the money of fancy private schools makes them more diverse than some of the flagship universities that I’ve taught at in the Midwest. But now I think it does turn out that there’s not really, in the United States, a safe place to have ideas and to fight for ideas within a university.
The conclusion I draw from that is that universities aren’t going to be, for the foreseeable future, the place of insurgent ideas and organizing. I think we must fight for whatever bits of power and resources we have in universities, but we have to know that political education is going to take place mostly outside of universities now.
DY: I wanted to ask you about your writing against these right-wing caricatures of critical race theory and your writing in defense of critical race theory. I thought you had a really interesting diagnosis of, from your perspective, the major failure of critical race theory – that its leading proponents failed to outline what real action in favor of racial justice would look like, and we wound up instead with an individualistic theory of self-actualization through anti-racism rather than any general call to collective action.
DR: I don’t really claim the title of critical race theorist only because I think it’s mostly best practiced in the law schools and I don’t keep up fully with the law school literature. It started as a tool, of course, to open up litigation and rethink the narratives that were being presented in courts. It’s interesting, the boom of what people now call “critical whiteness studies” and the very first critical race theory conference were both right at the same time, roughly 1989 to 1991. And that reflects, I think, the Reagan ascendancy and the interest in trying to figure out who the poor and working-class whites who were sometimes voting for Reagan were. A lot of us began to think about, well, what’s in the long history of the United States that leaves us in this situation? But many of us who did that had been working in social movements for a long time against racism, and so we had these ways of talking. And those ways of talking actually made it beyond the universities. One of them involved the term “white privilege.”
The term white privilege was invented in the 1960s by leftists, by Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev. I was very sympathetic to that term. But then as it got into the universities and got to be spoken mostly in the universities, I think we forgot that it only really made sense inside of a social movement, that otherwise if you just go up and tell a poor white person you’re privileged, that’s not organizing, that’s just labeling. It had to be part of a social movement. And even now I’m trying to say “white advantage” instead of “white privilege” for that very reason. But the main thing that your question points to is that over the long haul, we on the left in social movements lost out to a more therapeutic and individualistic approach to diversity training.
I did a lot of what we would now call diversity training, although it didn’t have a name in the 90s, in unions, in Sunday schools, and in social workers’ groups. It wasn’t paid. It wasn’t mandatory that the people had to come. Certainly it wasn’t sponsored by the corporation that employed people attending. And then all of a sudden, or maybe not so suddenly, but over a couple of decades, diversity training became something completely different and something that was more a product of serving the army and the police, and corporate interest and was sponsored by these groups, and it was usually mandatory and experienced very badly by the people who were subject to it. I think that we have to admit that we lost that. It doesn’t mean that we turn on the diversity consultants who are themselves being victimized by what the state is doing now. But we realize that the weak position that they’re in is not a result of how strong their critique of U.S. society was, but of how weak their critique of U.S. society was.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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