Famed historian chronicles his 'radical' intellectual and political transformation
LAWRENCE — In the opening sentence of his new autobiography, noted historian David Roediger writes, “I learned racism about when I learned to walk.”
He’s spent his whole life trying to unlearn it.
“We receive an informal education in racism and antiracism,” said Roediger, the Foundation Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. “My book tries to view education as not mainly happening in schools or universities. It’s about how families educate you, how cities educate you and how social movements educate you.”
Roediger titled his latest work “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.” It chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in a Midwest “sundown town” to becoming a leading figure in working-class history and whiteness studies. It’s published by Fordham University Press.
“I had a hard time being a historian and writing autobiographically because I wanted to go check every fact and look things up in censuses and newspapers,” he said. “I had to just say at a certain point, ‘No, this is actually an autobiography.’ It was hard to get out of a research mindset and get more into a subjective one.”
The book details how he developed intellectually and politically despite growing up in settings seemingly inhospitable to antiracism. As a scholar in the early 1990s, his literary contributions placed him alongside Toni Morrison and Alexander Saxton as an architect of what’s come to be known as contemporary whiteness studies.
“I try to open up this question of the rural, white, lower middle-class, working-class experience as having a lot of dimensions to it,” he said.
“I don’t think that makes the outcome any better. In a way, it makes things more tragic that individuals who are poor and are themselves left out of society draw a conservative political conclusion. I’m not one to deny that. But I hope people might be interested in ‘what else?’ What else are ordinary working white people experiencing, thinking and desiring?”
The chapter of which he is most proud is titled “Saved.” It details the part of his youth spent in Cairo, Illinois.
The professor recalled, “I started going to a little Black Catholic church there, which turned out to be a hub of the Civil Rights Movement. I called that chapter ‘Saved’ because it’s about finding my way out of religion. I’m saved in the sense of moving away from these intensely racist settings in my family and the two towns that I mostly grew up in to thinking about the Black Freedom Movement and Vietnam War.”
During this period, he said became “radicalized.”
“The Latin of it means ‘to the root.’ I never thought of radicalism as being anything but a social justice radicalism that tried to find what the root of the problem is in the structure of society,” Roediger said.
By embracing hot-button terms, Roediger fully understands these may prove problematic concepts to many. Does he think we’ll see fewer and fewer books about such topics?
“People will shift at least what they call themselves and what they call their books,” he said. “I think it’s probably already true in terms of textbooks and how you ‘have to please Texas.’ On the other hand, the problems of inequality are likely to become more urgent, and that might mean we see more books like this.”
Roediger is now in his 12th year at KU. His areas of research include the histories of the labor movement and slavery. Previous books include “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History,” “The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History” and “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.”
“My kids make fun of me because my books all tend to have ‘whiteness’ in the title,” Roediger said.
“Yet the books are just trying to figure out what the relationship between race and class is, and why poor people who are white and realize they’re workers tend to call themselves white workers. That question has been at me for 35 years: Why is it we don’t just have workers in the United States? We have white workers and Black workers. Why does the accent fall on white?”