Courtesy of David Roediger
On March 13, the Department of Ethnic Studies hosted David Roediger, a renowned historian whose work centers around the critical study of race and racism in America. Roediger, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Kansas, was on a book tour for his recently-published twelfth book: “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.” According to Roediger, the novel is both a memoir and a response to current white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the U.S.
At the event, Roediger read excerpts from his memoir and shared his experience growing up in Illinois sundown towns. He was then joined in conversation with Magalí Rabasa, Director of Ethnic Studies and Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Lewis & Clark and Carmen P. Thompson, a widely-sought historian and author of “The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” Thompson’s scholarship was quoted in the Dec. 2022 Oregon State Supreme Court decision, Watkins, Jacob Keith v. Ackley, regarding the disparate racial impact of non-unanimous jury decisions. She also authored the introduction to Protest City: Portland’s Summer of Rage, a photo book documenting protests in Portland in response to the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020.
Rabasa moderated the event and introduced both Roediger and Thompson to attendees.
“Many, many thanks to the many departments and units on campus who really enthusiastically responded to the invitation to co-sponsor this event, contributing resources and sharing in the commitments to building the anti-racist education here at LC,” she said.
She related Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education” to one of the classes she is teaching at LC this semester.
“It is, in many ways, a kind of testimonio, the genre of radical first-person narratives from Latin America that I’m studying with my Spanish 375 students this semester,” Rabasa said.
She praised Roediger’s work as being particularly relevant in the current political climate and at LC.
“Dr. Roediger’s book and broader work are vital tools that we can draw from in this moment of a deep crisis of democracy, education and indeed of humanity,” she said. “I believe his work is particularly relevant for us here at LC, which is what academic bureaucrats might call ‘a predominantly-white institution,’ but Dr. Roediger provocatively suggests that we might be better served to naming a ‘historically-white college or university’ or a ‘white-serving institution.’”
After Rabasa concluded the introduction and welcomed Roediger to the podium, he began his presentation by describing his initial inspiration for the book.
“When I started this book, the rage that animated the very first moment of writing it was about the outlawing of critical race theory in the state where I teach it,” Roediger said. “Now it looks like in all 50 states, if the Trump guidelines go through, that will be the case. I was going to call the book ‘Making a Critical Race Theorist’ or ‘The Autobiography of a Critical Race Theorist’ and only accept talks in states where it was illegal, so the initial book tour was gonna be an all-illegal book tour, which is easy to do in the Midwest actually.”
His comments elicited a few chuckles from the audience before he continued to explain how over time, his book morphed into less of a study of critical race theory and more of a memoir with an argument for upending traditions of racism in the modern political climate.
“The book’s argument is that those of us born into socially-backward environments are not destined to stay there,” he said. “The short presentation that I’ll be doing tonight is about how white advantage works, and particularly about how white advantage works among disadvantaged whites.”
He explained how he grew up in Columbia, IL and spent his summers as a child in Cairo, IL. Both towns were prominent sundown towns in the Midwest — the former being a historically and predominantly-white town, while the latter existing as a blatant example of longstanding segregation.
In reference to Columbia, IL, Roediger described living around very few people of color.
“We grew up in total absence of Black people. We worshipped the style and excellence of the great Black and LatinX stars of the 1960s … Miles Davis, Tina Turner and Red Fox, just about everybody, but we had no direct experience with African American people,” Roediger said.
He described Cairo, IL as “half-Black, half-white,” in contrast to Columbia, IL. He recalled an anecdote from his childhood, at age 10, that opened his eyes to the town’s blatant disregard for the wellbeing of Black people: the closing down of a beloved public pool. Because white city council members refused to desegregate the public space, and allow Black patrons into the establishment, they decided to shut the doors altogether. The pool historically served as an accessible space for white people who did not have the status to swim in the country club pool. Roediger described his mother’s reaction to her childhood pool shutting down, reading a passage from his memoir.
“Now, my mom said, of the closing of the pool built in her teens, the kids will start drowning again. That is, given the low-lying Cairo’s hot summers, the two big rivers, their overflows, children would be tempted irresistibly into the water. Without a pool … swimming would again be poorly taught and unsupervised, often in dangerous currents. It was a humane comment from my mother, and even a class-conscious one,” Roediger said. “Nevertheless, it did not move her to consider the fact that during the three decades that the pool existed only for whites, Black parents had to worry all those times over the fatal attraction of the rivers. They were always without any place to safely learn how to swim. Like many whites of Cairo, my mother did not so much disregard black miseries as fail to regard them at all, until she, extraordinarily, admirably changed her views later in her life.”
Roediger explained how his upbringing, coupled with the late ’60s anti-war and liberation movements led him to become interested in the study of antiracism and therefore structure his career around the study of CRT.
“The very juxtaposition of those two things every year had to make me wonder, ‘What is this thing called race, if it takes such different forms?’” Roediger said.
After concluding his presentation and reading a few more excerpts from his memoir, Roediger joined Rabasa and Thompson for a brief conversation, before opening up the floor for questions and comments from the audience members.
Questions ranged from how to balance the defense and critique of DEI in the current political climate, to why integration has not successfully bridged the gap between Black people and white people to how to decenter the study of whiteness in the broader pursuit of an antiracist society.
Several of Roediger’s books are on display at Watzek, and his most recent memoir, “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education,” is available to purchase online, both through his website or via larger e-commerce sites such as Amazon. The next event put on by the Department of Ethnic Studies, “Film Screening & Dialogue with the Filmmaker: Big Mountain Legacy, Last Stories of Díneh,” will be held in the Council Chamber on April 7 at 6 p.m.
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