An Ordinary White

David Roediger is Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at University of Kansas. His books include The Wages of Whiteness (Verso, 1991), which won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians and Class, Race and Marxism (Verso, 2017), which won the Working Class Studies Association's C.L.R. James Award.

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

An Ordinary White is class analysis that leads to heartbreak--heartbreak for the academic system that gave Roediger his voice and is now deteriorating, heartbreak over the oppression our system inflicts on everyone at a basic level.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books" 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.---Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch Bursting with humor, insight, and a sprawling cast of characters, An Ordinary White illustrates how ideas and radical activity shape and reshape each other across the terrain of everyday life and during much rarer moments of radical mass upheaval.---Daniel Widener, author of Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity David Roediger knows that anti-racists are made, not born. By examining his own personal history, he reveals that the path to militant antiracism is crooked, halting, bound up with the injuries of class, the perjuries of gender, and the vagaries of location. Honest, tragic, funny, An Ordinary White is neither ordinary nor white. It is blues, confronting and shaking off the devil we know.---Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination In this expansive memoir, David Roediger reveals how ordinary white lives include many invitations and opportunities to reckon with the pervasiveness of white advantage, to see the ways in which the dominant racial order can make even those with advantages miserable, and to learn from racialized communities ways to build a new, better, and more just world.---George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness This intellectual autobiography is a treasure. Roediger lived through times and locations in which race has been a fundamental site of social struggle, contest, transformation, and retrenchment. His observations and analyses are moving, affecting, and important.---Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents A thoroughly engrossing narrative, David Roediger's An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education is honest, warm, and nuanced. Roediger takes us from the sundown towns of his youth, through his educations--formal and political--to our current dismal time of HWCUs (read the book to find out). Yet he ends, pro-Grinch-ly, with his faith in change from below and the promise of a vital labor movement.---Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People An Ordinary White is an extraordinary memoir of a historian honing his craft while participating in grassroots organizing and establishing (or not!) the subfield of 'critical whiteness studies.' Part autobiography, cultural analysis, and social history, this book strums with honesty, humor, compassion, and insight.---Tiya Miles, National Book Award winning author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake