An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education

An Interview with David Roediger

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with esteemed labor historian David Roediger to talk about his latest work, An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education. Many of our readers may recognize his name which has become synonymous with whiteness studies. He has written various influential books, including The Wages of Whiteness, which became a foundational text in race and labor history. He is also known for his work on the history of slavery and emancipation, as well as his activism related to labor and anti-racist organizing. 

I knew of Roediger from his writings on whiteness and radical labor history as well as from his friendship with Noel Ignatiev. We first met in 2020 at Ignatiev’s memorial service which was held at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, a hub of the mid-19th century abolition movement. The prominent abolitionist, Wendell Phillips delivered many speeches there, including his eulogy for John Brown in 1859. Both Ignatiev and Roediger dedicated themselves to imparting the political lessons of the abolitionist movement. While they belonged to two distinct micro-generations of the New Left and came to politics through different entry points, their work intersects and is concerned with the historical and social construction of race and whiteness. Their work, as well as that of working-class intellectuals like Theodore Allen and Alexander Saxton, builds on the insights of both W.E.B. Du Bois and Karl Marx to examine how whiteness impacted the development of the American working class, especially how it hindered working-class solidarity. 

However, by the late nineties, coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism and the commodification of everything under the sun, whiteness studies was severed from these radical roots, growing into an academic trend concerned more with punishing white people as individuals rather than dismantling the systems of power and privilege that sustain white advantage. The George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 brought renewed attention to white privilege, with a professional managerial class (PMC) centering itself as spokesperson of anti-racism, leading the charge on corporate diversity trainings. The PMC became an easy target for many leftists, especially among the Jacobin crowd. But in these critiques, any mention of white advantage was seen as a hold-over from the identity politics wars and interpreted as a road block to existing class struggle, a new variant of the old leftist adage “white and black unite and fight.” Roediger took a different approach, one that emphasized the importance of fighting against white supremacy while also being critical of liberal anti-racism. In his review of Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility he recognized the book’s popularity, why it resonated with so many, while also pointing to the limits of such proposed anti-racist training to ignite radical social change.  “In my view,” he wrote, “such a change will come when whites are swept into social movements that express the interests of humanity and that probably will seldom have whites at their center.” 

Roediger remains committed to a radical critique of whiteness that is desperately needed today. His latest book is not just the memoir of a radical historian. It is a memoir-as-history. 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, all the while maintaining his political commitment to radical social movements. As someone who has been deeply influenced by his work, I was excited to read his memoir, and especially looked forward to learning more about his time in Chicago. 

Destiny in the form of an email from my favorite Chicago radical bookstore, Pilsen Community Books, put us in touch again, this time under more positive circumstances. Roediger’s book talk was scheduled to take place just as massive anti-ICE/police protests erupted in LA and were eagerly awaited in other cities, including Chicago. I excitedly said yes. We had a lot to talk about! 

ZK: I read your memoir with great interest. It was nice to be invited into your inner world, to learn about how you grew up, the moments that shaped you, and all the twists and turns your life took. What prompted you to write a memoir? 

David Roediger: I find it really odd that I’ve written a memoir and I always feel the need to apologize for it. It happened over a long period of time. My editor at Verso initially encouraged me to write a memoir 30 years ago. And I just thought it was the craziest idea ever, and he kept saying, “Well, not so crazy in Britain, and there are all these academic memoirs and you know, intellectuals memoirs, and so you should think about it.” And then I didn’t because I still couldn’t understand it at all. 

About three years ago, my mother died at 100 and I wrote her obituary and it made me think about the way that family and radicalism came together for me. So that was part of it. And then where I teach and now all over the US, critical race theory was outlawed. If it weren’t being repressed, I wouldn’t claim to be a critical race theorist. But in that setting, I started the book with a little post-it note that said “the memoir of a critical race theorist.” I was going to do a tour only in states where it was against the law to teach critical race theory. Kansas, where I teach, is one of those places. But it turned out I was only so interested in that. So I ended up writing a lot about growing up in a sundown town that was in a kind of revolutionary situation at the southern tip of Illinois in the late 60s. I wrote a lot about experiences in the very late New Left, what I’m calling a micro-generation of the New Left, what our experiences were. And then lots about Chicago. I spent the 80s and parts of the 90s in Chicago with the Chicago Surrealist Group and the Charles Kerr Company. I wanted to tell that history in a way to keep it for everybody to know. 

And then I do write a chapter on critical race theory and a chapter that reflects on the crisis of the university and the kind of impossibility, I think, of the continuation of the university as it’s been. That chapter seemed completely crazy, deliberately crazy, at the time and over the top. And then it’s been totally surpassed by real life. It seems just completely mild at this point.

ZK: The word “fathomable” serves as a bookends–it is the starting (preface) and ending point (afterword) for your memoir. I wonder if you can say a bit about the significance of this word. 

DR: The preface is called “Becoming Fathomable.” Fathomable is a word that Howard Zinn used when he was trying to talk about conservative southern whites. He posed the question: “are southern whites unfathomable?” He wrote about this early in the civil rights movement. I think it’s a Hard Crackers question as well. I discovered it very late in the writing, but it turned out that it was exactly the word that I needed. 

In 1993, I began teaching at summer schools on race and class for industrial workers around St. Louis. Socialists organized some of them. Betsy Esch, my partner, also organized some of them. The New Directions reform caucus of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) convened others. One was so mainstream that the incoming international president of the steel workers attended. He was terrific, as a student anyhow. Not knowing how to begin, I jotted down a possible question and a follow-up: “Why would anybody want to identify as a ‘white worker’?” and then “Why not just as a worker?”  Two concerns made me hesitate to ask these questions of that first class of UAW members. The first was that the whites would shut down, leaving the question to Black students to answer. This happens frequently enough in university classrooms when race comes up. The second worry anticipated that some of the white workers would say that affirmative action and other reforms that addressed race were what forced them to identify as white. I took the questions with me without deciding whether to ask them. I opted for those big, hard questions because the workers who came, perhaps 70% white, seemed so familiar to me. I’d grown up about a dozen miles from St. Louis, closer still to a big suburban Chrysler plant. Lots of my friends had taken industrial jobs right out of high school.  The ones in good unions and working overtime were still making considerably more money than I was. I knew such friends to be clever and to have lots to say. I’d just turned 40 and the summer school students’ age averaged around there. Such familiarity ruled out any supposing that the whites in the class would be without racism. I knew them, and myself, as people formed by some of the worst ideas and prejudices in US society. But they were not only that and I wanted to hear what they had to  say in an integrated, union-based setting, exactly the sort of place that Bill Clinton’s pollsters had scrupulously avoided in setting up focus groups to find out what white “middle class” workers thought in the then-recent 1992 presidential election. I wanted to learn if they’d speak. When I posed the question, white workers immediately answered with a catalogue of the white advantages that anchor a white worker identity: “You  get  better  home  loans.”  “You  have  a  shot at getting into the skilled trades and making lots more money.” “You can live in any neighborhood, ones with better schools.” “The cops don’t get after you as much.” The workers who were white thus explained how white advantage persisted long after legal equality, much as those of us contributing to the developing field of Critical Race Theory did. They knew a lot. 

ZK: You begin your book by chronicling your personal and political life growing up in the Midwest, initially in a southern Midwest “sundown” town and then in Cairo, Illinois which at the time was marked by state abandonment, racial violence and resistance. I was wondering if you can tell us a little about growing up in these two places and the impact they had on your thinking about race. 

DR: I grew up in Columbia, Illinois, which is south of East St. Louis and it was at that time, a farm town with a quarry, and my folks were quarry workers. The town had 3,000 people, almost entirely German American. At that time, it was part of this very, very common pattern in Illinois that was called “the sundown town,” which meant that African Americans had to be out of town by sundown. I spoke in a sundown town outside of Carbondale, Illinois, not too long ago, and people came up afterwards and said, “oh, yea, we had all these Black friends, the schools were integrated.” It was in the North, after all. “But we couldn’t understand why we never saw our friends at a party at night.” And that was my generation, you lived in a sundown town, everybody knew it but it wasn’t talked about very much. 

Jim Loewen, the great sociologist expert on sundown towns was a friend, and he’d come and hang out with me at the University of Illinois. After he did field work out in these small towns, we’d meet up. One time he said to me, “Oh, I just was in a little sundown town talking to people about their sundown whistle.” They had a whistle at 6 o’clock at night to announce the sundown time period. And I said to Jim, “I grew up in a town that was a sundown town and they had a six o’clock whistle but one didn’t have anything to do with the other.” And he said, “Oh, ask your mom.” And the next time I went home, I asked her. She said that the very first thing that happened to her moving from the integrated town of Cairo, Illinois, to Columbia was that the chief of police greeted her, a young single woman, and said, “You’ll be safe here. We have a whistle.” 

It was a very interesting situation because the town was also near East St Louis. I was born in the hospital in East St. Louis. Growing up we identified with Tina Turner and Ike Turner and Miles Davis and Katherine Dunham and, for little kids, the historic baseball teams of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s–Lou Brock and Bob Gibson and above all, Curt Flood on those teams, and some Latinx players as well. We didn’t actually know any African American flesh and blood people at all but we had this tremendous desire to be connected somehow with African American culture. But there was nothing politically to do with such desires.

And there would have been nothing to do with it for me, except that I spent summers in Cairo, Illinois which had become, by the late ’60s, this flashpoint of the Black Freedom Movement and a focus for the whole country. I was lucky enough to kind of happen into that social movement. But even beyond the movement, I think it mattered just to be in two of the most racist possible places in the United States but so different from another. So, race couldn’t be very stable for me. I had to think about this thing that can be deeply held in two very different places. 

ZK: I also appreciated your close relationship with your mom. She was an educator who became active in her union and instilled in you a lifelong appreciation of public education. 

DR: Cairo, where she grew up, was a town that advertised itself as being more south than Richmond. The Chicago Defender called it “the Jackson, Mississippi of Illinois.” Her anti-racism was hard won. It took a long time for her. The fact that the unions she admired were from East St. Louis and were racially integrated helped her and so did Catholicism. 

ZK: Growing up you are bearing witness to the racial order but then the political climate around you begins to rapidly transform. Can you say more about the series of events that radicalized you? 

DR:  The little town that I grew up in, within the space of about six months, recorded its first death in Vietnam. Also a slightly older person I’d watched play baseball, then the most charismatic athlete in our high school, graduated and went to Canada to resist the draft. All of a sudden, this would have been in about 1968, the way of looking at the war was just completely transformed. There were things going on with the draft that also transformed in that moment. So, it was these two things that I was very lucky to witness. With the example of the track athlete who went to Canada: if he wouldn’t have done that, the sentiment in those small towns was that of course you go and fight. 

In Cairo, I was lucky enough to be a part of a social movement, because I was trying to avoid spending an hour and 15 minutes at a High Catholic Mass every Sunday. I convinced my mom that I could go to the African mission, actually run by African missionaries in Illinois. It was a Catholic Church where they said mass in 25 minutes and then did political education. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I also got to go to two different summer schools that were sponsored by the Cold War, basically, to try to produce scientists to combat Sputnik and seeming Soviet advantages in science. One of them was at Manchester College, and it was run by pacifists and I got this wonderful education in how to speak against the war. I was supposed to be studying chemistry, but I ended up doing that. And then I joined SDS in 1969 when I was 16, in Athens, Georgia. And that was again because I was in a science program and there was an SDS office there. 

ZK: How do you think coming to SDS when you did impacted your world view? While we know that the New Left was a broad movement with many tendencies, we still nonetheless frame it as a monolithic generation. But as your experiences indicate, there are actually distinct micro-generational experiences (depending on your entry point). For instance, I think about your experience versus that of others like Noel Ignatiev who was very optimistic about world revolution. Do you think, by the time you entered, that optimism had waned? 

DR: Noel was not that much older than I, but with significant political experience by the time I met him and he retained his optimism. I mean, even near death, I think he still thought a socialist revolution was not just necessary and likely, but could happen with incredible speed. 

I, in that later micro-generation, never believed that revolution was on the horizon. But just because I didn’t expect socialism to happen the day after tomorrow, I then said, well what can I help build that will last. 

ZK: I appreciate your honesty in the book about how you literally stumbled into academia and radical politics. 

DR: Well, I got a Marxist education at Northern Illinois University because that department was half Marxist professors. As a result, every other search, the other part of the department didn’t participate. So, the left would get to hire somebody.

I became a history major because the scholarship my tennis coach got me bought your books. History classes had the most expensive books. So, I’d sign up for those classes and then drop them all and sell the books. Eventually, I just started looking at the books. 

For those of us who become radicals, I think that should make us really treasure our good fortune all the more, because in this society something odd does have to happen if you’re going to move to the left. To sustain that kind of a commitment, I think you have to be lucky and should just admit to being lucky. 

Three of my favorite books by David Roediger: The Wages of Whiteness (1991) Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994) and Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White (1998).

(First appeared in Race Traitor and remains one of most important essays on the ‘92 LA Rebellion. You can download it here.)

ZK: You were also active in the Surrealist Group in Chicago which emphasized freedom, resistance and the power of the imagination and unconscious. Surrealism shares with the New Left an affinity for radical transformation. What impact did the group and other Chicago connections have on you? 

DR: Part of it was that Franklin, Penny and I became more sympathetic to anarchism and utopian socialism because we were in a period where none of us knew what was going to work. I was an odd surrealist in that I lacked artistic and poetic talents. But I came to write lots of small, popular pieces on surrealism, at first with much help from the Rosemonts. Not only my work with Kerr, but strike support, anti-Nazi organizing, and opposing “Jails for whales” at Shedd Aquarium were surrealist projects for me. My kids grew up meeting surrealists and surrealists of the path like Jayne Cortez, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ted Joans, Laura Corsiglia, Lenora Carrington, Dennis Brutus, and Paul Garon.

I also became more open to the ideas of  Noel Ignatiev. He was the person who first gave me James Baldwin’s important writings on whiteness. His writings on whiteness in the ’60s with Ted Allen very much centered on W. E. B. Du Bois. Baldwin wrote in the ’80s, particularly a little piece in Essence magazine called “On Being White and Other Lies.” It was Noel who sent me that piece, and you know, it was part of saying, we need to talk about the psychological dimensions of whiteness.  There’s some kind of surplus, there’s some kind of excess in  white’s commitment to whiteness that goes beyond just it pays off. There’s something else going on. Of course surrealism also emphasized the psychological dimension–in shorthand the synthesis of Marx and Freud.

ZK: It was really nice to read some of your Noel stories. Any one in particular you’d like to share with our readers? 

One I do not tell so much involves being with him in St. Louis in 1988. I’d helped organize a conference honoring the marvelous radical historian George Rawick, conceived locally by the Workers Democracy group. George was by then quite ill, though not yet 60. The very good turnout of his admirers included some elders of the revolutionary left, notably Stan Weir and Marty Glaberman. I’d only been around Noel in situations where he was the seemingly most experienced person in the room. It fascinated me how fully awed and appreciative he was towards Stan and Marty, how solicitous of their views and experiences and how eager to banter participating almost as a youth, in the way that forty-somethings are sometimes counted as youth on the US left. He particularly cared about Stan’s views on West Indian food and his friendship with Baldwin.  Those days in St. Louis helped me to understand Noel’s deep loyalty to Ted Allen as a mentor even amidst challenges. 

ZK: I’d like to shift gears a bit to our current political moment. In the last chapter, you offer what I think is the most sober analysis of the university: a capitalist workplace to organize against. 

DR: It’s just clear that the university is not a congenial place, it’s too acquiescent in the face of attack. Now, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t claw and fight to keep every little bit of progress that we’ve made in universities. But the kind of radical spaces that we are talking about, they are going to be made outside of universities. This includes radical history which is going to be a project that’s outside of the universities. And that’s a good thing as well as a difficult thing.  

ZK: Any other thoughts you want to share about our political moment and near future? 

DR: The afterword to the book has a little subsection on pessimism and optimism now. And it very much argues for a pessimistic view, not even so much of politics, but regarding the planet’s future. Part of our generation’s hopefulness held that gradually things were getting better. We could imagine being on the right side of history. The arc of history bends slowly, but bends toward justice. Or as people say in southern Africa: time is longer than rope. Those are reassuring statements if you don’t have a burning planet. And being a grandfather has been important to me in thinking about this and talking to parents about what it is like to raise children in the shadow of this apocalypse. So, the book makes a case for pessimism in that regard. 

I kind of regret that section now because its not actually meant to be pessimistic concerning our ability to get past Trump. I think that will happen soon. When the Kerr Company reprinted CLR’s Capitalism in the World Revolution, I asked him to do a new introduction to it. It was very short, but the most memorable part of it was when he said, “I’ve lived through Hitler and Stalin and Roosevelt. And they thought that they could solve all the problems of the world and look where it ended up. They are still ours to solve.” 

And I think Trump is not a historical figure in that pantheon of importance. And I do think that this will end and crash at a certain point. We can help make it crash. I think there’s some really difficult things where he has tremendous advantages around the question of immigration and opposition to street demonstrations like we are seeing in L.A. But when the economy sours dramatically, it’s going to be a very different kind of situation. 

ZK: We go back to the word that you began the book with: fathomable. Are the Trumpers fathomable? 

DR: I was back in small-town Trump country the last two years of my mom’s life a lot, and I’d run into people. And a lot of people who we’d dismiss and the Democrats also dismiss as incorrigible and deplorable and all those things. They have a lot else going on in their mind at the same time. It made me realize this and also that many Trump supporters may be looking forward to his demise. I think it’s partly a society of the spectacle kind of thing where you want to see the end of it, too. And I suspected some of the people in that town voted a second time, third time for Trump because they just couldn’t let go of the damage. 

ZK: Before we end, I have two burning last questions. The first is: do you still play tennis?

DR: Yes, I do.  

ZK: Okay next time you are in town we have to play. And the second question is: what are your writing habits? The people demand to know! This is your 12th book, so you are clearly doing it right.

DR: Well, I did a lot of movement writing. The surrealist group I was in was all talented people. I was the only person around it that didn’t have any creative talent. And so I became very much a writer for that group. And later on, there was an opportunity in Kerr to work on the Haymarket Scrapbook that was meant to come out in 1986 for the centennial of the Haymarket Bombing. It was not a typical Kerr book where it could be as late as you wanted it to be. A lot of my discipline as a writer came in those movement settings. I was a completely unsuccessful book-writing historian until my late 30s, and then it turned out, once you learn how to write one book, you can do it over and over again. 

ZK: Oh sure, that’s what all prolific writers say. 

DR: Well, okay, maybe once you write five books. 

(David Roediger & Zhana Kurti at Pilsen Community Books, June 2025. Many thanks to Erik Wallenberg for organizing the book talk event.)