Basic Stuff About Reality

Devin Thomas O’Shea reviews David Roediger’s “An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education.”

By Devin Thomas O’SheaMarch 28, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Politics

AS DAVID ROEDIGER puts it, he “became low-key famous—academia famous, that is—in the early nineties following the publication of The Wages of Whiteness,” a foundational text in the study of labor and race in the United States. “The same book,” he writes in his new one, An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education, “plus three or four sequels and spin-offs, also made me low-key infamous by attracting extreme right-wing and not-so-right-wing political attacks.”

Detailing the history of sundown towns and riots over integrated pools, Roediger recalls a local civil rights attorney in Cairo, Illinois, who “found his home illuminated by a neon arrow, mounted in the next-door yard. The neighbor who installed the light explained that he wanted vigilantes to know which house to bomb.” When discussing capital abandonment in East St. Louis, Illinois, where companies create their own district in order to escape the tax-base, Roediger points to nearby Alorton: “[G]et it? Aluminum Ore Town.”

In Columbia, Illinois, a young Roediger becomes familiar with Moredock Lake, named for Colonel John Moredock. Moredock is lampooned as a psychotic racist by Herman Melville in The Confidence-Man (1857), a novel of collected political satire set on a riverboat that floats down the Mississippi, secretly peopled by the devil and his demons. “Colonel Moredock,” Roediger points out, is “a shady character[,] the novel tells us, [who] stopped short of being the ‘Indian hater par excellence’ but only just.” As the author explains, “Moredock—having repeatedly lost family in clashes with Indians and devoting his life to revenge—is offered by the novel as an example of what Melville memorably calls ‘the metaphysics of Indian-hating,’” a precursor to Roediger’s area of study.

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. Roediger’s father worked in the office of a rock quarry in Columbia, which included a desk and expensive, white-collared shirts, which elevated him above the menial labor. Still, Roediger’s father toiled for the bosses, whom he also emulated, and liquor crept in to sooth the drudgery. After Roediger’s parents divorce, his aunts come to collect the hunting rifle and shotgun:

This delighted me not so much because I was scared of getting shot but because my father had shot a family dog chained in the backyard for barking. In the aftermath of the divorce an Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book sat at the ready on the nightstand in his room in his mother’s upstairs, without result.

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Who profits from racism? What turns someone into a racist? Or are they born that way? I burned through Roediger’s memoir because, like many people my age, the way I think about race in labor politics was shaped in a foundational way by his work. Both Wages of Whiteness and An Ordinary White take their titles, in part, from one of Roediger’s chief influences, W. E. B. Du Bois. “Black Reconstruction […] seemed an almost impossible length to be read or even to be made into a paperback whose binding would not break,” he writes, but admits that he now often assigns the book as the Foundation Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. The physical size of Du Bois’s work might lead some students to believe they’re in for a dry, academic study, but Black Reconstruction is a readable, rewarding examination of how the Civil War emancipated the slaves and yet did not set anyone free—it’s a study that strikes down eugenicist myths, grounded in a materialist analysis, explaining how profits incentivize racial bigotry from the slave owner to the poor white worker to the industrialist to the Free Soiler.

Du Bois argued that white racial animus is grounded in a psychological phenomenon. Those born white in the United States inherit a “public and psychological wage” that Black Americans do not. This wage is both a surplus in literal monetary payment and—perhaps more importantly—a feeling of default validity. Roediger illustrates this through his mother’s working-class life in Cairo, and the surrounding white community: “[I]n addition to higher wages, better jobs, and greater wealth than African Americans, whites all knew that the best parks, pools, and schools were theirs, and could at least hope that police power would not systematically make them victims.”

Justification for this wage is ubiquitous and embedded in American culture because, historically, it has benefited the capitalist class to have its workers split up in a tiered system, with a range of dignity according to pigmentation:

While the sundown town form of discrimination is sometimes seen as victimizing African Americans by affronting dignity, limiting housing choices, impeding travel, and creating terror—all true—it also functioned in much of central and southern Illinois to literally distance Black workers from good, sometimes union, working-class jobs.

Pitted against each other through language, scarcity, bureaucracy, culture, and so on, capital exerts tremendous leverage over a fractured working class whose unity and solidarity would otherwise threaten to remake life on earth for the better—no joke. The stakes of cooperation across racial lines in the working class have never been higher, and Roediger has spent his life studying the psychological engine in capital that is constantly throwing off new forms of race science.

Race science is an evolving, illogical entity that’s very profitable, and is already rooted in your head and mine. Consciously or unconsciously, whiteness constantly struggles to justify its bonus wage, to rearticulate why it deserves to sit in the halls of power, to argue why being white is equal to being beautiful, to demand that whiteness deserves to be both defended to the death and rescued first in a worst-case scenario. Dummy logic embedded in advertising, celebrity, nationalism, academia, and the culture industry props whiteness up, which Roediger encountered early in adolescence—his mother was a teacher, and her training came with a dose of standard-practice eugenics lessons, “which involved wise choices of partners, avoiding the alcoholic, the weak, the nervous, the southern Italian, etc.”

It only makes sense that smart people would want to study this phenomenon. Maybe something in the logic of racism can be reverse engineered. Grounded in a materialist explanation, maybe a rhetorical flaw in a racist line of thought can be isolated, discussed, and disposed of—undoing the whole essence. Maybe that would require a professional to become some kind of “critic” of racial theories—someone who pokes holes in ideas so that we better understand ourselves, putting forth an improved thesis for why the world seems abundant with suffering and malice.

My understanding is that professional thinkers smoke out problems in someone else’s ideas, but those who manipulate the average Republican voter don’t even engage on that level. As Roediger puts it, the controversies in this area of academic study, sometimes called “critical whiteness studies,” “are largely bullshit.” The assaults on “CRT” and “DEI” are blunt instruments wielded to protect narratives of American excellence, sure, but mostly they are weapons systems trained on blowing up jobs and nuking budgets. The average red-blooded American is told that these acronyms are literally demonic incantations that enshittify the world and make things bad.

That’s the extent of the argument from the Right, which, while being juiced by more and more nefarious algorithms, is at its core nothing new. A blunt, moronic, failure to do the reading will always be the right-wing attack on intellectual progress, and so institutions committed to anti-racism—like the media, or academia, which are both full of so many smart people—should be wise to this game.

But they’re not? On one hand, “Democrats are trained by their leaders to announce that CRT identifies an esoteric legal theory,” Roediger writes. This nonessential study is “scarcely practiced in the wider world and so universally un-taught in schools as to require no defense.”

On the other hand, a defunct and shifty-eyed version of whiteness studies is masquerading as the real deal. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018) is one such book, which advocates for the open discussion of white privileges among white people. It arrived right on time—in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, White Fragility became a New York Times bestseller, and it just so happens to be one of the primary ways in which the average professional-managerial American comes into contact with anti-racism.

In his review of White Fragility for the Los Angeles Review of Books, with an even hand, Roediger points out that Adolph Reed, a political scientist, and Walter Benn Michaels, a literary scholar, were already keen to the game that figures like DiAngelo are playing. Reed and Michaels, Roediger writes in the review,

discern in activism and education around racism the diversionary initiatives of a “class” of academics, middle managers, and political hired hands who, consciously or otherwise, divert attention from the hard facts of economic inequality and keep us preoccupied instead with obsessing about identity. This “antiracism/industrial complex”—odd that a nation so bereft of industrial jobs is said to keep generating these complexes—allegedly expresses the interests of a professional/managerial class serving capital.

The Right loathes DiAngelo for her pricey speakership gains, and the money she makes conducting corporate sensitivity training. Liberals encounter DiAngelo’s anti-racism as something their company pretends to care about, manifesting in the form of a workshop, certificate, or some other piece of professional-managerial bric-a-brac. Everyone feels guilty and angry about our failing systems, but no one gets a raise.

To add to the embarrassment, DiAngelo also faces accusations of plagiarism.

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An Ordinary White is dotted with an array of famous leftist figures. Roediger and Toni Morrison share inside jokes. Angela Davis and Roediger chat while watching a baseball game in a hotel bar. Mike Davis, then working as a long-haul trucker, calls Roediger to ask if he wants to hang out for a few hours. Davis sometimes passed through Missouri, where Roediger taught. Proletarian legends Jack Conroy and Alexander Saxton make cameo appearances.

The blend of history and civil rights defines Roediger’s academics. “To see these as two distinct things helped me to regard history as something more creative and profound than writing one’s politics back in time or even than producing accessible accounts of prior struggles as a usable past,” he writes. “It could ultimately become a place to test political ideas rather than to garner endorsements for them.”

This work is not accomplished through genius, or a visit from the muse, but through persistent sitting. “Higher education seems to me best thought of as just another workplace,” Roediger writes. “It is no worse than the quarries, offices, switchboards, printing plants, grade schools, warehouses, labs, morgues, soda fountains, and refineries where my relatives had worked.” Roediger shares the advice of Clarence Ver Steeg, a renowned scholar who specialized in colonial American history at Northwestern University: “First of all,” Ver Steeg said, “figure out the places where you are going to sit.”

Patient sitting and knowing where the bathroom is, and how to acquire coffee and a photocopier, are all weapons in the history-writing war. “I’d long thought that in tennis an unwillingness to be ‘out-worked’ had papered-over weaknesses deriving from a late start and middling talent,” Roediger writes. “Now there was a new goal: not to be out-sat.”

It’s seldom glamorous, or profitable, but the study of history, race, and class is under attack, underfunded, and demonized precisely because it threatens the ruling elites. Raising consciousness remains the task of the century, and Roediger has been fighting in the war for a long time—having fallen out of favor with his university over pro-Palestinian activism in 2015, his new favorite class to teach became “The Historian’s Craft”:

When I saw [it] listed among the possible courses the department needed to staff, I could not resist the irony of my offering it. My version carries the subtitle “Slavery from the Enslaved’s Point of View.” Weather permitting, I show up campily to class in a light History Channel jacket a friend gave me.

Wages “sold nearly 100,000 copies and now approaches 10,000 citations, unheard of for a work of nineteenth-century US history,” Roediger writes. It has introductions from former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver and South Asia historian Priyamvada Gopal, but one of the foundational lessons in Roediger’s memoir is the fact that his route through academics is largely closed off.

In the past, when doctoral and graduate students facing joblessness went to Roediger for advice, he used to give them a hopeful and productive story. “Now I don’t,” he writes:

There’s not a job crisis in the history business now, subject to being cyclical and ameliorated. There’s a fully reorganized labor process condemning most who persist in the work to a career of precarious labor. The favored few avoiding that fate come with dismal regularity from elite universities.

Both intellectual autobiography and insider account, Roediger’s memoir is situated in a global anti-racist struggle, anchored in his experience in the deindustrialized Midwest. It’s crucial that Roediger is a working-class scholar—another data point in the pattern that says working people, when given resources, will study and reveal things about the world that the children of the rich simply aren’t interested in. And yet, despite the United States being deindustrialized and converted to a service-based economy, the job of “professional thinker” is harder and harder to attain—since the 1980s, Roediger points out, “median family income grew by less than 25 percent and public university costs by 160 percent.”

By the end of An Ordinary White, we see that even state colleges are systems designed to fail working people, and to widen the distance between rich and poor. Racism is a crisis that is operative in the head of everyday Americans, who are being increasingly deprived of the tools that help us understand basic stuff about reality. Combined with the oligarchic domination of the media and the internet, plus overlapping ecological catastrophes and a proliferation of bullshit fascist thinking, the future looks bleak, but there is always hope. As Roediger writes in the final chapter, “it is knowledge—often incomplete, fleeting, and contradictory—of what whiteness separates whites from” that is one of the front lines of the struggle. What we stand to gain is “a vital labor movement, an even rudimentary welfare state, a critique of empire and settler colonialism, meaningful planet-saving political coalitions, and humanity.”