TRICIA ROSE: Where are we
with whiteness in America, and how did we get here? In two, three, four
minutes or less. DAVID ROEDIGER: OK. TRICIA ROSE: Just
kidding, just kidding. DAVID ROEDIGER:
Well, let me start by saying how happy I am
to be here and how glad-- this is supper time
in the Midwest, so for people to come out
at 5 o'clock at night, I was skeptical. And thanks for coming. And apologies to
those who had lunch. I only have so many
little bits of knowledge and so there'll be repetition. I won't repeat any jokes
but some of the analysis will be repeated. I think it's important to
think about tone when we begin to address these matters. I was trained by Sterling
Stuckey, the great African American historian,
and the first thing he'd often say about writing
is, what tone are you trying to strike here? If you're writing about
slavery, what's the tone? And I think that the
Trump experience, for those of us on
the left and who've been studying these things,
invites a kind of panic, first of all, but also a
kind of self-congratulation that now is the moment
where people are finally going to have to listen to us. And it is true that
everywhere I go now, the crowds are much, much larger
than they would be otherwise, and I get that. But I think the tone has to
still be a humble tone, that we have been trying. We have had ideas. I didn't foresee Trump. Did you? TRICIA ROSE: Not immediately,
but pretty soon, about halfway through, I was like, OK, this-- DAVID ROEDIGER: Halfway through
the night or the election day? TRICIA ROSE: No, around July,
August before the election. DAVID ROEDIGER: OK. On election night you
knew that Trump would win? TRICIA ROSE: I was
in a fantasy land. I was like, no. I was just worried
about nothing, and then I went into a
complete sweating panic. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah. TRICIA ROSE: Exactly. But I just said, this is really
possible for a lot of reasons. It was more just calculations. DAVID ROEDIGER:
So I think we need to stay in that moment of
humility that grows out of how unexpected this was,
even if this is our life's work to study these matters. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah. DAVID ROEDIGER: I didn't get it. All of my undergraduate
African American women students said, well, of course
Trump will win. And I said, I don't think so. I just don't see it. And I had also, in my work,
imagined that white nationalism doesn't have very much to
do with everyday whiteness in the United States, that
it's kind of a separate thing, and that there's a line between
the far right's whiteness and the ways that people
are mostly oppressed. Now, when you begin to
talk about police and jails and guards, there's a
different dynamic to that. But now, I think-- and this is part of
what you're raising-- that there is a moment now
where we have to really talk about what it is to have a
white nationalist president, and what it says
about the larger ways that whiteness rules. TRICIA ROSE: Right, right. The thing that surprised me
the most was not that there was this core group of white
nationalists that were being brought out of the woodworks,
but how much everyday, ordinary, not just whites, but
middle-of-the-road liberals of all backgrounds, didn't
ultimately read the politics as white nationalism right away. I remember saying, we have a
white nationalist government. We'd be like, oh. We just elected a white
supremacist president. Oh, you're so dramatic, Tricia. And I'm thinking,
no, I'm really not. I was like, that's what we did. And yet, it took
people, it seems-- not all people, but
a number of people you would have expected-- to
immediately be hysterical, to read it differently. Did you have that experience? DAVID ROEDIGER: Yes. And I was trying to puzzle out
factions in the administration and say, well, if
it's Bannon today, and then he's on the
out, and this is a defeat for the white nationalists. But none of those
factional groupings have persisted, really. It of runs through people. And yet, this core reflex,
that when you're in trouble, you go to a white
nationalist appeal, I think that that's
the core of it, rather than this
group of advisors or that group of advisors. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, although
the ones that remain are pretty well entrenched. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yes. TRICIA ROSE: In any event. So is Trump, then, sort of a
symbol of a long-standing set of practices? Is this the long march of the
origins of white supremacy in the West in this formation? Or is there something different? How much of this is
new and how much of it has the level of
meaningful continuity? DAVID ROEDIGER: I think both. I think it's an
elaboration of things that were happening for a long time. I tried to write
about it for a while, and did a little bit--
right wing talk radio, and listened to a lot of right
wing talk radio in the Midwest. And I think that there's a fair
amount of the habits of Trump, and really, the habits of
his listeners, that grow out of that ability for a Rush
Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity to posit themselves as
the brave person, who, for the first time, is saying
what's being said in your home already, along racial lines,
along anti-immigrant lines. So I think that that's very old. That's 30 or 40 years
old on talk radio. Part of my problem is I
don't know how seriously to take Trump. I mean, obviously, as a threat
and a phenomenon, seriously, yes. But Bill Kristol, the
[INAUDIBLE] commentator who's now back to being
a critic of Trump, has been saying on TV, we have
to realize how smart Trump is. And the worst thing
that Trump's critics do is dismiss it as just
unserious and random. TRICIA ROSE: Right. DAVID ROEDIGER: And I get that. I don't want to be
in a conversation about how smart Trump is. I think there is a certain
way that the randomness is what gets him over, and that
he's not a political thinker. And that's different, I
think, that the races before. Racism would work to
join to polling data. I don't think, except
in a very general way, that Trump cares
about polling data. TRICIA ROSE: Right. Yeah, but I mean, he could
be smart and unwell and wily all at once. I mean, there have been
many maniacal smart people. DAVID ROEDIGER: And
maniacal in ways that is congenial to the
larger society [INAUDIBLE] TRICIA ROSE: Absolutely. It taps into certain feelings. But I'm interested in this
habit that you talked about, the listeners in
right wing radio, and commentators and anchors. I'm interested in
the pattern of what happened in the wake of the
civil rights movement that produced this notion
of reverse racism, that whites are
at a disadvantage if the playing field is
attempted to be leveled. And that the habit, then, is
that what the victories of, say-- just to be simplistic here-- just the victories of
the civil rights movement did, was force a certain
kind of white privilege into a certain kind
of narrative silence. It created a silence. So I mean, do you
think that there's some truth, potentially, to
there having been a missing piece of the strategy, a
kind of re-education program for whites, as opposed
to just a legal change? Because I'm really
struck by how convinced, when I occasionally listen-- because I don't have the
stomach for right wing radio. You're a [INAUDIBLE]. I just don't have it. But I get enough, and I
figure I've got the gist. But this sense of betrayal
and being wronged, not by the business class,
not by the billionaire elites, not by capitalism, but by
immigrant people of color, African Americans, et
cetera, et cetera, that this is really where the
harm has been done. And I'm just wondering
what that tells us, not just about
whiteness, but also about political strategies
that may or may not have been attempted. DAVID ROEDIGER:
I've been reading with my students this
introduction to E.P. Thompson's Making of the English
Working Class. And he talks about class
being a relationship, that he thinks of it as
Marxist as a two-party party relationship. He says there is no
love without lovers. There's no difference
without squires and laborers. And I think that one of
the things we paid for is that, for years, working
people in the United States thought of themselves
as middle class. That's changing a little bit. But who's the other
for the middle class? SIRI: I'm not sure I understand. DAVID ROEDIGER: How did
you get that to do that? TRICIA ROSE: I just
want you to know Siri never does what I say. I have cursed her out
that she blames me for having bad language. But for the first time,
I press to see the time and she wants to
know what's going on. Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry, David. She said, I'm sorry, I
don't understand you. I'm like, yeah,
that's no kidding. OK. So back to the E.P. Thompson. DAVID ROEDIGER:
My point there is that we know our class by
the others that we imagine. And I think that built
into this idea, that what's called the middle
class is now being called the white working class. A middle class always
has two others. It has a chance to
look up and say-- during occupy, the genius
of occupy, in some ways, was that the 1% re-entered the
conversation of US politics, and you could look up
and find your other. But it also has this opportunity
to look down and find your other. And the state, the
culture, I think, is much more congenial
to having people who have their own
economic grievances look down at somebody else,
then look up at their enemies. And so I think we
see that develop now, that the middle classes, or the
hankering to be middle class, takes the form sometimes. And I'm not wanting
to apply that Trump was elected by white workers. We can talk about that later. But to the extent
that he enjoyed support from people whose
economic interests were not at all in supporting him. I think it's that
temptation to say we know we're of this position,
beleaguered as we are, because we can see
those below us. And those are people who
are on benefits, people who are immigrants,
those are the groups that stand out as vulnerable. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, although
many people were on benefits voting against the benefits. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah, I was in
South Carolina when Gingrich was running in the primaries,
and he won the South Carolina primary-- this a
long time ago now-- by describing Obama as
the food stamp president. And the press in
Columbia, South Carolina-- I was a visitor there
for a semester-- asked me if I thought
that could work. And I said, well, of
course it can't work. Almost every white
family in South Carolina knows somebody in their
family that's on food stamps. But it worked. It did. It worked. TRICIA ROSE: It's an interesting
dissociation that required. So one of the answers
for how we got here does follow from
what you're saying now, which is that there was
too much focus among Democrats, in particular, on
racial inequality and ethnic and immigration
inequality, and that we-- or the Democrats, or
the left, obviously-- folded in, abandoned
the white working class, and that this core
group were able to find a home in both the Republican
Party, but especially in Trump, in particular. What would you say to this? I mean, you've heard this,
I'm sure, a million times. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yes. The truth in it is that
the Democrats don't have any successful
way to talk about class and what they want for
working people in the main. I don't think that, in answering
the charge analysis that you just laid out, we should
move to the position that everything's OK
with the Democrats, where class is concerned, because
I think it is a big problem. One of the favorite
things after the election, journalistically, was to go
to some beleaguered place in Appalachia, Harlan County,
historic labor place, now without mines, basically, and
to find some poor person who had voted for Trump and was now
losing their health insurance. So the undertone of it was
what a stupid move this was, and fair enough. But the other thing
we could ask was, why wasn't the health
insurance compelling enough? Why was it only
Obamacare and not socialized medicine,
not even single payer? Why was it not
compelling enough to keep those poor people inside the
ranks of the Democratic Party? So I think it's very easy to
look at elections and say, this is about the movement of
white workers toward Trump, and it's only driven by-- that the only way that
whiteness comes into it is that whiteness structures
the appeals of Trump. Whiteness also
structures the lack of appeals of the
Democratic Party, that we don't have
a full-blown, even social democratic
politics, because Democrats are so afraid of being accused
of providing benefits that are going to go to people of color. So that you get this really
attenuated welfare state, and it's hard to defend it. There's not enough there to
defend, in a lot of instances. So both those things are true. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah. That's really interesting. So do you think that
the Democrats have not worked hard enough
to figure out how to thread that needle, between
appealing to these class concerns of whites, without
looking like they're providing benefits? Have they worked
hard enough at this, or do you think it's an
impossible conundrum, the race class problem? DAVID ROEDIGER: I'd
be very interested what people say about this. But it's mystifying
to me in some ways. During the Sanders campaign,
which some of us, I'm sure, were involved in, when Ta-Nehisi
Coates raised reparations as a possible Sanders demand,
as a Sanders supporter, that was so roundly
criticized, including by people on the left, as impossible
as politics, and as-- and the answer was
the Sanders strategy of appealing to
the right support people will automatically
raise people of color because they're poor. That's never really worked. Most of the social policies that
get put on the chopping block are not pro-black
social policies. They are universal
social policies. Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, when Clinton got signed in,
ended welfare as we know it. That wasn't a racialized social
policy, that was a non-racial. TRICIA ROSE: It had
been racialized. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah. So on one hand, there
hasn't been a way to figure out how to
talk about those things in universal terms,
or how to not lose that debate to white supremacy. But sometimes I think that
the Democrats also haven't tried very hard in that regard. TRICIA ROSE: I mean, it may
be possible that the wages of whiteness-- which I'd
love it if you could just give the audience, both
Du Bois and your analysis, of what that is. But it could be that it
creates a fundamental conflict, because you can't have
the wages of whiteness and have the wages of
classness simultaneously in a multi-racial context. So describe, just
for everyone briefly, what wages of whiteness
are and how you think they might be playing out now? DAVID ROEDIGER: During
the Reagan presidency-- so the Reagan presidency,
we had debates a little bit like this, what were called
the Reagan Democrats. Trade union members,
white ethnics, so-called, had voted for New Deal
candidates for decades. All of a sudden,
enough of them-- not all, but enough change-- to deliver two elections
to Reagan in the '80s. And all of a sudden,
you get this outpouring. This is the moment of
critical study of whiteness entering the academy. And it's because so many
people were concerned, in the same way
that a lot of you are here because you're
concerned about Trump. So many people were
concerned about, where did these Reagan
Democrats come from? And so my question--
and I had thought about this as a revolutionary
for a long time, not just in terms of
electoral politics-- but my question at
that point was, OK, people were talking about
white workers all the time. What's the history of
these white workers? Where did they come from? And it turns out that the
first serious treatment of the white worker
in US history was Du Bois' Black
Reconstruction. It's anchored around
chapters on the black worker and the white worker
and the planter, so the class structure and
race structure of the South. And deep into that book, Du
Bois is describing the loyalty of whites who don't own
property to whites who do own property in the south. And he says they weren't
necessarily paid great material wage, but they were
paid what he calls a public and psychological wage. And there are wage differentials
to some of this is material, and Du Bois very much realized
that some of it was material. But this is Du Bois'
first time writing really seriously with Freud in mind. He actually met psychology
in a very modern psychology sort of way. And when he says
public, he's meaning you can go to the best park. You can send your kids
to the best school. You can live in the best
neighborhood, very like today, for example. So he was describing
that, and I took it-- the title of the book
that I wrote about, The History of the White
Worker was the wages of whiteness in tribute
to Du Bois's insight, and then also trying to play off
the idea of the wages of sin, that these are wages
that are also not worth having and destructive. The hardest thing, I think,
in the critical study of whiteness, for
many of us, has been to engage how whiteness
makes whites miserable. It's easy enough to talk about
the advantages of whiteness and necessary to talk about
the advantages of whiteness, but Du Bois was driving
at-- and what, above all, James Baldwin drove at--
was to say, how do we talk about the
fact that whiteness is a misery-producing
machine for people of color, but likewise encourages
people to accept miserable lives on the other
side of the color line? So when Baldwin collects
his essays from the last 30 years of his life in
The Price of the Ticket, The Price of the
Ticket is, for Baldwin, the adoption by white immigrants
of white identity, mainstream white identity in
the United States, so it's that ability
to be able to say, without losing sight
of white advantage-- what was the term you
used at lunch time? White priority. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah. DAVID ROEDIGER: Without
losing sight of that, to also be able to talk
about the wages of whiteness as something that already
limits what people can imagine, in terms of a good society. And that's, I think,
where Du Bois was going. He introduces it at
a point in the book where poor whites
are having to decide if they're going to be
supporters of Radical Reconstruction or not. And he's trying to explain why
some do, and there are heroic, ongoing experiments in
democracy, but most don't. And when they don't, it's to
the detriment of black radicals and Republicans in the South. But it's also, he says, to the
detriment of white poor people in this south. TRICIA ROSE: So it, is
in this case, the wages-- or should we say the minimum
wages of whiteness, right? Because it's not that, say,
bourgeoisie or operational class whites are at a big
disadvantage or are suffering. Or are you making a more
philosophical claim, that these racial categories
divide and oppress and provide a lot of fear, and produce
a spiritual deficit, and that this is the
kind of suffering? Or is it that it's
an economic matter? DAVID ROEDIGER: I think both. Both, and mainly the former. I think it's mostly about
keeping white people without property, out
of political coalition with people of color. My mom is about to turn
96, and she's fine now, but about eight years
ago, she had a stroke. And she was in a good union. She was a school teacher. It has good health care. Nobody in the United States
has good health care. I mean, because the United
States has constructed its welfare state in the way
that it's constructed it, that so afraid that somebody
is going to get over by getting benefit from
society, that everybody suffers because of that. I mean, the super
rich can afford very, very good private health
care, but we all pay for that. And we all pay for
the fact that it's so hard to imagine a
different kind of society. It's so hard to have any kind
of political imagination. I would say this could be
a very, very different kind of place. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah. So how has critical whiteness
studies grappled with this, from your perspective? I mean, this seems a lot tougher
than the critical breakdown of how whiteness works. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah. TRICIA ROSE: So
what would you say has been a successful component
of addressing this aspect of it in whiteness studies? Or what's the biggest thing
that really has been almost impossible to wrench free? DAVID ROEDIGER: Well, we
haven't caught up with Baldwin, I think. TRICIA ROSE: Well,
none of us have. DAVID ROEDIGER: In
many, many ways. I'm going to South Africa right
after this and, I don't know, some of you maybe [INAUDIBLE] TRICIA ROSE: Straight
from Providence? I was going to say. DAVID ROEDIGER: Two
days of teaching. If you've been to
South Africa recently, there's so much
panic about crime, and there's quite
a bit of crime. Well, some would
say, in South Africa. But one of the things I
want to try to talk about in South Africa is Baldwin
has this line where he says that one of the most
pernicious effects of whiteness has been to allow
people to believe in an illusion of safety. And I think this is very much
goes to the heart of Trump, that if it weren't for
the criminal Mexican, if it weren't for the
interloping African American, you can have a
perfectly safe society. TRICIA ROSE:
All-white world, yeah. DAVID ROEDIGER: And who's
writing about that now? And I know it as a problem
and still can't figure out a way to really write about
it without worrying that, to put that minus for
white people out there, somehow detracts from the minus
for everybody else in society. It's not an easy thing to do. That's why I was so interested--
is it Shannon Sullivan? TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, yeah,
the White Priority. Yeah. At lunch, we were talking
about drawing distinctions between kinds of
racial privilege, so that there isn't a kind
of absolute hierarchy. Normally, it's common to
talk about racial privilege among whites as
fixed and complete, as if no one black could have
some privileges, economically or otherwise, that it's fixed. But if you think of it more-- almost privilege as
a hierarchical matter within race, Shannon Sullivan
talks about this notion of white priority,
as a way to get at working class white
privileges that are not the same as middle
class white privileges, and that there can
be middle class blacks who have
economic privilege that don't immediately get-- I don't want to use the
word trumped, but it's what's coming to mind-- by white priority. So it's a nuanced
way of thinking about the resistance among
working class whites, to say, what are you talking
about white privilege? I'm poor. I don't have economic means. I don't have benefits. I don't have a union job, or
whatever the complaints are. And how do you
talk about how race can be working both as
a class disadvantage, and specific examples, and still
generate some ability to talk about this extra component? DAVID ROEDIGER: I'm really
glad to hear of that work. In the introduction to
Class, Race, and Marxism, I try to say I've not
only campaigned for this, but if I could
shape the language, it would be the language
of white advantage instead of white privilege. And it grew out of us
speaking on the radio, speaking up in
Rochester, New York, and I was on the NPR
radio show there, call-in show for an hour. And I bet in an hour,
the interviewer, who is a great person, said
white privilege 35 times. And I had just come
to the studio from-- these trade unionists
had taken me on a tour of Rochester, which
is just a devastated town. I mean, it's a completely-- it didn't have heavy
industry, but it's a classic deindustrialized town. It's got the fifth highest
rate of child poverty in the United States. There were whole
neighborhoods where people had lost their mortgage. TRICIA ROSE: It's
the wrong word. DAVID ROEDIGER: There
would have been no way to reach those white workers
around the term white privilege because they didn't
have that experience. So some kind of more
nuance, and this is not to say that a lot
of great work by activists isn't done under the
banner of white privilege and confronting white privilege. I completely understand that. But there is
another moment where I think we have to have a
little bit of a different word. And also it shouldn't be that
not getting murdered by a cop is a privilege in society. It's not a privileged. It's human rights. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, yeah. Going briefly back
to Baldwin in fear, that, I think, segues to-- and the police, the privilege
of not being gunned down. Everyone has been debating
who voted for Trump, was it the working class? But then there's the
white women's vote. And of course, you might want
to invoke your students again. Maybe they have an explanation. But I wonder how
much of this ties in to this stoking of
fear, this racialized fear. How have you been thinking
about the role of gender in its relationship
to the working class, as this so-called
base, which is assumed to be such a masculine,
heteronormative worker? But also, the fears of race
that are being generated and fomented, in the ways
in which women are both invoked as to be protected,
but also their own fear is perpetually stoked. As soon as you said, oh, if only
we could get this environment that's just so-- if we didn't
have this group and this group and this group, it would be so-- I was like, oh, that looks
like a Folgers commercial. It's suburban place. Yeah. DAVID ROEDIGER: And it
came right back around in the Alabama election. So I think that
53% of white women voted for Moore
in an even more-- TRICIA ROSE: That one doesn't--
that I don't even know what [INAUDIBLE] DAVID ROEDIGER: --clear example
or right after the charges, and all these women right
there before you, some of whom were known in the
state, and then to be able to garner
that kind of vote. So I do think that
that fear is one-- I think, in a certain
way, Trump has gathered all the
single issue voters, and I think a lot of down
was an anti-abortion folk, single issue anti-abortion
voting, in which women can see themselves
as the custodians of that pro-life movement,
and can sacrifice themselves on that altar. Can say, yes, but we
have to hold our nose and vote for this guy
because abortion is murder. So I think Kansas, the
right, the gun issue, so overwhelms everything else
that it's the gathering up of all those pro-gun-- TRICIA ROSE: Voters. DAVID ROEDIGER: So
that's going on. But there's also
a sense, I think-- because this is also-- the Moore election was
right at the beginning, beginning to be the beginning
of the Me Too movement, which is really resonant. It's not that that
movement doesn't exist, and it's not that it
doesn't exist in Alabama, and people aren't
retweeting things to each other in fundamentalist
churches in Alabama. It's a real issue,
but there's still a sense in which a white
woman who has connections to white masculinity that
it's asking a lot to deny. Everybody knows Cheryl Harris's
wonderful article Whiteness as Property in Harvard Law
Review from the mid-'90s. I think the best thing
that's been written on whiteness in my generation. But right after that, she
wrote an article in Cardozo Law Review, equally long
and equally great, called Finding
Sojourner's Truth. And she anchors it in the
story of Sojourner Truth and Sojourner
Truth's lost child. And she says, what's
the difference in 1840, between white womanhood and
African American womanhood? And she says, more or
less, white womanhood could only give
birth to freedom, and black womanhood could
only give birth to slavery. That's a web of
relationships that roots a lot of further relationships. So you're asking a lot. I mean, it's necessary
to ask a lot. But confronting
some real material, long-standing things
when white women decide to stick with white
men, even when those white men are abusive. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I also
think it's sort of absurd to assume that
women are feminists because they're women. If that were the case, we
would have solved a whole lot a long time ago. It doesn't surprise
me that much, but what I think is
important is the way people made that assumption,
particularly among Democrats. What were these
women voting for? They were just born feminists,
or born liberal feminists, in particular. So there's all these potential
intersecting dynamics, factions, fractures
that you're describing, histories that are
intertwined, but also limiting our imagination. But we're still being asked,
from the left the most, it seems to me,
with an insistence, that this is the time to
talk, really, race-neutrally-- presumably class only, I'm not
sure what replace is raised. I want to hear what you
have to say about that. But that, basically,
we have to create unity through the emphasis of an
overarching category that always seems to involve
the erasure of race as a point of interpretation,
understanding, et cetera. I mean, this is an
old debate, but for it to be back with
such a vengeance, it just strikes me as odd. It seems to me so obvious
that it's not going to work, but maybe I'm just
being unreasonable. What do you think's
going on with that? DAVID ROEDIGER: I
like the old debates. I'm an historian. TRICIA ROSE: You're like,
do it again, do it again. DAVID ROEDIGER: I'll only
go back to the mid-1990s. TRICIA ROSE: OK. Well, that's not too bad. DAVID ROEDIGER: We talked about
this at lunch a little bit today. In the Clinton triumph,
the Bill Clinton triumph, one of the key counties, the
key county, for his campaign was Macomb County
outside of Detroit, anybody from that area. So his advisors, including the
academic Stanley Greenberg, who became his pollster,
went to Macomb County and tried to figure
out what it was that made these white
Reagan Democrats tick. And they said, we're going to
only poll interviews, focus group interviews, in the
homes and institutions of Macomb County. Now, a lot of these
were auto workers and they worked in
plants that were very, very integrated plants. But the idea was that
you paid attention to the issues of these Reagan
Democrats in their homes, in their counties. At that time, Macomb County
was, I think, about 95% white, and some were sundown
towns properly. That research was funded
by the automobile workers. It was funded by the UAW. And yet, it skewed
entirely to saying, let's define this problem as a
problem not of workers, but of middle class people. So Stanley Greenberg's book on
this triumph in the election was called Middle Class Dreams,
that they convene these focus groups as middle class
people who had to be, not politically appealed
to, but paid attention to. And the focus group revealed
that integrated schools were a problem. Bussing was a problem. Crime was a problem. All of that kind of buzz
word code word issues, and then Clinton's
campaign promise to end welfare as
we know it, promised to mend affirmative action. Three strikes and you're
out, the effective death Penalty Act. All of those things become
Clinton era reforms. And they rest on this idea
that we're paying attention to white workers. My great student, Tyler
Miles, has a new book on the early history of
Detroit, and it turns out that Macomb was the biggest
slaveholder in that area, and it becomes, then, this
county sundown towns later on. In the 2016 election, Trump's
strategist made Macomb County their key laboratory. They called it a
laboratory, from returning the Republicans-- they thought, if we can figure
out a way to win that county. And they did resoundingly
figure out a way to pay attention to the
issues of white workers. So I think there is
this way in which we have to be very careful. One of the things
that will happen now in the next round
of primaries is there will be democratic
candidates who say, I know how to listen to the
concerns of white workers. And they'll be listening
to the concerns in a certain kind of
environment, which is not the only environment. I wanted to say one
more thing about that. Because this was
the moment when I was writing Wages of
Whiteness and then it came out and I was lecturing about it. And I was doing a lot of summer
schools for the Automobile Workers Union at that time, I
was telling people at lunch. I said, I would go into
those summer schools and I'd say to maybe 3/4
white workers, a quarter African-American workers
at that time, why would anybody-- my
work is about-- here's what I'm interested in. My work is about,
why would anybody call themselves a white worker? I get how you call
yourself white. I get how you call
yourself a worker. But why do you
want to call-- why would anybody want to call
yourself a white worker? And the white workers
answered that question. And they said, oh,
it's because you can get a job in
the skilled trades, in the automobile industry. You can live wherever you want. You can send your
kids to good schools. You can get a home loan. The police don't
bother you as much. Of course people will call
themselves a white worker. So alongside that stuff
that was being relayed in the homes of Macomb County,
in terms of white supremacist rhetorics about
black people, there was a whole other
available discourse, even at that moment,
that could have been talked about and tapped into. TRICIA ROSE: Right. Right. So it sounds like there's
a kind of continuum of whiteness here going on. But they've been divided
into good and bad whites, the liberal whites
as the good ones and these conservative,
or unintelligence amount, because they were working
against their own best interests. But can you talk a bit
about whether or not they're on a spectrum? How do you think about
ways of being white, and whether or not there are
ways of transforming that? Because given all the
investments we know, it's not like the
category is going away. And some could argue that
certain kinds of whiteness has been cultivated over
the past 30 or 40 years to get us here. It's not a fixed thing. It's a constructed matter that's
reinforced and highlighted. And it's reinforced with
benefits, with resources, and it's reinforced with
rhetoric and ideology. But I'm just wondering how we
think about it, whether or not it's on a continuum,
whether or not there are value judgments
that you want to make. How do you think about the
breadth of the category, and can we do more with
it in a progressive way? Can we have the anti-FOX
network that does the opposite? DAVID ROEDIGER: Air America. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah. Oh yeah, so much for that. That was a success. But something that cultivates
a progressive, multi-racially, comfortable kind of whiteness. How is that possible, and how do
you see the category operating overall? DAVID ROEDIGER: Well first
of all, I sometimes think-- and with the restrictions
on immigration now, this may not
quite be true-- but I've sometimes worried about
the critical study of whiteness as taking up so much space
talking about whiteness. I've argued in places that
the most important kind of interracial unity
in the United States is black-brown unity now,
and black-white unity has been superceded, or
is about to be superceded, in that regard. So I think that one thing
we have to watch out for is to do the dreamwork of
white supremacists for them by assuming that
whites are always going to be the key
constituency, that everything that matters in
the United States is going to be associated
with whiteness. After the election, a
graduate student and I did this small study
that was about Wisconsin. And we wanted to try to find out
how voters in sundown towns-- I knew from Joe Feagan, the
sociologist, that over half of all towns in Wisconsin
are sundown towns, that is, towns where black people had
to be out of town by sundown, and they remain less than 1%
African American to this day. So this student and I wanted to
find out how those towns voted. Because so much of
what we were hearing was acting as if
changes in white opinion were the product of actual
knowledge and experience with people of color. We couldn't get
the data for towns. We looked at counties
with a sundown town as their county
seat, which turns out it's 58 out of 72
counties in Wisconsin, that have sundown towns
for a county seat. And sure enough, Clinton
barely lost Wisconsin. You could easily say
that those sundown towns, which, in
the press, stood in for rural, poor,
backwards, et cetera. They weren't always, but. Those sundown towns
delivered the state to Trump. But two other things
were pressing. One was, by far
greater than that, was suburban Milwaukee, educated
people, middle class whites, educated whites who
voted for Trump. And they voted for the
Republican candidate in every election as far
back as-- and even more, they voted for Trump. That group gets missed. It's that educated, racist
group that we have trouble identifying and talking about. It's much more
easy for the press to talk about the Appalachian
worker or the rural Wisconsin. But then I talked
to Jim Lowe, and he does this great work
on sundown towns, and told him about this article. And he said, oh, take a look at
those same counties in the 2008 election. And then the 2008 election,
those 58 counties, with all white towns
as their county seat, overwhelmingly voted
for Obama, 55 to 45. TRICIA ROSE: Why? DAVID ROEDIGER: They
voted for Obama. Desperate places, change. There are places
that if they're going to survive at all as a county,
they need a strong state. So I think it's
important to realize that these things are at
least a certain amount fluid. and so when you say,
where can we tap in? The biggest swing in a
county was in a county called Calhoun
County in Illinois not too far from
where I grew up. And it went from 73-30 for
Obama to 70-30 for Trump in the space of eight years. And my son was, for a
time, a legal aid attorney that served that county. And he said everything got
shut down in that county. Very, very, very,
very poor county that still had public housing
through rural agricultural administration homes. They all got shut. The social security
office got shut. The experience of austerity in
that county was part of what-- TRICIA ROSE: Obama. DAVID ROEDIGER: So
it's about race. And certainly in
one of the things I hope we talk about, at least
in the question and answer-- so the way that Trump has
highlighted immigration, maybe even more than any black racism
in his public appeals, all of that. I don't want to deny it all,
but there are some other things that we can attend to. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk
a little bit about the black and brown alliance you
referenced, because that seems particularly productive around
fighting anti-black racism and fighting and the
racism of immigration. So how important is race to
the anti-immigration strategy and impulse, in not just
Trump, but in his supporters, and others? DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah. This was happenstance, but
one of the things that really struck me in the
last month was when Trump did the shithole
country thing, which itself deserves some attention. It's an interesting example of-- we say we're against
structural racism, but it's when words get used-- what was really
outrageous about Trump in this shithole country things
was that he was openly saying, I'm going to discriminate
against people on the basis of race. That was about policy. And nobody really-- TRICIA ROSE: Yeah, it was
all personal behavior. DAVID ROEDIGER: --to the policy. It was the right the bad
words associated with the-- both are reprehensible,
but we do have to be able to talk
about structural racism when we talk about
Trump's rhetoric. What was your question? TRICIA ROSE: Racism and
anti-immigrant policy. You're right on it. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah. So that day after he-- I think the night before he
issued this shithole country thing-- and then
the day or the day after, I was the King
holiday celebration. And Trump really made a big
thing out of the King holiday celebration. And a few people
who were invited protested, and some
people didn't come. But mostly, he pulled it off. And it reminded me of the way
that, during the campaign, there was plenty of anti-black
racism in the Trump campaign. But a critical
juncture is he chose to lead with the
issue of immigration rather than confront the moral
high ground that the Civil Rights Movement, I think,
still occupies, in some ways, in the United States. And so I think that one
of the things that's interesting about Trump
is that he's got policies to hurt immigrants,
and he's got rhetoric to hurt African Americans,
and policies, as well. But there is this way in which
he's pushing anti-immigration so far that it challenges
us to think about how to build an alliance
that defends immigrant rights and
African American rights at the same time. He's giving us that task,
I think, by the very way that he's so using
anti-immigration and, in that shithole country
thing, anti-globalization, I think, to a certain
extent, to define problems as being about outsiders. There's a great
British sociologist I recommend a lot
name Satnam Virdee who has a book called Class, Race,
and the Racialized Outsider. And this concept of racialized
outsider that he's theorized, I think, is really, really,
deeply important in the United States now, to
think about people who are racially on trial. They're just here. And then maybe 40
years from now, they'll be of the
same ethnicity, but not in that same exposed
position that they are, especially if
they're undocumented. So the black-brown one,
I think, is an issue that Trump poses for us, and
it's an opportunity as well. TRICIA ROSE: An opportunity. Yeah, for sure. And certainly, the
criminalization, the rendering of various
immigrant groups as nonwhite, and their
criminalization, could be an important source
of connective tissue for mobilization. DAVID ROEDIGER: Yeah. It's also a challenge for the
anti-incarceration movement, because some right
wingers are getting interested in shrinking
the size of prisons and thinking that you can use
new technologies to police people outside of prisons,
and maybe make money off of those technologies. But immigration prisons
are making the slack. TRICIA ROSE: Attemptive right. DAVID ROEDIGER: So the
issues are actually posed in real life for us, I think. TRICIA ROSE: Exactly. So trying to study
white supremacy-- it's this and one last
question, we'll throw it open to the audience. Studying white supremacy is
getting a lot of attention on campuses. You can study African
American history, it doesn't usually generate
the same level of hate mail. It gets it, but there's
been a tremendous outrage about the handful of
courses in the few places that are tackling just
the historical formation of white supremacy. Can you speak to that? I mean, is this a moment
for whiteness studies that's politically valuable? How much intimidation are
you seeing in the field? What's your sense? DAVID ROEDIGER: Tricia
asked me at lunch if I've gotten death
threats recently, and I haven't, actually. But there are so many people
just down the road at Trinity, at Drexel. There have been case after
case of people, particularly who study whiteness, who fall
victim to this kind of outrage media coverage, that,
oh my God, people are in classrooms discriminating
against white students. It's so old. 1992, I was asked to be
on Fox and kindred shows. I was asked to drive
to Chicago in order that people could yell at me
and berate me on right wing TV shows. And then it was like, oh my God,
there's this new thing called the critical study-- they
called it whiteness studies-- called whiteness studies, and
we should all be up in arms about it. And so now, over a period of
decades, every two or three years, like clockwork,
there's a series of shows on Fox and other
right wing networks, saying, we just found out that this
thing called whiteness studies, and your kids are
being exposed to it. And it's a tricky business
because some of us are anti-white, in
the sense that we think that whiteness is
an ideology that's caused a lot of misery in the world. And so it's easy enough, in
the case of Johnny Williams at Trinity, it's easy enough
to find it out-of-context quote where somebody says, I don't
wish good fortune to whiteness. I wish it would disappear. And then that becomes genocidal. We can't critically
study whiteness without being able to say
that whiteness is harmful and doesn't help white people. And so when that threat is
made, we have to find some way. I was absolved from it
because I was always a say, I've never taught a course on
whiteness, and never would. All part of people who
teach such courses, but I consider whiteness to
be part of ethnic studies. If you're going to
critically study whiteness, I think it grows out
of and is best embedded in ethnic studies. Whenever people
say, why don't you come on and talk about
your terrible course in whiteness studies, I'm always
able to say, no, that's not me. TRICIA ROSE: Well, that's a good
move, if for no other reason. So what do you think
the post-Trump landscape will look like? I mean, who knows? But what would you
say at this point? DAVID ROEDIGER:
The things that's interested me in policy terms-- TRICIA ROSE: Oh, there's going
to be a post-Trump landscape. There will be. That's a fact. You heard it here. DAVID ROEDIGER: We just make
sure there's still a landscape. The post-Trump landscape. TRICIA ROSE: Good point. DAVID ROEDIGER: But one of the
things that's interested me about the tax policy
is how little there was of mobilization
against industries, against the tax bill, compared
to some of the other things, and how we're hardly hearing
anybody in opposition to Trump saying, if we
win the midterm elections, we'll repeal this tax bill. It's very interesting. So I think that the
important intellectual and political debates
are going to be about, are we getting rid of Trump? Are we getting rid of the
ideas that Trump pushed, the policies that Trump pushed? And I think that's a big one. Are Democratic politicians
going to be willing to say, we describe this as a
disaster for working people, and as soon as we
get an opportunity, we're going to get
rid of that disaster. And you can write that in
a lot of different ways, or apply it in a lot
of different ways. Are we against anti-immigrants
safer rattling because Trump is doing it, or are we also
cognizant of the fact that those deportations
were going on-- TRICIA ROSE: Under Obama. DAVID ROEDIGER: --at
about the same rate. And so I think that's one of
the challenges of the post-Trump landscape, is whether
there can be a meaningful, radical anti-racist
response that moves-- TRICIA ROSE: Moves the needle. DAVID ROEDIGER: --beyond
the alternatives that we've had so far. There will be more Trump's. Less outrageous, but same
deal, or more outrageous. TRICIA ROSE: Yeah,
that's the question. DAVID ROEDIGER: So if we
don't attend to some of those closed matters. There's a sense in which
whiteness is a self-fulfilling proposition that white-- people always ask me-- I was lecturing in a
prison in central Illinois not too long ago, and 80 black
inmates, 20 Latino inmates, and they had read Working
Toward Whiteness, which is about the early 20th century. And they had one question
on all of their minds. And at the very end, somebody
finally asked it and said, so are Latinos going
to become white? TRICIA ROSE: Really? DAVID ROEDIGER:
And both the Latino inmates and the black inmates-- TRICIA ROSE: Wanted to know. DAVID ROEDIGER: --were
really interested in that quote for
very good reasons. They were trying
to figure out how to get along with each other and
they were being really honest. But as long as whiteness means
having 11 times as much wealth as African Americans, people
in the immigrant populations are going to want
to become white. It's a material fact
that if you don't address that differential, there is a
compelling material incentive to think about yourself
as becoming white in the United States. So structural things are
needed to change that. It's not just about having
a more civil president. TRICIA ROSE: No. Definitely not. Well, we're going to
take some questions, but first, I just want
to thank David Roediger for this great conversation. Thank you.
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