“When I think about the insistence of white power and privilege — from racial inequity, the murder of George Floyd, the storming of the Capitol, and the emergence of Donald Trump, to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s rejection of critical educational programs designed to bear witness to the inhuman and cruel suffering of Black people in this country — there is a sense of both disbelief and a painful recognition that this is all too familiar. Whiteness functions as one of those multi-headed creatures; it finds a way to survive. Because of its recursive existence, I thought it crucial to engage the ideological, political, economic and psychological dimensions of whiteness with prominent historian of whiteness, David R. Roediger, who is the Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas, where he teaches and writes on race and class in the United States. Educated through college at public schools in Illinois, he completed doctoral work at Northwestern University. He is the author of Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All; How Race Survived U.S. History; Class, Race, and Marxism; and The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth D. Esch). His older writings on race, immigration and working-class history include The Wages of Whiteness and Working Toward Whiteness. His most recent book is entitled, The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History (2020).”
