Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the US might be the only country that ever went from the status quo to counterrevolution without revolution in between. We are today living in an era of historically ferocious political regression, a massive conservative backlash whose grievances are often more imagined than real. In no case is this more dramatic than race. Notwithstanding the fact that Nick Fuentes is preaching white victimhood to millions, the Coast Guard has declassified nooses and swastikas as hate symbols, and the Supreme Court has eliminated voting rights protections and affirmative action, African Americans continue to be discriminated against. Indeed, for all of the problems with the New York Times’ 1619 Project, it did show the ways in which structural racism continues to shape the US from healthcare to the labor market to criminal justice to traffic. Nevertheless, today’s anti-woke backlash is so ubiquitous that even some liberals have accepted its premise that in the movement against racism the pendulum has swung too far.

It is therefore immensely valuable that David Roediger has just written a memoir, as there are few people better equipped to evaluate the project of radical anti-racism in light of today’s all-consuming reaction. An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education accomplishes a great deal. For one, it is a record of both Roediger’s life and the world into which he was born. Roediger, now 73, was raised in the southern Illinois “sundown town” of Columbia, Illinois and spent parts of his youth in Cairo, Illinois, a town whose leaders, after unsuccessfully fighting desegregation tooth and nail, decided to abandon rather than share the city’s schools, pools, and parks. Roediger writes that he was “saved” from his small town’s racist parochialism by the Catholic left and the Black freedom movement and, later, by the anti-war movement. Roediger also credits his interest in music and sports (he was an accomplished tennis player and deeply admires Arthur Ashe) for broadening his worldview and helping to lead him from a likely life of smalltown factory work to the heights of historical scholarship.

The book additionally chronicles the different milieus Roediger came up in, including the radical publisher Kerr Company and collectives such as the Red Rose Chicago Surrealist Group, and it details the evolution of........

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