The Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and the Department of History welcome David Roediger, Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas, for a talk on “The Anti-Racist Education of an Ordinary White.”

The historian David Roediger will present stories from his new book An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education. A direct response to the venom and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, the memoir describes Roediger’s youth in a family of southern Illinois workers. He portrays the white racism he was carefully taught, both in a small all-white town and the integrated city of Cairo. He recalls also the ways in which rural places and working-class lives can nurture other conclusions about social justice.

David Roediger teaches American Studies and History at University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Education from Northern Illinois University. He holds a PhD from Northwestern, where he studied under Sterling Stuckey. Roediger has taught labor, immigrant, and Black history at University of Missouri, University of Illinois, and University of Minnesota. He worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Sinking Middle Class, and The Wages of Whiteness.

Free and open to the public.