Greetings!

Please join us on Tuesday, May 13, at 5:30pm for a conversation with David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas, to discuss his new memoir, An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education (Fordham University Press, 2025). The book “chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class history and Whiteness studies.”

More from the cover: “A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.”

David Roediger is the award-winning author of The Wages of Whiteness, Working toward Whiteness, Class, Race, and Marxism, and Seizing Freedom, among others. 

The conversation will take place at the CCSRE Conference Room (450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 360, Room 361J). The event is sponsored by the American Studies program, the Department of History, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Institute for Advancing Just Societies. 

For any questions please contact Austin Clements (ajclem@stanford.edu)