Imagining Supremacy

Abstract

Imagining Supremacy Wilfred Reilly (bio) In Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, authors Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua Reno do something fascinating: use contemporary academic theory to render the answer to a rather simple question almost incomprehensible. Imagining the Heartland—a dense and often quite well-written text—is focused on one core question: why is the American Midwest seen as it is? The authors argue that the midwestern region of the U.S. is often seen and presented as a sort of idealized, mostly-White heartland of the country. Empirically speaking, this claim seems to have three component prongs: that the Midwest is depicted as very White in population terms (13, 18, 44); that it is described as a sort of pioneer-settled American core; and that it is viewed as an agrarian region (22–24), often in contrast to giant ant-hill cities which may be seen as decadent, over-civilized, and perhaps not truly American. One immediate and obvious observation is that the reason citizens believe most of these things is that they are true.1 Five minutes of research reveals that the Midwest, generally defined as containing the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, is by far the whitest large region of the U.S.2 Iowa, perhaps the archetypal Midwest state, was 84.1% White (and only 4.3% Black) as of the 2020 census.3 Typical "Plains Midwest" state North Dakota is 83.2% White today—down from 90%—with the largest number of racial minorities being Native Americans and people who are half White, and African Americans making up 3.5% of the population. And so forth. Even states like Wisconsin, which is home to the good-sized and diverse city of Milwaukee, do not disrupt the mold: the Badger [End Page 157] State is 80.2% non-Hispanic White as of 2020, with Blacks stable at 6.8% of the population. Not to belabor this point, but the most diverse Midwestern state is probably my own heimat of Illinois, which was 60.0% White, 14.7% Black, and 18.0% Hispanic or Latino. In contrast, the most racially diverse mainland U.S. state is California, which is just 35.2% non-Hispanic White. Against virtually any other region, the Midwest is seen as "heavily White" because it is. Similarly, the Midwest is seen as a pioneer-settled national core because it was exactly that. The midwestern states fall in almost the exact geographic center of the United States: the current population/demographic center of the country is located in central Missouri.4 In cartographic terms, our actual geographic center is Lebanon, Kansas.5 The Midwest and Great Plains were the primary areas settled under the pioneer-driving Homestead Act, which was focused specifically on "opening up" the middle of the North American continent to western agriculture and development.6 Along these same lines, the primary reason the Midwest is seen as agrarian is that much of it IS. Even today, the region has both "the greatest number of farm operations and farmland acres operated in the nation," and contains fully 36% of the 2,042,220 working farm operations in the United States.7 The next-highest performing American agricultural region, the Southeast, comes in at 20%—and the drop is sharp from there. Things used to be still more rustic in my home zone, with even Halvorson and Reno (22) noting that 53% of all residents of Wisconsin were farmers in the fairly typical historical year of 1850. A logical extrapolation from all of this uncontested data might be that American writers and artists have largely seen the Midwest as it is, or at least in terms of its more prominent distinguishing characteristics—albeit while employing the same slight romanticization used to present all New England as Protestant and stoic, or la belle Nouvelle Orleans as a boozy Disneyland for adults. Even to the extent that this largely White and agrarian region is seen as a nostalgic reminder of an America past—and, today, it is presented at least as often as the failing and opiate-addled...