Midwestern Studies Meets Critical Race Theory: Notes on Imagining the Heartland

Abstract

Midwestern Studies Meets Critical Race TheoryNotes on Imagining the Heartland Jon K. Lauck Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 218 pp. $85.00 (hardcover), $29.95 (paper). As readers of this journal know better than anyone, the last decade has witnessed a concerted effort to promote and revive Midwestern studies. As consumers of the news in recent years know, the ideas underpinning Critical Race Theory have increasingly been debated in the public square after years of mostly percolating underground in the academy and adjacent institutions. Now comes a direct meeting of the worlds of Midwestern studies and Critical Race Theory in the form of a book published by the University of California Press, which is based in Oakland, California. It is titled Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest and was authored by two anthropologists, one at Colby College in Maine and the other at Binghamton University in New York. In a bit of stage-setting, the University of California Press announces in the book that it "publishes bold progressive books … with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide."1 Imagining the Heartland affords an opportunity to consider whether Critical Theory generally, and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in particular, can help us understand the Midwest more completely and accurately or if the reverse is true. At this stage of the discussion, the CRT approach to the study of the Midwest, if this book is a reliable guide, suffers from weaknesses that will cloud our ability to see the region in its fullness and complexity. It serves as a broader warning about the problems associated with Critical Theory more generally and should be a reminder of the importance of relying on more [End Page 126] fruitful ways of examining the history of the Midwest. These include, most importantly, a dedication to collecting and examining the particular facts on the ground when interpreting the Midwestern past and placing them in historical and comparative context with limited use of theories which can predetermine conclusions. At a minimum, before it is widely adopted, CRT and its application in Midwestern studies should be the subject of a robust discussion which can begin in this journal. This discussion will continue in future issues. It should be explained up front that Imagining the Heartland does not rely on original research nor the kind of ethnographic study once-common to anthropology. The book relies on secondary publications, from academic studies to media reports to aspects of popular culture, and analyzes them through the lens of Critical Theory and seeks to explain and critique how other writers and artists have imagined or talked about the Midwest. Critical Theory is not the same as thinking critically about evidence when interpreting the past, an exercise we should all embrace.2 Critical Theory, for the uninitiated, was primarily developed by the Marxists who organized the Frankfurt School of social analysis in Germany in the early twentieth-century and who later, to escape the Nazis, moved its operations to the United States.3 During the last third of the twentieth century, Critical Theory in its various forms became highly influential in humanities and social science departments at American universities. From the general debates and ideas within Critical Theory emerged the more focused CRT, which was made prominent by Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School, in addition to other law professors. Bell and his allies promoted activism and, for them, CRT recognized that "revolutionizing a culture begins with a radical assessment of it" and predicted that "scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance."4 A deep background in the adoption and development of Critical Theory in the academy and an understanding of these goals are helpful when reading this book because that is the source of its ideas and language. This grounding in Critical Theory is important to understand when delving into Imagining the Heartland because the book is quite distinct from some of the research that takes place in Midwestern studies. A good deal of the work in Midwestern history is grounded in studying...