Whitewashing the Heartland

Abstract

Whitewashing the Heartland Michael C. Steiner (bio) Co-authors Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno begin their book, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, with a number of reasonable and significant claims. Among them, they argue that "the Midwest—as an imagined national middle ground, or average—is less a real collection of places and more a screen onto which various conceptions of middle-ness and average-ness are projected." (2) A few pages later, they expand this metaphor by asserting that the region has "operated as a screen or stage on which to articulate whiteness and virtue." (4) "The Midwest," they continue, "was not discovered. It was invented" and "it has been successfully reinvented again and again" (9) as an exclusionary zone of outwardly dull but dangerous whiteness. "Popular imagery and narratives of the Midwest," they argue, "have bundled together whiteness, labor, and property" into "a particular kind of racial capitalism" (9), and such whitewashing has cemented "the enduring relationship of the Midwest and whiteness in US history" and triggered an avalanche of dark consequences. (10) Building upon an earlier claim that the region "fosters projects of structural violence, from white supremacy to imperialism and nativism" (2), the authors sweepingly conclude that "[p]erceiving and imagining the Midwest has contributed to the spread of white supremacy among all Americans, as well as people elsewhere in the world." (12) The authors' fundamental purpose is to reveal the imagined or symbolic Midwest as a wellspring of White racism and open our eyes to the depths with which this imagery and ideology has saturated American culture. They hope, furthermore, that their book "will not only challenge the Midwest as a racial trope but help readers see themselves in what we write about," and that by learning to reject these harmful myths, the groundwork will be laid to use "the radical power of narrative to enlist us all in the creation of more [End Page 169] just worlds." (6) These are sweeping and worthy goals, and their study of the dark consequences of a heartland narrative and the hope to create a better one builds upon a tradition in American historical scholarship. Perhaps without knowing it, they are tracing the footsteps of a string of symbol-myth-image analysis, beginning with Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth in 1950, continuing with Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier in 1984, and culminating with Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America in 1993. Deeply aware of the power of myth and concerned about the impact of what Smith described as a series of "collective representations" and "compelling archetypes," each of these earlier writers traced multiple versions of the myth of the heartland as an open expanse for White men to conquer at the expense of women, Native Americans, and minorities, and each pointed the way toward the creation of less destructive, more inclusive regional visions. Halvorson and Reno offer a version of this theme, but unlike their predecessors they leave little room for nuance and subtlety, and in their crusading zeal to expose the region as the fountainhead of White racism, they make a series of excessive claims that undermine their argument. Beyond ignoring the deep contributions of other regions, especially the South and the West, to this ubiquitous American and global sin, and thus enriching their argument, it is damaged by the messianic zeal with which they indict the Midwest. To make their case, they inflate the symptoms of White racism and underplay the presence and power of Black culture in the region, and these related issues of overreach and omission require deeper discussion. In the sections of the book where the authors trace mutations of White racism in language and literature—a worthy effort at the onset—they find symptoms in every turn of plain speech and stretch of flat landscape. Their warning signs of racism are so multitudinous that they become overwhelming, so ubiquitous that they threaten to become meaningless. They sweep an extensive list of midwestern traits into a grab bag of bigotry, and many...