Wrong Ideas About Wrong Ideas

Abstract

Wrong Ideas About Wrong Ideas David Pichaske (bio) In summarizing their work in Imagining the Heartland, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno tell us they have "focused on understanding dominant ideas that have become associated with Midwestness and documenting some of their troubling political effects" (152). The "ongoing projects of white supremacy" (153) that they identify, although "barely noticeable" (39), are ideas, not "natural properties" (152)—which are imposed upon the Midwest by agents not necessarily from the Midwest. In fact, most depictions of the Midwest analyzed in this book—television shows, movies, paintings, national news outlets—are from California, New York, or the South. What is needed, the anthropologists tell us, is "fresh, new ways of thinking about and seeing what racism is and does in order to begin the multigenerational, hard and unglamorous work of dismantling white supremacy" (4) or reconstructing the Midwest not as it is, but as it is imagined by economic, political, and intellectual marketers, and sold to people all over the world. Interestingly, while some depictions analyzed here antedate the twentieth century, this purported use of the Midwest to promote White maleness became an agenda for the authors with the Trump elections. Thus recognizing and correcting the misrepresentations is also part of a political agenda. So while the anthropologists may claim their book is serious scholarship about "the cultural work of place-making" as applied to the Midwest (11), it is in fact a social crusade reacting to Donald Trump.1 Ostensibly the authors base their analysis of this process on the mindsets and marketing campaigns of others.2 However, it becomes pretty obvious that the mindset which selects material is that of the authors themselves (who spent some time in the Midwest but now teach in New England—a disconnect from place if ever there was one).3 Paradoxically, in presenting these misrepresentations for often foggy critique, the authors spread those [End Page 147] images and ideas, becoming de facto accessories to the false representations. Another problem is that their sense of "White/racist" is a little blurred. They admit that earlier definitions of "White supremacy" disappeared, as the definition of "White" expanded to include groups previously excluded for national, social, class, and religious reasons. In the Midwest, differences among Italian, German, Swedish, Scot, Irish, Czech, Lithuanian, and Bohunk "Whites" were once so strong that these diverse ethnicities battled each other like tribes of Native Americans before them.4 The authors do not, however, recognize that many factual representations of the Midwest today have already erased the distinctions they find prejudiced. Just look at any Midwest football, baseball, or basketball team's starting lineup. When place is nothing more than an imagined construct, people lose their groundedness. Teaching in New England while writing about the Midwest, these authors have lost any connection to real place. What this age of the internet needs is not new imaginations but a reconnection to reality. Also, people who actually live in this largely rural place understand that the Midwest is less about "White supremacy" than it is about the natural environment, which pretty much controls your life (and your mindset).5 Having no real interest in this artificial Hollywood abstraction or the postmodern politically correct world it represents, I began evaluating the book's assessment of depictions of the Midwest in literary texts associated with the region, both those the book mentions and those it ignores. This book is heavy on James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison (not many Native American authors), but apparently the anthropologists have not read O Pioneers! with Russian "Crazy Ivar" and Czech Frank Shabata, who shoots Norwegian Emil Bergson. They missed the fact that in My Antonia Antonia Shimerda is a Bohunk. They mention Upton Sinclair's The Jungle but avoid acknowledging the economic and ethnic diversity it presented to millions of readers. In discussing Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, they transform the battle between Carol Kennicott and the town elders into an affirmation of shared "whiteness," ignoring Miles, "the Red Swede," and the working-class farmers who, in a conversation overheard by Carrol, would "like to burn this town." When acknowledged, Midwest liberalism-leftism-populism-socialism is...