What to the "Other" Is the Midwest?

On July 5, 1852, formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke to a Rochester, New York, assembly for their Independence Day celebration. Over the course of the speech, Douglass chides the audience for their insensitivity, questioning if their invitation's purpose was to mock him:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."¹

This searing provocation parallels my assertion that even in the most earnest scholarly efforts to understand and challenge the Midwest's constitutive White supremacy, the region's residents of color are almost always rendered invisible. Many of the best texts on the subject of race in the Midwest, even those that attempt to be explicitly anti-racist, oftentimes still hold White Midwesterners and narratives about White people at the center. The experiences of people of color and their embodiment of regional identity becomes inconsequential. Such framing renders Indigenous, Arab, Latinx, Asian, and Black Midwesterners as in the region, not of it. I ask, then, "what to the racialized 'other' is the Midwest?"

Imagining the Heartland is a text with considerable merit. Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno ably demonstrate the pernicious and intractable envisioning of a rural, White Midwest. What I propose is an amplification of their brief concluding remarks to tell more inclusive narratives. Borrowing from Doug Kiel, twenty-first-century midwestern studies must move beyond "the mild frontier," to center bold interpretations of race, indigeneity, gender, class, and sexuality.² When scholars decenter White-other binaries in their "diversification" of the region, and explore Midwesterners of color's experiences on their own terms rather than refracting them through their relationships to the White majority, what new midwestern stories can be told? By highlighting the complicated and independent ways people of color see their own midwestern lives, scholars can commit to more expansive meanings, beyond xenophobia and erasure, to recognize people of color's relationship to the region on their own terms.

Halvorson and Reno put forth a thoughtful account of the creation and maintenance of a dominant midwestern identity, one in service to White supremacy and settler colonialism. In explaining the midwestern myths of whiteness to a White audience; however, the authors inadvertently reify the trope. The book investigates "the often taken-for-granted connection between the seemingly most ordinary of American regions and whiteness, a connection that lends support to other projects related to nation and empire, both historically and today." (4) But to whom is the connection between the Midwest and whiteness a revelation? As written, the Midwest becomes a place of meaning and value only to White people, erasing people of color who also shape and are shaped by alternative regional interpretations.

In their tight narrative, the authors look at representations of the Midwest through literature, film, and mainstream media to determine the ways that the region has come to be read as resilient, hardworking, and inherently White. One of the text's most valuable contributions is the articulation of "white virtue," which undergirds the midwestern economic and social systems through "specific entitlements and forms of white opportunity and social mobility." (19) What is critical about this intervention, is the way that this rationale not only justifies White progress but also quality-of-life gaps between White and Midwesterners of color. Whether White Indianans depicted themselves as virtuous "settler-farmers" in opposition to Latinx agriculturists, or claimed that Black Hoosiers were "troublemaking, idle, and shiftless" when citing low literacy rates, both examples reinforced the notion that White Midwesterners were the rightful, deserving inhabitants of the Midwest and its bounty. Most insidious, this racist logic ignored the actions White residents employed to restrict Latinx migrants' land use or Black access to public education. (55–56) Thus White virtue "foreground[ed] the resilient, virtuous, and economical white farmer (in contrast with the supposedly dependent or unresourceful other), concealing all the failures, violence, and various kinds of opposition that characterized white colonization." (59)

At the same time, by arguing that the...