No, the Heartland Isn't a Race, and the Social Sciences Are a Mess

This past summer, I went to my post office box in Bussey, Iowa (pop. 379) and was delighted to see I had a book in the mail. I ripped the package open and saw the title: Imagining the Heartland: White supremacy and the American Midwest. Interesting, I thought. Yep, White supremacy is in the Midwest. Okay. I've seen it, and some of its effects. I imagined a thoughtful discussion of the KKK, maybe how systematic racism is playing out in state legislatures, or even more interesting, a discussion of contemporary midwestern White nationalist "Christian" church groups, or racist right-wing militia gangs. I turned the book over and read the "blurb" by Joseph Darda—"The heartland isn't a region. It's a race. Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno have written an absorbing book about how images of boring white folks secure white dominance." I was stunned. What hubris, I thought. And condescension.

While I very much doubt this was Darda's intention, in three sentences he not only mischaracterized all Midwesterners, he wiped all minorities off of the map. This book pissed me off before I had even left the post office, and it didn't get much better as I slogged through it, considering their "logic" and "evidence."

The authors are going to say I'm missing their point. That I don't understand them. They are surely correct—in part. But before we can figure out if I am missing their point, we must figure out what their point is—it's not clear. Surely it's more than what Darda wrote? Here is their point, as near as I can figure. The book begins with a reference to a conversation talk show host Dick Cavett had with director Orson Wells in 1970. The authors say "Cavett was incredulous that such a global and cosmopolitan figure … was from such an underwhelming place." (1) That underwhelming place was Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The authors continue in reference to the Cavett-Wells conversation:

In this book we take issue with this underwhelming quality, this banality, and asked a series of questions that emerge from it: what are the conditions that make regions appear average, plain and homogeneous, and what are the social, political, and cultural consequences of this? Our central argument is that if one can understand the ways in which a region and its people do not seem to matter, then national and imperial projects of race and inequality can be understood and challenged in a new way … we argue that the Midwest—as an imagined national middle, or average, is less a real place or collection of places and more a screen onto which various conceptions of middle-ness and average-ness are projected. Put differently, the Midwest serves as a standard and has for many years, one that allows for normative claims about the state of the nation and fosters projects of structural violence from white supremacy to imperialism and nativism.

(2)

We are "average, plain, and homogenous," "banal," "don't seem to matter," "middle-ness and average-ness" are projected on us, resulting in "normative claims," and "fosters projects of structural violence?" If this is their point, I "think" I understand it, and after a consideration of their logic and "evidence," I reject it for reasons I'll give below. I also may have missed at least part of their point because they wrote this book without much effort to make it possible to understand parts of it.

This cloud of academic ambiguity throughout much of this book is frustrating, and yet all too common in the social sciences. Like a mediocre poem in The New Yorker, we are left to intuit its meaning, much like a shaman reads goat entrails as they seek to interpret the world around them. Yet, we assume the poem must be profound since it's in The New Yorker, just as Halvorson and Reno's book must be profound because it's published by the prestigious University of California Press.

Starting with the author's central argument (which is...