An overdue examination of the Midwest's long influence on nationalism
and white supremacy.
Though many associate racism with the regional legacy of the South, it
is the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated
convictions about the value of whiteness. From Jefferson's noble farmer
to The Wizard of Oz, imagining the Midwest has quietly gone
hand-in-hand with imagining whiteness as desirable and virtuous. Since
at least the U.S. Civil War, the imagined Midwest has served as a screen
or canvas, projecting and absorbing tropes and values of virtuous
whiteness and its opposite, white deplorability, with national and
global significance. Imagining the Heartland provides a poignant and
timely answer to how and why the Midwest has played this role in the
American imagination.
In Imagining the Heartland, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Josh
Reno argue that there is an unexamined affinity between whiteness,
Midwestness, and Americanness, anchored in their shared ordinary and
homogenized qualities. These seemingly unremarkable qualities of the
Midwest take work; they do not happen by default. Instead, creating
successful representations of ordinary Midwestness, in both positive and
negative senses, has required cultural expression through media ranging
from Henry Ford's assembly line to Grant Wood's famous "American
Gothic." Far from being just another region among others, the Midwest is
a political and affective logic in racial projects of global white
supremacy. Neglecting the Midwest means neglecting the production of
white supremacist imaginings at their most banal and at their most
influential, their most locally situated and their most globally
dispersed.
