Author of ExitRight talks about ‘whiteness’
Daniel Oppenheimer’s first book, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American
Century, has been praised by people across the political spectrum.
It was a Washington Post notable nonfiction book in 2016 and received positive reviews from The New Republic as well as The American Conservative.
On Friday, the Austin, Texas, writer spoke and signed copies of his book at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. But he mostly focused his speech on a forthcoming book titled White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America.
The author of that book, University of Minnesota associate professor Tim Lensmire, grew up in northern Wisconsin, and his book is based on interviews he conducted in his hometown.
The book portrays “a kind of whiteness that doesn’t fit easily into the prevailing frames,” Oppenheimer said.
“Lensmire’s subjects hold all sorts of racist or at least racially distorted ideas about people of color, particularly about black people. Yet they also seem to have genuine moral commitments to racial fairness and equality. They have insights about the nature of injustice and authentic desires to connect across racial boundaries,” Oppenheimer said.
These conflicting impulses make the subjects difficult to categorize, he said.
Writing them off, shaming them, treating them as irredeemable, has “both a moral and strategic cost,” Oppenheimer warned. It cordons off “a whole range of possibilities and strategies for nudging unstable white racial identities in a productive direction.”
Similarly, campaigning against “white privilege” may be a “bad strategic idea,” the white Texan said.
Roughly 80 people, nearly all of them white, gathered in Sturgis Hall to hear Oppenheimer.
During his question-and-answer session, Oppenheimer said the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president had a “profound and positive effect” but also led to “increasing polarization.”
He also expressed concern with the current tone of public discourse.
Fox News and commentators Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are spreading a “racially toxic poison into the ears of their listeners on a regular basis,” he said.
Despite today’s challenges, Oppenheimer described himself as, “in some sense, a long-term racial optimist.”
“I don’t know that we’ll get to the promised land, but I think things, broadly speaking, are getting better,” he said.
In an interview afterward, Clinton School Dean Skip Rutherford said Oppenheimer’s comments were thought-provoking.
“I thought it was an interesting, very detailed analysis that should cause people both on the left and the right to think,” he said.
Referring to Oppenheimer’s book, which describes the evolution of Ronald Reagan and five other leaders from liberalism to conservatism, Rutherford said, “I think Daniel Oppenheimer is one of the most talented political writers and analysts in the country.”