Episode 130: 'Heartland,' 'Middle America,' and US Medias Vaguely Nostalgic, Racialized Code for White Grievance
\u201cWe need a president whose vision was shaped by the American Heartland rather than the ineffective Washington politics,\u201d declares presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. \u201cAOC Kills Jobs Middle America Would Love to Have,\u201d proclaims The Washington Examiner. Amy Klobuchar insists she\u2019s a \u201cvoice from the heartland,\u201d while The Washington Post\u2019s Jennifer Rubin tells us, \u201c[Bernie Sanders] is not going to sell in Middle America. You have to WIN Middle America.\u201d
Everywhere we turn in American political discourse, the terms \u201cHeartland\u201d and \u201cMiddle America\u201d are thrown around as shorthand for \u201ceveryday\u201d men and women somewhere between the Atlantic Ocean to the East, Pacific to the West--homespun people who are supposedly insufficiently represented in media and Beltway circles. Those evoking their status presumably are interjecting these true Americans otherwise overlooked needs into the conversation.
But terms like \u201cHeartland\u201d and \u201cMiddle America\u201d are not benign or organic terms that emerged from the natural course of sociological explanation, they are deliberate political PR products of the 1960s, emerging in parallel with a shift from explicit racism into coded racism. Their primary function is to express a deference to and centering of whiteness as a post-civil rights political project.
On this episode, we explore the origins of the terms \u201cMiddle America\u201d and \u201cHeartland,\u201d what they mask and reveal, why they\u2019re still used today and how conversations about \u201cwhiteness\u201d as a political ideology would benefit greatly from clarity, rather than relying on code words to vaguely allude to the subject of political \u201cwhiteness,\u201d while still trying to obfuscate it.
Our guest is Professor Kristin Hoganson of the University of Illinois.