Why Everyone Hates White Liberals with Kevin Schultz

Kevin Schultz will be talking about his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History, starts out by saying that “how you define a ‘white liberal’ is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.”  More than just a criticism of modern liberalism, the book also tells the story of the variety of projects that have crafted a caricatured image of a “liberal” and then aggressively attacking it.  The book argues that these caricatures have hollowed out the center of American politics, leaving us in our polarized condition.
 

Kevin M. Schultz is a professor of history at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and currently Chair of the Department.  A member of OPT, his books and articles have charted the fate of liberalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, including books on how Protestants were forced to let Catholics and Jews into the American mainstream during the World War II era, an effort so successful that there are now six Catholics and two Jews on the U.S. Supreme Court, and just one Protestant.  One of his favorite books to write was Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Defined the Sixties, in part because he found a fun and often hilarious way to tell the story of the 1960s without hating his parents.  His most read book is one often read only half-heartedly and not by choice: a textbook of American history now in its sixth edition.