ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experiences and stories of white people from a small farming community in northern Wisconsin. It examines how white people learn to be 'white' and reveals how white racial identity is dependent on people of color—even in situations where white people have little or no contact with racial others. The Creator, Adonai, had flooded the entire Earth. Noah and his family and the animals waited in a giant ark. The dove returned with an olive leaf in its mouth, the water receded, and eventually the people and animals inhabited all the Earth. And like Moses and the children of Israel in Egypt, the enslaved Africans in America prayed to God and shook off the chains of bondage, only to endure lynchings and Jim Crow and mass incarceration and racist representation, seemingly without end—all taken up, all reinforced from below, by white folk who should have been their neighbors, their comrades, their fellow citizens, their brothers and sisters.
