R&L Logo R&L Logo
  • GENERAL
    • Browse by Subjects
    • New Releases
    • Coming Soon
    • Chases's Calendar
  • ACADEMIC
    • Textbooks
    • Browse by Course
    • Instructor's Copies
    • Monographs & Research
    • Reference
  • PROFESSIONAL
    • Education
    • Intelligence & Security
    • Library Services
    • Business & Leadership
    • Museum Studies
    • Music
    • Pastoral Resources
    • Psychotherapy
  • FREUD SET
Cover Image
Hardback
Paperback
share of facebook share on twitter
Add to GoodReads Exam Copies

White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism

How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem?

Edited by George Yancy - Contributions by Rebecca Aanerud; Barbara Applebaum; Alison Bailey; Steve Garner; Robin James; Crista Lebens; Steve Martinot; Nancy McHugh; Bridget M. Newell; David S. Owen; Alexis Sartwell and Karen Teel

White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism powerfully emphasizes the significance of humility, vulnerability, anxiety, questions of complicity, and how being a “good white” is implicated in racial injustice. This collection sets a new precedent for critical race scholarship and critical whiteness studies to take into consideration what it means specifically to be a white problem rather than simply restrict scholarship to the problem of white privilege and white normative invisibility. Ultimately, the text challenges the contemporary rhetoric of a color-blind or color-evasive world in a discourse that is critically engaging and sophisticated, accessible, and persuasive.


  • Details
  • Details
  • Author
  • Author
  • TOC
  • TOC
  • Reviews
  • Reviews
Lexington Books
Pages: 282 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-0-7391-8949-8 • Hardback • October 2014 • $133.00 • (£102.00)
978-1-4985-0673-1 • Paperback • March 2016 • $57.99 • (£45.00)
Series: Philosophy of Race
Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Philosophy / Social, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, Social Science / Minority Studies
George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Duquesne University He has authored, edited, and coedited seventeen books.


Introduction: Un-sutured, George Yancy
Chapter 1: Flipping the Script…and Still a Problem: Staying in the Anxiety of Being a Problem,
Barbara Applebaum
Chapter 2: Feeling White, Feeling Good: “Antiracist” White Sensibilities,
Karen Teel
Chapter 3: ‘White Talk’ As a Barrier to Understanding the Problem with Whiteness,
Alison Bailey
Chapter 4: Un-forgetting as a Collective Tactic,
Alexis Shotwell
Chapter 5: “Don’t make a labor of it”: Relationality and the Problem of Whiteness,
Crista Lebens
Chapter 6: “You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me”: The willed Ignorance and Wishful Innocence of White America,
Robert Jensen
Chapter 7: Humility and Whiteness: “How did I look without seeing, hear without listening?”,
Rebecca Aanerud
Chapter 8: I Speak for My People: A Racial Manifesto,
Crispin Sartwell

Chapter 9: Being a White Problem and Feeling It, Bridget M. Newell
Chapter 10: Keeping the Strange Unfamiliar: The Racial Privilege of Dismantling Whiteness, Nancy McHugh
Chapter 11: Cornered by Whiteness: On Being a White Problem,
David S. Owen
Chapter 12: Whiteness, Democracy, and the Hegemonic Mind,
Steve Martinot
Chapter 13: Am I the Small Axe or the Big Tree?,
Steve Garner
Chapter 14: Contort Yourself: Music, Whiteness, and the Politics of Disorientation,
Robin James


Yancy is a prolific author and editor whose previous collections include What White Looks Like. Here he once again gives readers an edited volume on philosophy of race that is distinctive and insightful. This new book addresses a question to white academics who are antiracist scholars: 'how does it feel to be a white problem?' This volume is unique in not only accounting for whiteness generically, but also treating whiteness as a problem—something to be named and diagnosed as a fundamental stumbling block for racial justice. Among the book's virtues are the insights offered by having 14 individuals speak of their personal and embodied experiences as white people in a racialized world. While the contributors avoid homogenizing the experience of white people, they all pinpoint a set of ways in which whiteness is a problem both within and outside antiracist activism. Any library that wants to expand its collection of texts dealing with race and racism should acquire this book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty.
— Choice Reviews


[T]he reader owes gratitude to the editor's oversight of the project…. Yancy's edited volume offers a model of solidarity among subjects who oscillate in that anguished space between suturing and unsuturing, which, to my mind, promises an effective solidarity…. This work is neither for the weak of heart, nor does it belong to the (whitely) project of being a hero. Simply put, it is your only option, white ally, ‘because your liberation is bound up with mine.’
— Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy


George Yancy’s essay collection enables an unprecedented insight into the white academic’s mind struggling to come to terms with its own privilege and complicity in structural discrimination. The contributors’ honest reflections are a forceful reminder of the ongoing challenge and difficulty of acknowledging the processual nature of dismantling white privilege. However, the major contribution of this volume is to be found in Yancy’s introduction, which provides the theoretical framework for the pressing task of staying ‘un-sutured’ vis-à-vis the comfortable and widespread attitude of having arrived at an anti-racist attitude. This unfinished process is indispensable for any white person eager to challenge the condition of silently participating and thereby perpetuating racial structures of power and oppression. The thought-provoking essay collection is highly recommended for anyone interested in better understanding – and challenging – the disconcerting state of racial affairs in the US.
— Kult Online


Many books have grappled with Du Bois’s “souls of black folk,” but this is the first to wrestle deeply with his forgotten concern for the immoral “souls of white folk”—the greatest racial problem facing this country. Philosopher George Yancy has compiled yet another major book that teaches well about the deepest racial realities shaping this much-troubled nation.

— Joe R. Feagin, Texas A&M University


White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism:How Does it Feel to Be a White Problem? is a timely, much needed intervention into the stale race-talk of US ‘post-racial’ discourse. The essays from white scholars in philosophy and other fields sweeps the reader into a profound, yet accessible, set of reflections and arguments about how to understand whiteness—and non-blackness—as the core foundation of the US’s ‘race problem.’ Yancy’s mesmerizing introduction un-sutures non-black readers while compelling them to keep reading, to work harder to understand not only how it should feel to be a White Problem, but how to arrive at more constructive solutions to resolving deep-seated, everyday, existential racism.

— Falguni A. Sheth, Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Emory University


I know many whites who do not make space for the question: ‘How does it feel to be a white problem?’ It is this question, this inversion of which race is a ‘problem’ in societies organized around racial hierarchy, that George Yancy forces his readers to address. The fourteen white anti-racist scholars that make up this evocative, compelling book shed needed light on how whiteness as a position of privilege is deployed even in the context of anti-racist interventions. This is an essential text for those who wish to understand how whiteness remains hegemonic across time and place.
— Charles A. Gallagher, La Salle University


George Yancy's governing metaphor of suturing is accurate: white personalities, institutions, and knowledge systems have been sewn up to contain or exclude racial truths that are now putrefying without exposure to air. Reading this collection of essays is like being in a dynamic, self-reflective encounter group of people determined to forego the comforts of ignorance, innocence, and illusions of goodness, and instead to open the festering wounds that were bandaged over. The authors of these searching essays have agreed to answer Yancy's question of what it feels like to be the white racial problem and I appreciate their complex openness to the question.

— Peggy McIntosh, associate director, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and author of "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"


White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism

How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem?

Cover Image
Hardback
Paperback
Summary
Summary
  • White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism powerfully emphasizes the significance of humility, vulnerability, anxiety, questions of complicity, and how being a “good white” is implicated in racial injustice. This collection sets a new precedent for critical race scholarship and critical whiteness studies to take into consideration what it means specifically to be a white problem rather than simply restrict scholarship to the problem of white privilege and white normative invisibility. Ultimately, the text challenges the contemporary rhetoric of a color-blind or color-evasive world in a discourse that is critically engaging and sophisticated, accessible, and persuasive.


Details
Details
  • Lexington Books
    Pages: 282 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
    978-0-7391-8949-8 • Hardback • October 2014 • $133.00 • (£102.00)
    978-1-4985-0673-1 • Paperback • March 2016 • $57.99 • (£45.00)
    Series: Philosophy of Race
    Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Philosophy / Social, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, Social Science / Minority Studies
Author
Author
  • George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Duquesne University He has authored, edited, and coedited seventeen books.


Table of Contents
Table of Contents
  • Introduction: Un-sutured, George Yancy
    Chapter 1: Flipping the Script…and Still a Problem: Staying in the Anxiety of Being a Problem,
    Barbara Applebaum
    Chapter 2: Feeling White, Feeling Good: “Antiracist” White Sensibilities,
    Karen Teel
    Chapter 3: ‘White Talk’ As a Barrier to Understanding the Problem with Whiteness,
    Alison Bailey
    Chapter 4: Un-forgetting as a Collective Tactic,
    Alexis Shotwell
    Chapter 5: “Don’t make a labor of it”: Relationality and the Problem of Whiteness,
    Crista Lebens
    Chapter 6: “You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me”: The willed Ignorance and Wishful Innocence of White America,
    Robert Jensen
    Chapter 7: Humility and Whiteness: “How did I look without seeing, hear without listening?”,
    Rebecca Aanerud
    Chapter 8: I Speak for My People: A Racial Manifesto,
    Crispin Sartwell

    Chapter 9: Being a White Problem and Feeling It, Bridget M. Newell
    Chapter 10: Keeping the Strange Unfamiliar: The Racial Privilege of Dismantling Whiteness, Nancy McHugh
    Chapter 11: Cornered by Whiteness: On Being a White Problem,
    David S. Owen
    Chapter 12: Whiteness, Democracy, and the Hegemonic Mind,
    Steve Martinot
    Chapter 13: Am I the Small Axe or the Big Tree?,
    Steve Garner
    Chapter 14: Contort Yourself: Music, Whiteness, and the Politics of Disorientation,
    Robin James


Reviews
Reviews
  • Yancy is a prolific author and editor whose previous collections include What White Looks Like. Here he once again gives readers an edited volume on philosophy of race that is distinctive and insightful. This new book addresses a question to white academics who are antiracist scholars: 'how does it feel to be a white problem?' This volume is unique in not only accounting for whiteness generically, but also treating whiteness as a problem—something to be named and diagnosed as a fundamental stumbling block for racial justice. Among the book's virtues are the insights offered by having 14 individuals speak of their personal and embodied experiences as white people in a racialized world. While the contributors avoid homogenizing the experience of white people, they all pinpoint a set of ways in which whiteness is a problem both within and outside antiracist activism. Any library that wants to expand its collection of texts dealing with race and racism should acquire this book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty.
    — Choice Reviews


    [T]he reader owes gratitude to the editor's oversight of the project…. Yancy's edited volume offers a model of solidarity among subjects who oscillate in that anguished space between suturing and unsuturing, which, to my mind, promises an effective solidarity…. This work is neither for the weak of heart, nor does it belong to the (whitely) project of being a hero. Simply put, it is your only option, white ally, ‘because your liberation is bound up with mine.’
    — Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy


    George Yancy’s essay collection enables an unprecedented insight into the white academic’s mind struggling to come to terms with its own privilege and complicity in structural discrimination. The contributors’ honest reflections are a forceful reminder of the ongoing challenge and difficulty of acknowledging the processual nature of dismantling white privilege. However, the major contribution of this volume is to be found in Yancy’s introduction, which provides the theoretical framework for the pressing task of staying ‘un-sutured’ vis-à-vis the comfortable and widespread attitude of having arrived at an anti-racist attitude. This unfinished process is indispensable for any white person eager to challenge the condition of silently participating and thereby perpetuating racial structures of power and oppression. The thought-provoking essay collection is highly recommended for anyone interested in better understanding – and challenging – the disconcerting state of racial affairs in the US.
    — Kult Online


    Many books have grappled with Du Bois’s “souls of black folk,” but this is the first to wrestle deeply with his forgotten concern for the immoral “souls of white folk”—the greatest racial problem facing this country. Philosopher George Yancy has compiled yet another major book that teaches well about the deepest racial realities shaping this much-troubled nation.

    — Joe R. Feagin, Texas A&M University


    White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism:How Does it Feel to Be a White Problem? is a timely, much needed intervention into the stale race-talk of US ‘post-racial’ discourse. The essays from white scholars in philosophy and other fields sweeps the reader into a profound, yet accessible, set of reflections and arguments about how to understand whiteness—and non-blackness—as the core foundation of the US’s ‘race problem.’ Yancy’s mesmerizing introduction un-sutures non-black readers while compelling them to keep reading, to work harder to understand not only how it should feel to be a White Problem, but how to arrive at more constructive solutions to resolving deep-seated, everyday, existential racism.

    — Falguni A. Sheth, Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Emory University


    I know many whites who do not make space for the question: ‘How does it feel to be a white problem?’ It is this question, this inversion of which race is a ‘problem’ in societies organized around racial hierarchy, that George Yancy forces his readers to address. The fourteen white anti-racist scholars that make up this evocative, compelling book shed needed light on how whiteness as a position of privilege is deployed even in the context of anti-racist interventions. This is an essential text for those who wish to understand how whiteness remains hegemonic across time and place.
    — Charles A. Gallagher, La Salle University


    George Yancy's governing metaphor of suturing is accurate: white personalities, institutions, and knowledge systems have been sewn up to contain or exclude racial truths that are now putrefying without exposure to air. Reading this collection of essays is like being in a dynamic, self-reflective encounter group of people determined to forego the comforts of ignorance, innocence, and illusions of goodness, and instead to open the festering wounds that were bandaged over. The authors of these searching essays have agreed to answer Yancy's question of what it feels like to be the white racial problem and I appreciate their complex openness to the question.

    — Peggy McIntosh, associate director, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and author of "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"


ALSO AVAILABLE

  • Cover image for the book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
  • Cover image for the book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Sixth Edition
  • Cover image for the book Servants on the Move: Employers’ Race-Gender Ideology and Service Work on Trains, Planes, and Cruise Ships
  • Cover image for the book African American Families Today: Myths and Realities
  • Cover image for the book India's Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives
  • Cover image for the book The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook on Workplace Diversity and Stratification
  • Cover image for the book The New White Nationalism in Politics and Higher Education: The Nostalgia Spectrum
  • Cover image for the book From Antebellum Light Skinned Slaves to the Globalization of Skin Whitening Biotechnology
  • Cover image for the book Interracial Romance and Health: Bridging Generations, Race Relations, and Well-Being
  • Cover image for the book Melting Pot, Multiculturalism, and Interculturalism: The Making of Majority-Minority Relations in the United States
  • Cover image for the book The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States
  • Cover image for the book Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America
  • Cover image for the book Retail Racism: Shopping While Black and Brown in America
  • Cover image for the book Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies
  • Cover image for the book The Alternative Right's Attempt at Autocratic Democracy in Twenty-First Century America
  • Cover image for the book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution
  • Cover image for the book Whitewashing the South: White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights
  • Cover image for the book Diversity Matters: The Color, Shape, and Tone of Twenty-First-Century Diversity
  • Cover image for the book Diversity in the Power Elite: Ironies and Unfulfilled Promises, Third Edition
  • Cover image for the book A Leftist Critique of the Principles of Identity, Diversity, and Multiculturalism
  • Cover image for the book Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance
  • Cover image for the book Living Racism: Through the Barrel of the Book
  • Cover image for the book Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights
  • Cover image for the book Can Muslims Think?: Race, Islam, and the End of Europe
  • Cover image for the book Reinventing Diversity: Transforming Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose, and Performance
  • Cover image for the book Class Counts: Education, Inequality, and the Shrinking Middle Class
  • Cover image for the book White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy
  • Cover image for the book The American Housing Question: Racism, Urban Citizenship, and the Privilege of Mobility
  • Cover image for the book Getting Smart about Race: An American Conversation, Updated Edition
  • Cover image for the book Native American Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
  • Cover image for the book Structural Influence on Biracial Identification
  • Cover image for the book Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language
  • Cover image for the book Race and Reconciliation in America
  • Cover image for the book Perceptions of Ethnicity, Religion, and Radicalization among Second-Generation Pakistani-Canadians: Unity in Diversity?
  • Cover image for the book No Middle Ground: Anti-Imperialists and Ethical Witnessing during the Philippine-American War
  • Cover image for the book Womanist Ethical Rhetoric: A Call for Liberation and Social Justice in Turbulent Times
  • Cover image for the book Mainstreaming Outsiders: The Production of Black Professionals, Second
  • Cover image for the book 'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident...': An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Roots of Racism and Slavery in America
  • Cover image for the book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
  • Cover image for the book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Sixth Edition
  • Cover image for the book Servants on the Move: Employers’ Race-Gender Ideology and Service Work on Trains, Planes, and Cruise Ships
  • Cover image for the book African American Families Today: Myths and Realities
  • Cover image for the book India's Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives
  • Cover image for the book The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook on Workplace Diversity and Stratification
  • Cover image for the book The New White Nationalism in Politics and Higher Education: The Nostalgia Spectrum
  • Cover image for the book From Antebellum Light Skinned Slaves to the Globalization of Skin Whitening Biotechnology
  • Cover image for the book Interracial Romance and Health: Bridging Generations, Race Relations, and Well-Being
  • Cover image for the book Melting Pot, Multiculturalism, and Interculturalism: The Making of Majority-Minority Relations in the United States
  • Cover image for the book The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States
  • Cover image for the book Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America
  • Cover image for the book Retail Racism: Shopping While Black and Brown in America
  • Cover image for the book Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies
  • Cover image for the book The Alternative Right's Attempt at Autocratic Democracy in Twenty-First Century America
  • Cover image for the book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution
  • Cover image for the book Whitewashing the South: White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights
  • Cover image for the book Diversity Matters: The Color, Shape, and Tone of Twenty-First-Century Diversity
  • Cover image for the book Diversity in the Power Elite: Ironies and Unfulfilled Promises, Third Edition
  • Cover image for the book A Leftist Critique of the Principles of Identity, Diversity, and Multiculturalism
  • Cover image for the book Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance
  • Cover image for the book Living Racism: Through the Barrel of the Book
  • Cover image for the book Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights
  • Cover image for the book Can Muslims Think?: Race, Islam, and the End of Europe
  • Cover image for the book Reinventing Diversity: Transforming Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose, and Performance
  • Cover image for the book Class Counts: Education, Inequality, and the Shrinking Middle Class
  • Cover image for the book White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy
  • Cover image for the book The American Housing Question: Racism, Urban Citizenship, and the Privilege of Mobility
  • Cover image for the book Getting Smart about Race: An American Conversation, Updated Edition
  • Cover image for the book Native American Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
  • Cover image for the book Structural Influence on Biracial Identification
  • Cover image for the book Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language
  • Cover image for the book Race and Reconciliation in America
  • Cover image for the book Perceptions of Ethnicity, Religion, and Radicalization among Second-Generation Pakistani-Canadians: Unity in Diversity?
  • Cover image for the book No Middle Ground: Anti-Imperialists and Ethical Witnessing during the Philippine-American War
  • Cover image for the book Womanist Ethical Rhetoric: A Call for Liberation and Social Justice in Turbulent Times
  • Cover image for the book Mainstreaming Outsiders: The Production of Black Professionals, Second
  • Cover image for the book 'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident...': An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Roots of Racism and Slavery in America
facebook icon twitter icon instagram icon linked in icon NEWSLETTERS
ABOUT US
  • Mission Statement
  • Employment
  • Privacy
  • Accessibility Statement
CONTACT
  • Company Directory
  • Publicity and Media Queries
  • Rights and Permissions
  • Textbook Resource Center
AUTHOR RESOURCES
  • Royalty Contact
  • Production Guidelines
  • Manuscript Submissions
ORDERING INFORMATION
  • Rowman & Littlefield
  • National Book Network
  • Ingram Publisher Services UK
  • Special Sales
  • International Sales
  • eBook Partners
  • Digital Catalogs
IMPRINTS
  • Rowman & Littlefield
  • Lexington Books
  • Hamilton Books
  • Applause Books
  • Amadeus Press
  • Backbeat Books
  • Bernan
  • Hal Leonard Books
  • Limelight Editions
  • Co-Publishing Partners
  • Globe Pequot
  • Down East Books
  • Falcon Guides
  • Gooseberry Patch
  • Lyons Press
  • Muddy Boots
  • Pineapple Press
  • TwoDot Books
  • Stackpole Books
PARTNERS
  • American Alliance of Museums
  • American Association for State and Local History
  • Brookings Institution Press
  • Center for Strategic & International Studies
  • Council on Foreign Relations
  • Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
  • Fortress Press
  • The Foundation for Critical Thinking
  • Lehigh University Press
  • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  • Other Partners...