White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism

George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Duquesne University He has authored, edited, and coedited seventeen books.

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.

• Introduction: Un-sutured, George Yancy Chapter 1: Flipping the Script…and Still a Problem: Staying in the Anxiety of Being a Problem, Barbara ApplebaumChapter 2: Feeling White, Feeling Good: “Antiracist” White Sensibilities, Karen TeelChapter 3: ‘White Talk’ As a Barrier to Understanding the Problem with Whiteness, Alison BaileyChapter 4: Un-forgetting as a Collective Tactic, Alexis ShotwellChapter 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 JensenChapter 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 SartwellChapter 9: Being a White Problem and Feeling It, Bridget M. Newell Chapter 10: Keeping the Strange Unfamiliar: The Racial Privilege of Dismantling Whiteness, Nancy McHughChapter 11: Cornered by Whiteness: On Being a White Problem, David S. Owen Chapter 12: Whiteness, Democracy, and the Hegemonic Mind, Steve MartinotChapter 13: Am I the Small Axe or the Big Tree?, Steve GarnerChapter 14: Contort Yourself: Music, Whiteness, and the Politics of Disorientation, Robin James