White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem? - Philosophy of Race

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes: 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"Review Quotes: 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, Hampshire College"Review Quotes: 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. This collection of 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. This collection also opens doors to understand the nuanced, intangible filaments that, 150 years after the end of legalized slavery, maintain white supremacy and the still-very-much-racial state. This book should be required reading, not only for graduate students and scholars who work in Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, and Philosophy of Race, but in philosophy courses as well.--Falguni A. Sheth, Hampshire College"Review Quotes: 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 Centers for Women"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"Review Quotes: 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"Biographical Note: George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Duquesne University He has authored, edited, and coedited seventeen books. Publisher Marketing: George Yancy gathers white scholarship that dwells on the experience of whiteness as a problem without sidestepping the question's implications for Black people or people of color. This unprecedented reversion of the Black problem narrative challenges contemporary rhetoric of a color-evasive world in a critically engaging and persuasive study.

Contributor Bio:  Yancy, George Yancy is a book reviewer for the Philadephia Tribune Magazine and a clinical family therapist at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Contributor Bio:  Bailey, Alison Alison Bailey is an associate professor in the Psychological Studies in Education Program of the Department of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, in addition to being a faculty associate researcher for the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST). A graduate of Harvard University, Bailey s research focuses primarily on language and literacy development, English language development in second language learners, and language assessment. At CRESST, her work focuses on researching the empirical basis of academic language for assessment, curriculum, and teacher professional development. Bailey serves on the advisory boards of numerous states and commercial publishers developing language and literacy assessments for English Language Learners. She is coauthor of the new IPT assessment of English language development at the prekindergarten-kindergarten level, editor and contributing author to The Language Demands of School: Putting academic English to the test (Yale Press, 2007), and coeditor and author (with Allyssa McCabe and Gigliana Melzi) of Spanish-Language Narration and Literacy Development (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2008). Contributor Bio:  Garner, Steve Steve Garner is a senior lecturer in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University and director of the International Drawing Research Network. Contributor Bio:  James, Robin Robin James lives in Snohomish, Washington. Contributor Bio:  Martinot, Steve is a retired professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, His latest book is "The Machinery of Whiteness," from Temple University Press. His two preceding books, also from Temple, are "The Rule of Racialization" and "Forms in the Abyss: a philosophical bridge between Sartre and Derrida (all Temple University Press). He lives in Berkeley, CA, and leads seminars on the structures of racialization in the US. Contributor Bio:  Teel, Karen Karen Teel is a retired elementary school teacher, making her publishing debut with Robot Rhymes. Compiling lyrics from hip hop rhymes performed by her late son, Sam Harshbarger, she has created a tribute to his musical legacy. Karen lives with her husband in West Virginia. Samuel Bridges Harshbarger (1980-2009), a lifelong West Virginian, studied at the University of Pittsburgh and the West Virginia University School of Journalism. While at WVU, he hosted a radio show for U92FM and became a regionally renowned hip hop artist, performing under the stage name of Meuwl. Robot Rhymes includes lyrics from songs he performed and sketches of his funkbot creatures and is a book he and his mother often spoke of creating.