Shannon Sullivan's Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White PDF

Building on her ebook Revealing Whiteness, Shannon Sullivan identifies a constellation of attitudes universal between well-meaning white liberals that she sums up as “white middle-class goodness,” an orientation she reviews for being extra occupied with developing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the advanced relationships among category and race in modern white identification and descriptions 4 methods this orientation is expressed, every one helping identify one’s loss of racism: the denigration of lower-class white humans as accountable for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness—especially within the context of white childrearing—and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, disgrace, and betrayal. to maneuver past those distancing suggestions, Sullivan argues, white humans desire a new ethos that recognizes and transforms their whiteness within the pursuit of racial justice instead of looking a self-righteous distance from it.

“Good White People is certainly a huge contribution to severe race and feminist concept … Sullivan at once demanding situations the sentiments of paralysis that many white humans consider after we take into consideration our complicity in racism, displaying us methods ahead that decision for our organization. it truly is worth reading.” — Hypatia

“With its hugely refined approach and edgy immediately speak, this provocative little e-book is needed interpreting for someone who aspires to destabilize racist platforms of undeserved energy and privilege … Essential.” — CHOICE

“…[Sullivan’s] paintings is so far-reaching and thought-provoking that it truly is not easy to visualize any reader completing Good White People with no need reexamined stale feelings and are available to new realizations.” — Bookslut

“…Sullivan posits that it really is white liberals’ personal ‘anti-racism’ that truly perpetuates racism by way of shutting down frank or nuanced discussions not just of race, yet of white privilege, which created racial difficulties and nonetheless sustains them … In advising white liberals how you can in truth reside their whiteness, instead of disown it or fake it doesn’t exist, Sullivan expertly deconstructs the conventional defenses … Like W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin prior to her, Sullivan sees white domination as a non secular challenge that afflicts one workforce particularly yet that touches us all.” — Ms. Magazine

Shannon Sullivan is Head of the Philosophy division and Professor of Philosophy, Women’s reports, and African American stories at Penn nation college. She is the writer and editor of many books, together with Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (coedited with Nancy Tuana), additionally released by way of SUNY Press.