Building on her publication 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 concerned about setting up anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the advanced relationships among type and race in modern white identification and descriptions 4 methods this orientation is expressed, each one helping identify one’s loss of racism: the denigration of lower-class white humans as answerable 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 concepts, Sullivan argues, white humans want 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 tremendous contribution to severe race and feminist conception … Sullivan without delay demanding situations the emotions of paralysis that many white humans think after we take into consideration our complicity in racism, exhibiting us methods ahead that decision for our organization. it really is really worth reading.” — Hypatia

“With its hugely subtle procedure and edgy directly speak, this provocative little ebook is needed analyzing for someone who aspires to destabilize racist platforms of undeserved strength 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 really 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 tips on how to truthfully reside their whiteness, instead of disown it or fake it doesn’t exist, Sullivan expertly deconstructs the normal defenses … Like W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin earlier than her, Sullivan sees white domination as a religious challenge that afflicts one team particularly yet that touches us all.” — Ms. Magazine

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