Impacts of Racism on White Americans

This is a wonderful book. There is one article in the compilation that I found especially helpful in explaining the backlash we see to the Obama presidency. The article discusses the negative impacts of racism on whites and mentions irrationality as one of them. Because whites know how poorly they have treated people of color, they expect that now that a man of color is President, he will deal back to whites as they have dealt to people of color. The guilt is so overwhelming that it overcomes rational thought and even tears down objective facts in favor of paranoid fantasy. I hope that white America will seek and get the treatment it needs for its guilt and paranoia around race. I want white people (and all people) to overcome racist fantasy, to seek fairness for all, to embrace peace and justice.

This is a profoundly scholarly work that is devoid of racial polemics and more clever defenses of our racism way of life. In a completely dispassionate and academic way, and through 12 separate essays, this manuscript first deconstructs the normal understanding of racism and then rebuilds it into one that is not only intellectually more honest but also one that is much more coherent; one that is about as close to an undistorted view of racist reality as we in America are ever likely to get. The most important contribution of this volume however, even though it goes only part way down this path, is that it turns the spotlight in the other direction: onto whites themselves and on the role they have played in devising an insidious but almost organic system of racism. The book exposes and then examines in detail the mechanics of American racism comparing and contrasting it with racism in other countries, and the historical motives for its invention and for its continued maintenance. It goes deep into white rationalizations, fears and insecurities upon which the process of racism is built, and in the end it goes into the damage racism has done to all its victims, including most importantly (and perhaps for the first time acknowledging this), whites themselves. An unwritten subtext of the volume is that whites, who invented racism to elevate themselves at the expense of, and to exploit and harm others, paradoxically may in the end have become its greatest victims. For, after all it is their very being and self-concept that rests on the fraudulent and fragile foundation of an ideology of racial superiority. It is this ideology that has, de facto, become the only white worldview, the white Holy Grail, and the cosmic reason d'etre of whiteness. The book does not explain what is to happen to whites when this fraudulent existential prop is exposed and the collective denial upon which it depends (one that has so carefully shielded collective white consciousness from its true meaning and consequences), either collapses or simply withers away? An awesome display of academic prowess and even-handedness. Five stars.