Building on her e-book 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 focused on setting up 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 determine one’s loss of racism: the denigration of lower-class white humans as liable 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 techniques, 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 surely an important contribution to serious race and feminist thought … Sullivan at once demanding situations the sentiments of paralysis that many white humans think after we take into consideration our complicity in racism, displaying us methods ahead that decision for our organisation. it truly is worth reading.” — Hypatia

“With its hugely subtle technique and edgy instantly speak, this provocative little booklet is needed interpreting for somebody who aspires to destabilize racist structures of undeserved strength and privilege … Essential.” — CHOICE

“…[Sullivan’s] paintings is so far-reaching and thought-provoking that it's 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's white liberals’ personal ‘anti-racism’ that truly perpetuates racism by means 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 the best way to truthfully dwell their whiteness, instead of disown it or faux it doesn’t exist, Sullivan expertly deconstructs the regularly occurring defenses … Like W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin earlier than her, Sullivan sees white domination as a non secular challenge that afflicts one workforce specifically yet that touches us all.” — Ms. Magazine

Shannon Sullivan is Head of the Philosophy division and Professor of Philosophy, Women’s experiences, and African American reviews 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.