continuing color-blindness – a book review
b. medusa 16 January 2007 4:11:45 pm
‘White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism’
edited by Ashley W. Doane & Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, published 2003
“Whiteness studies adds that the “personal interrogation of position” will make whiteness visible and thereby undermine the perpetuation of an unjust racial order. There is an assumption here that if white people would only become conscious of their whiteness, more just behavior would follow. One might ask if becoming conscious of whiteness could not just as easily produce white-supremacist movements or lead white people to feel relieved that they have privilege and others do not…”
right off the bat an unquestioned assumption is challenged. i knew @ this point that this book was not going to be like most of the books i’ve read on whiteness. pleasantly, i was not disappointed. not only is ‘White Out’ a book on whiteness that doesn’t center on whites, it exposes the racism of color-blindness, something both whites & poc espouse, although whites are most likely to engage in color-evasive language. “What appears to haunt these color-evasive accounts, then, is the understanding that recognizing race might be construed as racist. But why is it that recognizing one’s culpability in racist practices,…is so difficult to acknowledge?”
if that wasn’t enough, it goes the extra step of examining the white privilege inherent in the designation biracial & multiracial. finally, ‘White Out’ speaks on the eventual “darkening” of whiteness, the negative impact this darkening (combined with ongoing separatism) will have on struggles for equality, & strategies for avoiding continued marginalization. the language is neither overly simple, nor needlessly arcane; it is neither accusatory nor apologist, & @ less than 300 pages it is not overly time consuming. clearly a book that can & should be widely read, so @ the risk of sounding like a cliche, ‘White Out’ is definitely a must-read.
