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Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
City Lights Publishers
September 2005
124 pages
ISBN: 0872864499
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Non-Fiction
In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the
question whites wanted to ask him was: "How does it feel to
be a problem?" In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen
writes that it is time for white people in America to
self-consciously reverse the direction of that question and
to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the
problem. While some whites would like to think that we have reached
"the end of racism" in the United States, and others would
like to celebrate diversity but are oblivious to the
political, economic, and social consequences of a nation-and
their sense of self-founded on a system of white supremacy,
Jensen proposes a different approach. He sets his sights not
only on the racism that can't be hidden, but also on the
liberal platitudes that sometimes conceal the depths of that
racism in "polite society." The Heart of Whiteness offers an honest and rigorous
exploration of what Jensen refers to as the depraved nature
of whiteness in the United States. Mixing personal
experience with data and theory, he faces down the difficult
realities of -racism and white privilege. He argues that any
system that denies non-whites their full humanity also keeps
whites from fully accessing their own. This book is both a cautionary tale for those who believe
that they have transcended racism, and also an expression of
the hope for genuine transcendence. When white people fully
understand and accept the painful reality that they are
indeed "the problem," it should lead toward serious attempts
to change one's own life and join with others to change society.
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