Look, A White!

Philosophical Essays on Whiteness

George Yancy

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781439908549, 9781439908532
• eBook ISBN: 9781439908556
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder's charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy's essays map out a structure of whiteness.

He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its "danger," and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a "gift" to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively.

Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.

 

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword: Racist Onions and Etchings- Naomi Zack
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Flipping the Script
• 1. Looking at Whiteness: Finding Myself Much like a Mugger at a Boardwalk’s End
• 2. Looking at Whiteness: Subverting White Academic Spaces through the Pedagogical Perspective of bell hooks
• 3. Looking at Whiteness: The Colonial Semiotics in Kamau Brathwaite’s Reading of The Tempest
• 4. Looking at Whiteness: Whiting Up and Blacking Out in White Chicks
• 5. Looking at Whiteness: Loving Wisdom and Playing with Danger
• 6. Looking at Whiteness: Tarrying with the Embedded and Opaque White Racist Self
• Notes
• Index