White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better (Unabridged)
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4.6 • 27 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An instant New York Times Bestseller!
A no-holds-barred guidebook aimed at white women who want to stop being nice and start dismantling white supremacy from the team behind Race2Dinner and the documentary film, Deconstructing Karen
It's no secret that white women are conditioned to be "nice," but did you know that the desire to be perfect and to avoid conflict at all costs are characteristics of white supremacy culture?
As the founders of Race2Dinner, an organization which facilitates conversations between white women about racism and white supremacy, Regina Jackson and Saira Rao have noticed white women's tendency to maintain a veneer of niceness, and strive for perfection, even at the expense of anti-racism work.
In this book, Jackson and Rao pose these urgent questions: how has being "nice" helped Black women, Indigenous women and other women of color? How has being "nice" helped you in your quest to end sexism? Has being "nice" earned you economic parity with white men? Beginning with freeing white women from this oppressive need to be nice, they deconstruct and analyze nine aspects of traditional white woman behavior--from tone-policing to weaponizing tears--that uphold white supremacy society, and hurt all of us who are trying to live a freer, more equitable life.
White Women is a call to action to those of you who are looking to take the next steps in dismantling white supremacy. Your white supremacy. If you are in fact doing real anti-racism work, you will find few reasons to be nice, as other white people want to limit your membership in the club. If you are not ticking white people off on a regular basis, you are not doing it right.
Customer Reviews
Required training
This book is required reading material for all white women. A sobering wake up call for us white women and highlights our direct racist behavior we inflict on people of color every single day without our knowledge.
Incredibly honest and needed
This book is direct in calling attention to and confronting white supremacy, white feminism, and the compounding factor of racism, sexism and class.
Regina Jackson and Saira Rao deliver an unapologetic take on how white women benefit from and sustain white supremacy. Everything from weaponized tears to tone policing.
This book will not be nice. In fact, it will explicitly call into question white allyship in a way that may be uncomfortable. But that is the point. BIPOC do not have the luxury of tone policing while fighting against white supremacy, nor have the energy to sugarcoat our experiences. We also know that when these points are kindly and gently expressed, the result is the same: dismissal if not hostility.
I highly recommend this to anyone who is willing to take honest critical feedback about their own racism, and how we need structural change in our society if we are to put an end to racism, sexism and class antagonisms.
Highly recommended
This book is written in a highly engaging style, with chapters dedicated to topics such as microaggressions and racism in the workplace. There are tools and insights to apply in order to start to dismantle racism and white supremacy, plus plenty of anecdotes to make the concepts more personal and relatable. Because this is lifelong work for those of us who are white women, this book would be great to revisit on occasion, both as a measure of personal accountability and also as a way to reflect upon where one is in one’s journey. The recording is well-produced, and both authors have wonderful voices for audio delivery. Highly recommended!
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