| RATING: | 40% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
This is the usual White liberal woolly-headed nonsense that attempts to evade the very issue it raises. Talking about White supremacism as an unconscious habit exculpates those who indulge in it as not guilty of an inherent evil. Yet everyone possesses habits - good or bad - and is perfectly well aware of them.
This book does not explain what an unconscious habit is and simply posits its existence without evidence. This non-argument leads to the very White solipsism that White supremacism is; namely, the prioritized attempt to gain unearned privileges without having to openly acknowledge that this is taking place. Proof of this comes from the guilt and shame White supremacists express when outed - as do pedophiles when they are found out. Such expressions would never take place if the habits were unconscious, since there would then be nothing to be guilty and ashamed about.
By being academically-dry the book sounds like a profound investigation into the White psyche. Yet, it goes up its own White fundament because the author cannot escape her own childhood indoctrination into White privilege; admitting the latter, but not the former. She correctly criticizes color-blind, multi-cultural and diversity politics for being racist because they all assume Whites lack an ethnicity and are therefore the neutral benchmark for others, yet remains mired in her own Whiteness. After all, a White physically-uncomfortable in the presence of a Black person is completely aware of this and only claims otherwise to escape detection - as any successful criminal would.
This book falls into the same solipsistic trap that all racists fall into in never explaining the origins of White supremacism from which to deduce its resolution. Since, historically Whites have not always been institutionally racist; it is - in theory - a small matter to dismantle White supremacism. The issue here is really that Whites do not wish to dismantle such supremacism and, do not wish to admit that they do not wish to, and do not wish to admit - like all welfare dependents and junkies - that they are actually addicted to racism, since they materially benefit from it. Whites will cling to anything that defines them - as racism does - since it pretends Whites are superior and, in the absence of any genuine source of self-respect, White culture will remain supremacist. Even a mentally-ill person is aware that they are mentally-ill; their problem is that they choose not to know why. Claiming the existence of an unconscious aspect to human lives simply allows bad people to claim they did not know what they were doing and, therefore, allows them to effectively to get away with it.
The confusion in this book lies in the distinction between overt and covert racism - not conscious and unconscious. Whites have simply shifted the basis for White supremacy from de jure oppression to de facto oppression, with Whites creating a metaphorical freemasonry of signs and symbols for communicating their racism to others without it being so obvious that it becomes legally actionable. A White is not much threatened by White supremacism in the material world. It is only in the realm of conscience that Whites experience anything deeply about racism - not to benefit non-Whites, but to assuage guilt (much as this book tries to do). The White claim that racism can be unconscious is a claim that only a White can sustain because their lives are not in danger; making the issue, for them, little more than an abstraction.
The solution to White supremacism is for Whites to admit their culture racist. But that would leave them open to attack and devastate the benefits to them of racism; and who cuts the throat of the goose laying them golden eggs? Who bites the hand feeding them? As always with Whites, racism can so easily become an intellectual game - divorced from reality - when for Blacks it is always a matter of life and death.
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