WHITE LIES:Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Book

(Image: http://www.amazon.com/)

An amusingly anecdotal treatment of White supremacy from a White supremacist struggling - Racists Anonymous-like - with the twin poles of a contradiction: Loyalty to Justice or loyalty to irrationality. That such a group as RA does not exist proves the thesis of this work: That White culture is endemically supremacist and that all Whites are born with unearned privileges that few - if any - ever renounce. The price of this for Whites is shame and guilt coupled with murderous anger when the affirmative action that is racism is revealed as being such.

An easy-to-read journey through one White man’s experience of his own geneticist angst and his realization that Whites have no culture other than one defined by what it is not. Although the book itself is part of the wider struggle to free Blacks from the shackles of a hateful White culture it offers few solutions that would help Whites to stop thinking of themselves as Whites and transcend their own narcissistic obsession with the view that skin pigmentation determines character.

The book implicitly and consistently makes the point that phenotypism is solely a problem for Whites - as pedophilia is only a problem for the pedophile; rape only a problem for the rapist - and that blaming the victim is how Whites deal with their problems when their guilt, anger and shame become too much to bear.

Where the book goes wrong is in assuming that Whites are unaware or unconscious of the material benefits of White racism - they know very well; hence, their continual angry attempts at denial to hide the shame and the guilt of their unearned benefits. That Whites do not have to live their lives without worrying about the color of their skin does not mean that they are not keenly aware of its value in a White supremacist culture like that of the West.

Despite continually claiming - throughout - that this is a book about white denial the denial is present here also. That there is no such thing as unconscious White racism is obvious from the numerous examples cited here and yet the author still uses the term “unconscious White racism” to justify his own. A clever yet simultaneously sad commentary on the state of White academia in the United States.

Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.