| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Whites being honest about the essential emptiness of their culture is always an unusual thing, but this book hedges its bets by claiming that Whites are often unwitting collaborators in a system of self-oppression that ultimately benefits no-one. Not only is this a good example of White Guilt but of the desire of Whites to avoid both the label Racist and the label Race Traitor. Typical White Liberalism, in other words.
The worst aspect of this book is how me-centered it is: A White focusing on the economic problems of her own ethnic group as if they were the most important people on Earth. This, of course, is the inevitable result of the White tendency to squabble among themselves about how to steal from others and to make their theft look like it is a right rather than a crime. Whites have the hardest time facing the fact the very things from which they have economically-benefited -White supremacy, classism & sexism - have also led, ultimately, to their demise. This is the source of the confusion and paradox at the heart of this half-hearted and half-baked book. The first person style stresses the anecdotal rather than accurate nature of this work.
Inevitably, a book written by someone whose whole life has benefited from White privilege is going to be mired in it and this writer is unable to fully understand the political position she pretends to grasp. She never talks about the Affirmative action, for example, that is the basis of White supremacy in the United States (US) for Whites. She only talks of such a social policy as it effects non-Whites. She gets White resentment accurately and their inbred fear of darker-skinned people getting revenge on them through the ballot-box for centuries of racism; hence, the decline of Republicanism through its divide-and-conquer tactics that can only work when Whites are a majority and/or benefit from legalized apartheid. She does not even explain why Whites believe in auld lang syne, as promised by the subtitle of the book. Ultimately, of course, this means she offers no solutions to the half-understood problems she posits for the US.
What’s the matter with White people is that they write self-deluded books like this in the hope of appearing more human than they normally appear to appease non-Whites and hope they will not be victim to non-White anger and desire for revenge as Whites (Birth of a Nation-style) so hotly imagine. All part of the White belief that they are the most important people in the world and that they assume everyone is watching them as a source of moral inspiration and political leadership. Although James Baldwin is cited herein, this lacks profound political insight because it lacks profound psychological insight because the author tries to hide behind her lower-class roots rather than being openly proud of them. She also, as White Liberals always do, fails to appreciate that non-Whites cannot change their political allegiances because they cannot change their skin color, while she can; explaining why non-Whites are unlikely to trust her.
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