White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

This book is “aimed at white women who want to stop being nice and start dismantling white supremacy.”

(Amazon)

My review

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Quotes from the book

Antiracism work depends on your acknowledging your imperfections, namely how you have been born into and nurtured by a white supremacist society. This means acknowledging that you are not the expert on how it feels to be on the receiving end of racism, which means you do not get to decide what is and is not racist. Just like men don’t get to decide what is and is not sexist. It means acknowledging that you will get it wrong, that you will feel embarrassed, and that you will struggle to make progress. In spite of these obstacles and this necessary discomfort, you will have to pick yourself up and get back into the work—work that is messy, not tidy. Work that is tables turned upside down, not neatly set.

Pay close attention to this: dismantling your racism isn’t about learning something new. It is about unlearning that which you know deeply. No matter how many times you meditate or how many cleanses you do, you cannot escape the fact that you have been programmed to be racist. The goal is to unlearn it and unknow it.

So what does Lisa mean by “trauma of white supremacy culture”? Recall your need to be perfect—an objectively impossible task, trying for something over and over that is unattainable. You feel like a perpetual failure. That is trauma. You are never thin enough, smart enough, successful enough, sexy enough, a good enough wife, mother, daughter, person. That is trauma. Your need to be nice, which leads to silence. You are silent when you are abused by men and each other. Trauma. You are silent when you abuse us. Trauma. You take abuse at work at the hands of each other and men. Trauma. You abuse us at work. Trauma. You were raised to be violent and you are raising racist kids to be every bit as violent as you. Generations of trauma—to us, yes . . . but also to you.

Conclusion

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus a pretium leo. Praesent eu sem nulla. In nunc arcu, rutrum eu malesuada sed, lacinia nec ipsum. Maecenas quis tincidunt sem. Quisque vitae nisl vel purus laoreet efficitur quis ut arcu. Nulla sit amet risus hendrerit, tristique augue eu, dapibus risus. Curabitur ullamcorper ligula lacus, sit amet pharetra neque interdum in.

My rating for this book:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

✅  A must-read

✅  A fast read

✅  Great to read with a friend or small group