Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (SUNY Press)

Shannon Sullivan is chair of the Department of Philosophy and professor of philosophy and health psychology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Good White People identifies a constellation of attitudes common among well-meaning white liberals that Sullivan sums up as “white middle-class goodness,” an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege.

Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity and outlines four ways this orientation is expressed, each serving to establish one’s lack of racism: the denigration of lower-class white people as responsible for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness especially in the context of childrearing, and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, shame and betrayal. To move beyond these counterproductive strategies, white people need a new ethos that acknowledges and transforms their whiteness rather than seeking a self-righteous distance from it.

Good White People won an award for Outstanding Academic Titles reviewed during the previous calendar year from CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. It also was named a Ms. Magazine “Must-Read Book of 2014.”

Sullivan earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She teaches and writes in the intersections of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism and continental philosophy. Her latest book, The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (Oxford UP, 2015), deals with the physiology of racist and sexist oppression.

She is author of Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism (2001), Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006), and Good White People: The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism (2014). For more information, please see her academia.edu webpage.