Encountering Whiteness

 
 

Pre-Work

Please write your racial biography, reflecting on how you came to understand yourself as having or being a race.

Read, “Representing whiteness in the black imagination,” by bell hooks.

 
 

Additional Resources

Books

  • Carol Anderson, White Rage, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016

  • Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, Beacon Press, 2018

  • Ruth Frankenberg, editor, Displacing Whiteness, Duke University Press, 1997

  • George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Temple University Press, 2006

  • Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness in America, Basic Books, 2019

 
 
Whiteness becomes a social inheritance; in receiving whiteness as a gift, white bodies—or those bodies that can be recognized as white—come to “posess” whiteness as if it were a shared attribute.
— Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
 
 

Videos

Essays and workbooks

  • White Supremacy Culture (From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001)

  • Christina Sharpe, “Lose your kin,” The New Inquiry, November 16, 2016