“Check your privilege” is not a request for a simple favor. It
asks white people to consider the painful dimensions of what they have
been socialized to ignore. Alison Bailey’s The Weight of Whiteness:
A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance examines how
whiteness misshapes our humanity, measuring the weight of whiteness in
terms of its costs and losses to collective humanity. People of color
feel the weight of whiteness daily. The resistant habits of whiteness
and its attendant privileges, however, make it difficult for white
people to feel the damage. White people are more comfortable thinking
about white supremacy in terms of what privilege does for them, rather
than feeling what it does to them. The first half of the book focuses
on the overexposed side of white privilege, the side that works to
make the invisible and intangible structures of power more visible and
tangible. Bailey discusses the importance of understanding privileges
intersectionally, the ignorance-preserving habits of “white talk,”
and how privilege and ignorance circulate in educational settings. The
second part invites white readers to explore the underexposed side of
white dominance, the weightless side that they would rather not feel.
The final chapters are powerfully autobiographical. Bailey engages
readers with a deeply personal account of what it means to hold space
with the painful weight of whiteness in her own life. She also offers
a moving account of medicinal genealogies, which helps to engage the
weight she inherits from her settler colonial ancestors. The book
illustrates how the gravitational pull of white ignorance and comfort
are stronger than the clean pain required for collective liberation.
The stakes are high: Failure to hold the weight of whiteness ensures
that white people will continue to blow the weight of historical
trauma through communities of color.
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A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781793604507
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
Lexington Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter