Backlash
What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America

Professor George Yancy wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes entitled, Dear White People. It was essentially an open letter to white people, a ‘gift’ he called it, for white folk to take an honest and no doubt painful look at how their whiteness continues to feed the monster of white supremacy. And so this......more

The backlash in Backlash is the vile, hateful and vulgar response by white bigots and supremacists to George Yancy’s Dear White America, an editorial in the New York Times in 2015. In the article, Yancy offered what he repeatedly calls his “gift” to white readers, to recognize their own racism. In B......more

Backlash spoke to me. I’m a white ally, a “good liberal”, and not one of those white supremacist racists. However, I am racist because I carry white privilege with me and am complicit in the whole white institution. This book made me really think about our system, and be completely disgusted at the......more

3.5 stars, rounded up Poignant, though overwritten (such is the nature of philosophers though) and ends up patting “good” white people on the back, which I have a strong aversion to.......more

I had the thought today that I've not understood the weight of the gift Christ has given us in the same way I see it now reading through Yancy's book... "an act of gift-giving, one informed by a profound act of vulnerability on my part" he says. To actually sit with the awareness of just how much the......more