A review by nick_jenkins
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row
5.0
Emotionally and intellectually draining, but also exhilarating, germinal. Most of the book is not easily paraphrased or condensed, but here is a passage that I think sums at least one of the bigger points Row makes:
"White people–even those committed, in theory, to the struggle against white supremacy–do not know how to share power. White people do not know how to let white supremacy die without feeling they themselves are dying." (272)
One of the phrases that echoed through my head while reading this is Ta-Nehisi Coates's "the people who think they are white." Like Coates, like Baldwin, Row thinks of whiteness as a kind of self-imposed spiritual malady--not as something to have pity for, but as something that we can recognize as a severe limitation or stunting. The point is definitely not to feel sorry for "the people who think they are white," and there is no individual way to give up one's whiteness, one's white privilege--that is not a way out. The point is rather, I think, to reflect on the comprehensiveness of the global ruination that the idea of whiteness has caused, a desolation so complete that it cannot escape itself.
"White people–even those committed, in theory, to the struggle against white supremacy–do not know how to share power. White people do not know how to let white supremacy die without feeling they themselves are dying." (272)
One of the phrases that echoed through my head while reading this is Ta-Nehisi Coates's "the people who think they are white." Like Coates, like Baldwin, Row thinks of whiteness as a kind of self-imposed spiritual malady--not as something to have pity for, but as something that we can recognize as a severe limitation or stunting. The point is definitely not to feel sorry for "the people who think they are white," and there is no individual way to give up one's whiteness, one's white privilege--that is not a way out. The point is rather, I think, to reflect on the comprehensiveness of the global ruination that the idea of whiteness has caused, a desolation so complete that it cannot escape itself.