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Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege
"[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." --Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race
Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and self-searching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan's theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern.
Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and self-searching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan's theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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About the author
Shannon Sullivan
25 books22 followersShannon Sullivan is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte
She teaches and writes in the intersections of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy. 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). She is co-editor of several books including Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007). Her book on The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in July 2015
She teaches and writes in the intersections of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy. 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). She is co-editor of several books including Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007). Her book on The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in July 2015
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 5, 2014
As the author of a book on race and racism, I am very happy to say that Sullivan's work here is the first book on "white privilege" that takes the critical exploration of this phenomenon to new depths. Most treatments of white privilege remain at the level of the advantages white people have by virtue of their membership in the dominant cultural and racial group. Sullivan moves in an entirely different direction, eschewing this surface approach and focusing on white privilege as both sociocultural and individual habit whose roots are buried deep in personal and group consciousness. One particular strength of her analysis is the engagement with the subterranean geography of consciousness, i.e., the subconscious and unconscious moorings of white privilege. Readers of this book will find the discussion of the ontology of racial privilege to be rich and deeply suggestive for assessment of the relationships and cultural spaces white people inhabit.
September 10, 2020
The ontology of white privilege explained
A difficult book to read. I relate to the book as a non-white person because it reflects my reality. But I suspect a white person would consider this as an attack on their moral sense of self. If you’re white, read with caution.
A difficult book to read. I relate to the book as a non-white person because it reflects my reality. But I suspect a white person would consider this as an attack on their moral sense of self. If you’re white, read with caution.
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January 11, 2009A little heavy on the philosophy side but every dominant culture person (waspy) should read this... great.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews