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Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America?
From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society.
Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.
From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society.
Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
30 people are currently reading
620 people want to read
About the author
David R. Roediger
43 books115 followersDavid Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri, University of Minnesota, and University of Illinois. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world's oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 9, 2007
David Roediger has a mullet but I still like him a lot. All of his books are really straightforward about what point he's trying to get across, and there's no pussyfooting. He believes that whiteness is a social construction created in opposition to blackness/Otherness, and its sole purpose is to terrorize and oppress. He's white, but he also makes it clear he has no investment in this thing called "whiteness", and that's what keeps him from getting defensive when we talk about things like race privilege.
He's a good guy.
Anyway, he didn't write this book, but he did compile and edit it. It's a collection of essays, artwork, poems, prose, and deep thoughts by black intellectuals, activists, and icons on what "whiteness" entails and how it came to exist historically. My only complaint is that it's kind of meandering and there's no real order to things, but it also introduced me to people like Nell Painter, who I now love. Pick it up if you don't have time to read the cultural criticism canon; it's kind of like a Cliff's Notes in that respect.
He's a good guy.
Anyway, he didn't write this book, but he did compile and edit it. It's a collection of essays, artwork, poems, prose, and deep thoughts by black intellectuals, activists, and icons on what "whiteness" entails and how it came to exist historically. My only complaint is that it's kind of meandering and there's no real order to things, but it also introduced me to people like Nell Painter, who I now love. Pick it up if you don't have time to read the cultural criticism canon; it's kind of like a Cliff's Notes in that respect.
June 28, 2012
this was an excellent book for me to read. It introduced me to a lot of authors I'd been meaning to read (W. E. Dubois, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison etc), plus excellent essays by people I knew only from fiction.
The scope and breadth is pretty great. Sections on whiteness as property, gendered aspects to whiteness, white terror etc. And a mix of heavy theory, poetry, fiction, memoir and more approachable essays. Lots and lots of slave era readings and many brutal lynching stories but also a few more contemporary pieces including cultural appropriation (madonna) and literary criticism. There is A LOT in this book and I will probably have to return to some of it.
Oh yeah, it's only focused on the US. It did make me want to read a similar book in an Australian context. Might have to make my own reading list though...
The scope and breadth is pretty great. Sections on whiteness as property, gendered aspects to whiteness, white terror etc. And a mix of heavy theory, poetry, fiction, memoir and more approachable essays. Lots and lots of slave era readings and many brutal lynching stories but also a few more contemporary pieces including cultural appropriation (madonna) and literary criticism. There is A LOT in this book and I will probably have to return to some of it.
Oh yeah, it's only focused on the US. It did make me want to read a similar book in an Australian context. Might have to make my own reading list though...
August 18, 2012
some good excerpts from authors, now i want to read their full texts! important in rethinking 'critical whiteness studies' as many people think it has only started in the 1970s but has obviously existed for centuries, just not written by white people in universities...
July 17, 2009
While I have some issues with David Roediger (Since he kinda identified himself as some sort of recovering "white" person), this is a very fascinating anthology of some of the most prominent African-American writers/theorists on White Supremacy. Really, the best of the best: Cheryl Harris, Dubois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, etc. There's even an interesting piece on Madonna in there...
One main criticism I have of this book, is that if you read the introduction you'll see that Roediger describes the process by he selected the authors. It's quite problematic since it is a white person choosing which African-American writes he deemed "noteworthy" on the topic of white people.
One main criticism I have of this book, is that if you read the introduction you'll see that Roediger describes the process by he selected the authors. It's quite problematic since it is a white person choosing which African-American writes he deemed "noteworthy" on the topic of white people.
November 6, 2019
"Oh, would some Power give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us!" goes the old poetic plea (perhaps tinged with more than a bit of irony) by Robert Burns. White people, even "anti-racist allies," might find themselves discomfited to find out what black people see when they view them, and just how much is at stake when one goes from subject to object even in something as ephemeral as words. A personal example from my own life regarding the epiphany that I knew nothing about how black people saw us: a black soldier I knew in the Army said he didn't like white women, "because you can see their veins through their skin and that's nasty." Other African-American griotic chestnuts ranging from black folk wisdom to hilarious pseudo-science include the observation that white people smell like wet dogs (I probably especially do, since I have a dog that likes to walk in the rain) and the idea that the white race was created by a malicious scientist named Yakub, who created us genetic recessive, pale, stringy-haired devils to plague our melanin-rich superior and original African originators.
"Black on White" skips the Farrakhan- and Five Percenter theatrics, which is a shame, since I find some of that stuff fascinating, but it more than makes up for this omission (where is Khalid Muhammad?!) by providing a trove of insightful essays, a lot of those aforementioned nuggets of folk wisdom, pieces of short fiction, poems, and even images, (some collages that remind me of the provocative montages arranged by Hannah Hoch) all in order to give the reader a sense of how American whites fare under the gaze of the black (or chestnut or almond or hazel) eye. The observations in this collection range from the humorous to the enraged, on to the exasperated and the truly perplexed. You probably don't need me to tell you that, when casting about for a list of the best entries, W.E.B DuBois and James Baldwin tower over almost everyone else in terms of style and insight (even if one doesn't agree with their conclusions) although a gimlet-eyed, bemused portrait of a Greenwich Village white couple's negrophilia by Langston Hughes would give anything else in this collection (or any other observations about race) a run for its money.
I came away from this collection with two primary insights. The first is that, as in almost all spheres, the human race- its aesthetic, grammatical, and moral standards especially- has been in free fall lo these last couple centuries. It is not only humbling but shameful to read an essay by someone born an illiterate slave whose command of the English language puts a modern-day Nobel Laureate's skillset deep into the shade. We are now, to put in bluntly, with all of our technological advancement and prosperity, dumber and lazier collectively than the worst stereotype of a shiftless slave dredged from some racist fanatic's mind.
Even worse, once insight and philosophy and classical education give way in the book to later entries- theories and postwar Continental fads like Deconstructionism- it becomes painfully obvious that the slave master's lash ready for the back of any African slave who dared learn to read or write didn't bring to welter the same depth of scar than the cat-o-nine wielded by an amoral sack of nihilistic dissipation like a Michel Foucault did. To go from reading a speech by Frederick Douglas about the chasm between America's lofty ideals and its reality to BELL HOOKS' railing against a Madonna music video, or just to wade into the obfuscatory dense thickets of academese, really hammers the point home again and again. Clarity and sanity have been sacrificed as the institutional march turned into a dance on the rubble of Western Civilization (which, I know, doesn't exist, except as a racist concept perpetuated by the patriarchy).
It's odd to come away from a book about the ugliness of Eurocentric thought observing that it proves the point of someone like Oswald Spengler about civilizational deterioration, but...here we are.
Aesthetic observations aside, the profoundest takeaway from the book seems to be that white people find only one thing intolerable, vis-a-vis black America, and that is that, despite all of the horror and injustice and terror visited on the black race, a lot of black people pity us and find us ultimately a bit humorous. It is hard to reckon with the idea that a people we've been trained to treat with noblesse oblige find much of our collective efforts not only patronizing, but a misguided and misdirected effort to "remove the mote" from another's eye as the disciple Matthew had it, rather than taking the beam from our own. Though despite the presence of the beam, thankfully our lachrymal ducts still function well enough for us to shed crocodile tears during campus struggle sessions with Tim Wise or while prostrating ourselves before the litter bearing Ta Nehesi Coates from book tour to grant on to probably pretty soon having his own holiday as High Pontiff of Wakanda on the Potomac (formerly Washington D.C). Highest recommendation, though be prepared to be made crazy all again by the senseless nightmare we've all been living in, and from which we may never awaken. The current arrangement is, ultimately, too profitable for the white ruling class and the black pseudo-intellectual/radical class to do anything but keep blaming poor and working class whites, who, incidentally, get more than a fair hearing in this great book.
"Black on White" skips the Farrakhan- and Five Percenter theatrics, which is a shame, since I find some of that stuff fascinating, but it more than makes up for this omission (where is Khalid Muhammad?!) by providing a trove of insightful essays, a lot of those aforementioned nuggets of folk wisdom, pieces of short fiction, poems, and even images, (some collages that remind me of the provocative montages arranged by Hannah Hoch) all in order to give the reader a sense of how American whites fare under the gaze of the black (or chestnut or almond or hazel) eye. The observations in this collection range from the humorous to the enraged, on to the exasperated and the truly perplexed. You probably don't need me to tell you that, when casting about for a list of the best entries, W.E.B DuBois and James Baldwin tower over almost everyone else in terms of style and insight (even if one doesn't agree with their conclusions) although a gimlet-eyed, bemused portrait of a Greenwich Village white couple's negrophilia by Langston Hughes would give anything else in this collection (or any other observations about race) a run for its money.
I came away from this collection with two primary insights. The first is that, as in almost all spheres, the human race- its aesthetic, grammatical, and moral standards especially- has been in free fall lo these last couple centuries. It is not only humbling but shameful to read an essay by someone born an illiterate slave whose command of the English language puts a modern-day Nobel Laureate's skillset deep into the shade. We are now, to put in bluntly, with all of our technological advancement and prosperity, dumber and lazier collectively than the worst stereotype of a shiftless slave dredged from some racist fanatic's mind.
Even worse, once insight and philosophy and classical education give way in the book to later entries- theories and postwar Continental fads like Deconstructionism- it becomes painfully obvious that the slave master's lash ready for the back of any African slave who dared learn to read or write didn't bring to welter the same depth of scar than the cat-o-nine wielded by an amoral sack of nihilistic dissipation like a Michel Foucault did. To go from reading a speech by Frederick Douglas about the chasm between America's lofty ideals and its reality to BELL HOOKS' railing against a Madonna music video, or just to wade into the obfuscatory dense thickets of academese, really hammers the point home again and again. Clarity and sanity have been sacrificed as the institutional march turned into a dance on the rubble of Western Civilization (which, I know, doesn't exist, except as a racist concept perpetuated by the patriarchy).
It's odd to come away from a book about the ugliness of Eurocentric thought observing that it proves the point of someone like Oswald Spengler about civilizational deterioration, but...here we are.
Aesthetic observations aside, the profoundest takeaway from the book seems to be that white people find only one thing intolerable, vis-a-vis black America, and that is that, despite all of the horror and injustice and terror visited on the black race, a lot of black people pity us and find us ultimately a bit humorous. It is hard to reckon with the idea that a people we've been trained to treat with noblesse oblige find much of our collective efforts not only patronizing, but a misguided and misdirected effort to "remove the mote" from another's eye as the disciple Matthew had it, rather than taking the beam from our own. Though despite the presence of the beam, thankfully our lachrymal ducts still function well enough for us to shed crocodile tears during campus struggle sessions with Tim Wise or while prostrating ourselves before the litter bearing Ta Nehesi Coates from book tour to grant on to probably pretty soon having his own holiday as High Pontiff of Wakanda on the Potomac (formerly Washington D.C). Highest recommendation, though be prepared to be made crazy all again by the senseless nightmare we've all been living in, and from which we may never awaken. The current arrangement is, ultimately, too profitable for the white ruling class and the black pseudo-intellectual/radical class to do anything but keep blaming poor and working class whites, who, incidentally, get more than a fair hearing in this great book.
March 6, 2013
Biological vs social what it is to be white from another perspective.
August 18, 2020
I confini tra le aree tematiche in cui si divide l'opera sono molto blandi. Interessante è l'introduzione, composta da citazioni, all'inizio di ognuna: in modo coinciso ma estremamente efficace, è in grado di fornire un'idea generale delle diverse angolazioni sotto cui l'argomento in questione viene affrontato.
Trovo negativa l'assenza di un'analisi delle opere d'arte contenute nell'antologia.
Trovo negativa l'assenza di un'analisi delle opere d'arte contenute nell'antologia.
October 9, 2020
This book was just....wow! But definitely not for the beginner.
July 5, 2022
Excellent collection of essays.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews