Why This Book, Now?
To disarm right-wing propaganda and build a powerful, countervailing social movement, we need a new paradigm of white anti-racism. Roots Deeper than Whiteness is written to answer this call.
Before you read the article below, I’d like to share some updates on this book fundraiser:
There are only 10 days left in this main fundraising period which concludes with an online book event for all donors held on both Thursday 10/30 and Sunday 11/2.
We have now raised $25,500 of our 75k goal! This is a major accomplishment and we still have a ways to go. Thank you so much to all of you who have donated thus far. If you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll consider contributing today.
Larger Donors: Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY)—a 501(c)(3) organization directed by Teiahsha Bankhead and founded by foreword contributor Fania Davis—is partnering with me to receive donations for this book project of $1000 and above. If you’re moved to give at this level, please fill out this short form, and I’ll be in touch soon. We can’t do this without you!
We are in a pivotal moment. Across the political spectrum, people are recognizing the limits of mainstream models of white anti-racism.
These models have much to offer, yet too often leave those of us who are white stuck in oversimplified understandings of privilege and a sense of rootlessness. They often lead us into counterproductive roles as fearful, deferent “allies” who put people of color on dehumanizing pedestals, tear each other down, have little consciousness of our own stake in social change, and struggle to organize our own communities from a place of compassion or mutual interest.
To build a truly effective paradigm of white anti-racism, we must first understand what “whiteness” actually is. Over centuries, “whiteness” has been instilled through propaganda and legislation to serve two specific purposes. First, to re-shape our sense of belonging as Euro-descendant people—replacing distinct cultural identities and ancestral traditions of resistance to empire with identification with empire itself. And second, to convince us of the falsehood that our well-being is bound more to that of the white ruling class than to that of the multiracial 99%. In this way, whiteness has always functioned to manipulate both our sense of identity and our vision of what liberation means.
If our model of white anti-racism cannot undo both of these effects, it will fail. Until we are able to develop a pathway to not only delegitimize whiteness (and the harmful behaviors and false history it is based in) but to also re-root white folks in the lineages that were stolen from them, white people will continue to respond with either defensiveness, immobilizing guilt and inauthentic deference, or a clinging to revisionist histories and reactionary politics. Until we can get past oversimplified conceptions of white privilege and reveal that—despite the forms of comparative advantage white people have been given—we too have a fundamental stake in ending this system of divide-and-rule racial capitalism, we will fail to build the powerful alliances we need to transform this society.
Right-Wing Backlash
For the last decade, right-wing propagandists have been watching us—closely. And they have seized on the weaknesses of our movements to build their own.
Chris Rufo, the architect of the Critical Race Theory and DEI smear campaigns, directly built campaign messaging around the themes of white belonging and white material interest. Meaning—he set up these campaigns to focus on the notion that anti-racism advocates sought to strip belonging from white people and intended to enact a massive wealth redistribution program—not the type that I would hope for, one from the super-rich to the multiracial 99% (race-conscious and decolonial reparations included), but a program of redistribution from millions of downwardly-mobile working and middle class white folks, who are themselves struggling to get by, to people of color.
These messages are lies, no doubt. We have not actually been striving to do what Rufo says we have been. Yet his lies were explicitly designed to target legitimate gaps in our analysis and messaging. Rufo and the MAGA movement were able to re-take the White House and carry out an assault on anti-racism education because of their capacity to reaffirm the lie of whiteness. They were able to do this, in part, because we hadn’t yet figured out how to disarm that lie.
Roots Deeper than Whiteness
Many of our social movements are clearly seeing these realities and are yearning for a different model of white anti-racism—one that can give white people a life-giving political purpose, a transformative message to bring to their communities, genuine commitment to the reparation of racial and colonial harm, and courage to join in united struggle against a billionaire class intent on domination through division (at everyone’s expense).
Roots Deeper than Whiteness is written to meet this need on a broad scale. It offers a renewed paradigm of white anti-racism that guides those of us who are white to find deep belonging in a centuries-old struggle for collective liberation that we have been strategically separated from and gives us the capacity to build powerful coalitions in this age of backlash.
To understand more about how the book does this, you might enjoy reading the expanded book outline that I sent out last week.
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