Book Review: White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao
White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better by Regina Jackson
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: November 1, 2022
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
A no-holds-barred guidebook aimed at white women who want to stop being nice and start dismantling white supremacy from the team behind Race2Dinner and the documentary film, Deconstructing Karen.
It’s no secret that white women are conditioned to be “nice,” but did you know that the desire to be perfect and to avoid conflict at all costs are characteristics of white supremacy culture?
As the founders of Race2Dinner, an organization which facilitates conversations between white women about racism and white supremacy, Regina Jackson and Saira Rao have noticed white women’s tendency to maintain a veneer of niceness, and strive for perfection, even at the expense of anti-racism work.
In this book, Jackson and Rao pose these urgent questions: how has being “nice” helped Black women, Indigenous women and other women of color? How has being “nice” helped you in your quest to end sexism? Has being “nice” earned you economic parity with white men? Beginning with freeing white women from this oppressive need to be nice, they deconstruct and analyze nine aspects of traditional white woman behavior–from tone-policing to weaponizing tears–that uphold white supremacy society, and hurt all of us who are trying to live a freer, more equitable life.
White Women is a call to action to those of you who are looking to take the next steps in dismantling white supremacy. Your white supremacy. If you are in fact doing real anti-racism work, you will find few reasons to be nice, as other white people want to limit your membership in the club. If you are not ticking white people off on a regular basis, you are not doing it right.
I read a lot of anti-racism books and I learn something from every one of them. I’ll never know it all and accepting that is important when doing anti-racism work. I learned a lot from this book. I especially appreciated the section of this book about white feminism and how it is actually holding up white supremacy. That is one topic that I didn’t know much about. There are also sections on micro aggressions, schools, color-blindness and more.
I originally checked this book out from the library but I liked it so much I bought a copy. I know it’s one that I’ll read again and again, taking in more information each time.
Highly, highly recommended for all white women. (If the title makes you uncomfortable, you need to read it for sure.)
