Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America by George Yancy

Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America Reviews

• 
  Ellie

  Yancy's book is a reaction to the reaction his original "Letter" to white readers provoked--which was intense. I was sickened by the invective and hatred spewed by the readers of his letter (which is reproduced within this work).
  
  This book (and the original letter) is certainly a powerful indictment of the "white problem" as Yancy sums up racism, structural and individual. And he states, simply but clearly and repeatedly, that all white people are racist as they (we, since I am white) even if they have friends who are BIPOC benefit from institutionalized racism, racist structures and systems. For example, when I go to a store, I do not have to worry about being followed. I am thereby benefiting from a country in which an African-American would much more likely be treated with suspicion and as a potential criminal. I do not worry every time my (white) son leaves the house that he will be murdered by a police officer.
  
  Yancy's book is intense and unrelenting. Although it's fairly brief (less than 200 pages) it took me several weeks to read it. I could only absorb its intensity for short period of time.
  
  Yancy certainly gave me things to think over, not exactly new ones since his work ties in with much of what I've been reading, but the strength of the pain and anger and, maybe even, hope charges out from the pages with an emotional power that is admirable and attention-catching. He is a professor whose thinking is nuanced and complex. I doubt that I could read his academic work. But he puts his mind to work here in communicating information that is both factual and emotional. He is pleading us to wake up and change. He is challenging us to do so with respect for our ability as thinking adults to deal with whatever discomfort it will cause us to do so.
• 
  Marie

  Take a deep breath. Don’t tell me about how many black friends you have. Don’t tell me that you are married to someone of color. Don’t tell me that you voted for Obama. Don’t tell me that I’m the racist. Don’t tell me that you don’t see color. Don’t tell me that I’m blaming whites for everything. To do so is to hide yet again. You may have never used the N-word in your life, you may hate the K.K.K., but that does not mean that you don’t harbor racism and benefit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that allows you to walk into stores where you are not followed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your skin does not count against you, where you don’t need to engage in “the talk” that black people and people of color must tell their children when they are confronted by white police officers.
  
  If you have young children, before you fall off to sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch your child’s face. Smell your child’s hair. Count the fingers on your child’s hand. See the miracle that is your child. And then, with as much vision as you can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is black.
• 
  Andre

  Professor George Yancy wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes entitled, Dear White People. It was essentially an open letter to white people, a ‘gift’ he called it, for white folk to take an honest and no doubt painful look at how their whiteness continues to feed the monster of white supremacy. And so this slim volume is an exploration of the backlash he received via the responses to his ‘gift.’
  
  Professor Yancy maintains he was fully aware of how white people would respond, though by his writing it feels like he was shocked into another level of awareness that clearly he wasn’t all that prepared for. He was truly shaken by the intensity and vitriol of white reaction to a very benign, albeit bold letter. He details in this slim volume the excerpts from many of those who reached him via email, snail mail and voice mail.
  
  There were death threats, the copious use of the N-word, comparisons to animals, etc. All this over a letter that was offered as a gift with love simply seeking a little reciprocity in asking one to be vulnerable. It is frightful to read some of the feedback, but it’s not a fright born of fear, but one of disgust. George Yancy asks the white reader to shoulder some of this pain, requesting they take all this in and sit with it and empathize with how he must feel.
  
  He suggests that his personal pain is just a microcosm of what Black people experience daily as they move through life. How does whiteness affect Blackness? How does implicit bias impact the Black body and psyche? It “feels as if Black embodied existence is in a constant and unrelenting state of trauma.”
  
  If people are sincerely interested in change, then a tremendous amount of work must be done and what George Yancy is saying, the heaviest burden is on those who benefit the most from this system, i.e. white people.
  
  He is certainly not the first writer to make such a claim, in fact James Baldwin, who is heavily quoted throughout this text was writing about race, racism, and white-black relations in the 60’s. There are also plenty contemporaries who have taken up the mantle including a number of white scholars and writers many of which are referenced here also. It is not an easy thing to be told you are a problem and harder still to hear that, and subsequently gather the intestinal fortitude to challenge oneself to move from problem to solution, to become less of a problem and indeed minimize the role and impact you have on the maintenance of white supremacy. That is the ultimate ask of George Yanky’s ‘gift.’
  
  One must “risk tarrying with a disagreeable mirror that refused to walk quietly around the issue of whiteness.” What is the takeaway? Well he warns against one processing these words as guilt. No, “that is far too easy” he states. Instead, “Daily, white people should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation, to fight against oppression, white arrogance, white color -evasion, white privilege, white hypocrisy, white denial, and everyday white normative ways of being?”
  
  Not only was his letter a gift, but this entire volume is a gift, if one receives it as such and does the hard work required to make this world easier for all to navigate with an absence of existential anxiety.
• 
  David Wineberg

  The backlash in Backlash is the vile, hateful and vulgar response by white bigots and supremacists to George Yancy’s Dear White America, an editorial in the New York Times in 2015. In the article, Yancy offered what he repeatedly calls his “gift” to white readers, to recognize their own racism. In Backlash, Yancy gives the bigots far too much stature, quoting their ugly missives, voicemails and death threats, painstakingly analyzing their word choices, questioning their semantics and patronizing their English. As if they were credible and had value. He lowers himself to their level repeatedly. He has also spent an enormous amount of time on their misogynist websites, giving him further ammunition against their atrocious ignorance. He even criticizes the responses of whites who thanked him. He is not easy to please.
  
  Yancy’s argument is that America is innately racist by its institutions. So even if you’ve married interracially, have children of a different race, and never uttered the n-word, you are still a racist if you are white. “Loving a few Black people is not proof you have confronted your own racism,” he says. You still enjoy white privilege and don’t have to be on the defensive every day. Yancy says “We (Blacks) have been forced to lay claim to our humanity … ad nauseam.” He repeats and pounds this message continuously. It gets old.
  
  Where Backlash really falls down is in its terribly shallow scope. For someone who (frequently) touts his PhD, Yancy’s world is remarkably tiny. His navel-gazing never reaches beyond American borders. As I’m certain he knows, the USA is not the problem. Man is the problem. All over the world, majorities oppress minorities. Race is an exclusive club whose members are easy to identify. The Malays oppress the Chinese in their midst. The Burmese abuse the Rohingya, and the Japanese are superior to everyone in the world. Possibly the most striking example was Liberia, where America shipped Black slaves 200 years ago, sending them “back to Africa” (though few had ever been there). The slaves immediately lorded it over the natives, keeping them unemployed, ignorant, out of government, unequal and subservient - in their own land.
  
  Every society has its derogatory names for people of other nationalities, races, and religions. No one is perfectly Politically Correct. Yancy must know all this, but Backlash makes it seem this is a uniquely American disease, aimed only at American Blacks.
  
  Backlash is Yancy taking revenge and getting the last word, nothing more. Although he repeats (too) many times that it is written with “love”, it drips with sarcasm, anger and bitterness aimed directly at whites.
  
  For Yancy, the USA is a racist society, and therefore all whites are racists. Yancy’s bottom line is if you aren’t part of the solution (and precious few make the cut), you are the problem. End of discussion.
  
  David Wineberg
  
• 
  Raymond

  I found Backlash to be utterly fascinating. In this world of book clubs and reading groups focused on examining what allies can do to help dismantle structural and institutional racism, too many of them want to go directly to learning how to be anti-racist without first confronting the reality that whiteness is inherently wrapped up with racism in the first place.
  
  Yancy examines the various ways in which whiteness is defined through a perpetuation of the current power structure, meaning that whether one considers oneself to be racist or not, their existence and their lives are tied up in racist tropes and definitions. He accomplishes this in many ways, not the least of which is by explaining that his own life as a man means that he is inherently sexist, and that he has to accept his sexism in order to actively work against it.
  
  This would be a great book for anyone to read, but I would especially recommend it for any white person, whether they think they are racist or not. The reality is that, as Yancy points out, is that most people think of racism with a big R, as using the N-word, or actively working to keep one's foot on the neck of a person of color. But the real problem is racism with a little "r," the kind that people of color encounter dozens of times per day, being assessed and defined upon first glance, definitions that, in cases such Trayvon Martin's, Tamir Rice's and others, can have the immediate effect of changing the entire trajectory of their lives.
  
  Yancy's argument makes it clear that whiteness is a blanket, a covering protecting white innocence, an innocence that allows white people to walk through the world ignoring the effects that their presence and the perpetuation of these institutional racist support has on everyone else who isn't white. And of course at the heart of whiteness is a lie.
  
  The bottom line is that you cannot solve a problem until you confront what the problem actually is. Yancy excellently and concisely defines the problem, and the ways in which that problem manifests. I consider required reading for anyone who believes that they want to be part of an equal and open society.
• 
  Christine

  This is basically an addendum of an op-ed piece which Professor Yancy wrote and was published in the NY times. I respect professor Yancy immensely and agree with all the salient aspects of this book, wholeheartedly. The only misgiving I have is the length of the book itself. Otherwise an important and timely book which every one of us, regardless of race, should read. It should be said that no one is immune to biases, and in this case, racism. As we are all of us social beings, we enter that social sphere with pre-conceived perceptions of the world that we navigate. The crucial elements outlined in this book is that we should all regularly check our own personal biases and duly adjust our prejudices. This would allow us to maneuver appropriately in the world with open hearts, minds, and empathy, if not compassion, for our Black (and POC) brothers and sisters. We need to change the current system that continues to oppress and silence Black voices (i.e. lives!) in order to bring about genuine legislation that would allow Black communities preeminent equality and equity, in all facets of society and life.
• 
  Bri

  3.5 stars, rounded up
  
  Poignant, though overwritten (such is the nature of philosophers though) and ends up patting “good” white people on the back, which I have a strong aversion to.
• 
  Gena Thomas

  I had the thought today that I've not understood the weight of the gift Christ has given us in the same way I see it now reading through Yancy's book... "an act of gift-giving, one informed by a profound act of vulnerability on my part" he says.
  
  To actually sit with the awareness of just how much the world can't handle such an honest, raw & vulnerable gift, will react violently against it (and wow the overt racism & volume of such racism in response to his NYT article!) — and just how many folks won't do the hard work of naming their own racism within.
  
  I know several people who believe that one can either be racist or anti-racist, and while I think this thought process certainly gets us deeper than we've been & shows us that being anti-racist requires intentionality, I have concerns about how polarizing this can be and how we can feel we've 'arrived" simply because there is no language to state otherwise.
  
  I appreciate Yancy's phrase "anti-racist racist", which gets closer to the truth of who I am as a white person...in that I am never done doing the work and I am never fully purged of the racism within me. I'm never above reproach. And indeed this self-truth is quite a gift Yancy has given me, one which, to be very honest, ushers me into a greater dependence on Christ and a holy affinity for deep & raw confession — something I often wish was modeled better for me in my faith tradition.
  
  "Love is a kind of danger in that it requires risk, truth-telling, and honesty," he says. Which makes me think authentic Christianity might be the most dangerous force on earth, if we would get out of its way.
• 
  Beth

  This seems like a real missed opportunity. Yancy's "Dear White America" letter, published in the New York Times in 2015, was a spark that started a conversation (or, in some cases, a vitriolic hissy fit), and I was hoping this book would expound on the letter in a way that would help open our white eyes to the structure of white privilege that makes up our world. Unfortunately that's not the case here.
  
  Yancy covers well the ground of overt racism by sharing the many horrific responses he received after "Dear White America" was published, and he states over and over again how while this overt racism is easiest for us white people to denounce, it's not the be-all and end-all of white racism and privilege, and we whites should not use our denouncement of blatant KKK-style racism as absolution. However, he rarely gets into the details of what exactly the white power structure of our society looks like today so that we can *get it.* He gives only two or three examples, such as being followed in a store due to the color of his skin, and not until at least halfway through the book (after a lot of lecturing about white racism, white privilege, etc.). By then, the people that most need their eyes opened have either already stopped reading or have already assumed a defensive stance! Perhaps changing the order of the book, so these examples (and hopefully others) come first, would get people thinking about things first, critically instead of defensively. Yancy also mentions an article by Peggy McIntosh where she gives 46 examples of white privilege, and then says "I highly recommend this article." Great, but...why not give some more examples here instead of just directing people to read a different article to *get* what you're trying to explain?
  
  Listen. I know it's not the job of people of color to educate we white people on our racism, either overt of covert. But if the purpose of the "Dear White America" letter and of this book, as Yancy repeatedly states, is to hold up an honest and unflattering mirror to us white people of the world, to give us the gift of truth and honesty and inviting us to be vulnerable and honest in return, then DO IT. Simply saying "white people are racist" repeatedly doesn't help us to SEE IT, to recognize or acknowledge it. The last line of "Dear White America" DOES:
  
  "If you have young children, before you fall off to sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch your child's face. Smell your child's hair. Count the fingers on your child's hand. See the miracle that is your child. And then, with as much vision as you can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is black."
  
  More of that would make all the difference in this important book and conversation.
  
  *Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC, provided by the author and/or the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Katie

  This book held up a mirror to those parts I don't want to see. Professor Yancy calls this message a gift, and it's a great prod to keep working.
• 
  Al

  The book is an exploration of white backlash in response to "Dear White America", a letter written by the author in the New York Times’ philosophy column, The Stone. In case you haven't read the letter, it is included as chapter 1 of the book.
  
  A sampling of the backlash is included in chapter 2. It is a sampling of the angry rebuke levelled at the author for daring to challenge not just systemic racism, but racism that we (Whites, including me) carry with us. The un-redacted vitriol is painful to read. If you have any empathy at all, reading these venomous statements will shake you to your core. How can people speak that way to another human being?
  
  Dr Yancy presents "Dear White America" as a "gift", a gift of opening up himself to White America, a gift which is like a mirror, to help us (White America) to see ourselves. I will admit that life had to prepare me to read this book. I had to go through periods of disillusionment with the status quo to receive Dr. Yancy's gift. I had to be on the journey of becoming aware of my own racism and that I have been embedded in a racist system. If you have come to the point of picking up this book, you are probably on that journey. Even so, you will be challenged intellectually and emotionally.
  
  While the book is written from the heart, it is also written by a philosophy professor. It is written with a certain academic rigor, but not overwhelming for the layperson. You will encounter new words and new concepts. I found myself taking notes and pondering what was presented. In fact, the author invites the reader to tarry and not to run ahead. To learn anything from this book, the reader will have to wait in that in-between space of processing whiteness and its effect on people of color.
  
  When reading a book like this, a book exploring one of America's most intractable problems, one hopes to find answers and failing that, next steps. This book is not a how-to. Instead, this book is a mirror to our soul, the soul of White America. If you are serious about bridging America's racial divide, this book is a must read.
• 
  Kris

  Really enjoyed it.
• 
  James Uscroft

  Perhaps the single most critical problem when attempting to address the issue of bigotry, oppression and discrimination is that our white supremacist and hetro-normative patriarchal society has decreed that to be a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a transphobe or what have you to be a fundamentally bad and evil person who is incapable of redemption. A self-righteous and self-serving act of cowardice which means that, as this book describes in horrifying detail, any attempt to ask us to look inward and consider our own place in the systems that were built upon systemic dehumanisation, oppression and discrimination is met with an equally self-righteous and self-serving tidal wave of hatred, abuse and threats.
  
  Indeed, the irony of the fact that so many of the comments and messages that the author received amounted to "How Dare You Call Me A Racist You F***ing N***er! I Have Black Friends, So YOU'RE The Real Racist & Deserve To Be Lynched!" would be funny if it wasn't so terrifying. And in short, just like the letter in the New York Times which received this violent backlash, this book is a desperate plea for all of us to get over ourselves and realise that it's not about our feelings.
• 
  Vnunez-Ms_luv2read

  I am not sure how I felt about this book. Having read "Dear White America", I was anxious to read this entry. I do understand what the author was trying to do, but throughout my reading I kept asking myself" Does he really think this is going to make anyone admit their racism""? The book is written with "love' as the author states many times, but honestly, I did not feel the love. All i felt was a sort of bitterness toward White America. I must say that the author has a way with words and some will agree, some may not. But, this book can be a good conversation starter. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.
• 
  Madeline Knight-Dixon

  This book is so necessary. It can get very academic at parts, but it was worth taking the time to work through. Race is such a complex issue, but Yancy finds a way to break it down to its simplest component. We’re all racist, sexist, flawed beings. Now let’s accept that, let ourselves be uncomfortable with the vulnerability that opens us to, and work towards fixing it with communication and honest introspection.
• 
  Roger

  I earnestly support Yancy's arguments set out here and aim to be a racist committed to antiracist work, but think this would have been better served as a Times follow-up rather than a slim book. The chapters did not develop or sharpen beyond the chief points made in the 2015 article Dear White America.
• 
  Marian Alexander

  Thought provoking. Highly recommended for anyone interested in race relations or understanding the Black experience in America.
• 
  S. Wigget

  This book is really important. All white people in this country need to read it.
• 
  Rick Quinn

  On Christmas Eve of 2015, the New York Times published an essay in its ongoing column *The Stone* titled “Dear White America.” It was written by the column’s editor, Dr. George Yancy who is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. Written as a a gesture of love to white America, Yancy offered a mirror and invited those he addressed to listen with love and invited them to self-reflection and honest acknowledgement of the deep structural racism that is part and parcel of this country and, as Yancy pointed towards, constitutive of the white self in America regardless of one’s avowed commitments to anti racism. His candor and vulnerability were met with a vicious, vitriolic outpouring directed at him in violent rhetoric, death threats, and angry resistance to his offering.
  
  *Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America* is his follow up and response to this incident and its aftermath. It may seem cliche to declare a book “essential reading for our times” but this book certainly qualifies. The book offers the original letter, “Dear White America” to us again as loving invitation. Love here entails unsparing honesty which renders the author vulnerable and lovingly invites vulnerability in his readers. His unsparing honesty is continued in his recounting of the horrendously violent and racist response he received from the letter. If you extend any empathy along with self reflection, it is excruciatingly painful to read and absorb. Having done so, it is hard to argue with his candor in the introduction when he says that “...there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, that *assures* me that white America’s collective future will be any different than a miserable failure when it comes to facing the existential necessity of addressing and eradicating white racism.”
  
  And yet given this, Yancy still ends with a renewed invitation to accept the gift offered and to let go of our need to “suture” our vulnerability and instead to open ourselves to our woundedness and the ways we have participated and benefited from the violent racist structures which have formed us. This involves what he terms as the “risking of the white self.” Are we, the white readers, willing to risk our selves? He challenges us to be open to a kind of death, “...-a death of your stubbornness,a death of your denials, a death of your racial comfort, a death of your narcissism, a death of your ‘goodness,’ a death of your fears, a death of your color evasion, a death of your self-righteousness, a death of your sense of entitlement, a death of your illusions of safety, a death of your sense of ‘greatness’ and ‘manifest destiny,’ a death of all of those tricks that you play to convince yourselves that you are fine, that you are the good ones, the sophisticated ones, the nonracist ones, the ones who truly care about justice and a world without oppression, hatred, and racist violence.” (58)
  
  How white America answers that challenge to risk and stare deeply into the mirror Yancy’s work provides as a gesture of love is crucial to whether we move from this moment to a more perfect union. This invitation gives relevant nuance to the saying of the Jewish carpenter/rabbi who proclaimed that to find one’s life is to lose it. I cannot recommend this book and its importance strongly enough.
• 
  Nathan

  Racism is the centuries-old system of white advantage in the United States, which white people collectively have only recently (1960s or so) begun to realize they should even question. Professor Yancy's book confronts this system head-on by inviting white people to notice how they are implicated in it.
  
  Specifically, Yancy expands the gift that he first offered in his New York Times column "Dear White America" (reprinted here as chapter 1) by letting us see how many white people responded to that effort to speak honestly and lovingly with us about our racism. The response is incredibly ugly and violent, threatening enough that Yancy's university had to send police to patrol his office and speaking engagements. Yancy doesn't pull any punches about how it feels to be the target of massive quantities of racist vitriol. He also doesn't waste his energy hating anyone. Instead, in chapter 2 he deploys the power of his philosophical training and intellect to demonstrate the total lack of logical coherence of the hate-filled responses he receives. In chapter 3 he takes the time to show why some of the more sympathetic responses still ultimately miss the point, and in chapter 4 he talks about white people who are truly committed to anti-racism and what they can do to make real progress.
  
  This book is one real, live human being's passionate protest against racist hatred. It's a heartfelt cry for human connection. My impression is that he decided not to attempt to make white readers more comfortable by toning down his emotions. Instead, he lets us see what it feels like to have your humanity so completely rejected by people who don't even know you. It can be difficult to sit with this much sorrow and anger, to acknowledge that it is a thousand percent legitimate. It may be hard to allow yourself to grieve for Yancy, with Yancy, and--perhaps most of all--for yourself. But if you consider yourself a reasonable person, especially if you are white and believe you are non-racist, you owe it to yourself to hear him out.
• 
  Adam Shields

  Short Thoughts: This is a short book that is doing a couple different things. First it introduces an essay that was originally in the NYT about racism "Dear White America" and uses the comparison of sexism to racism to talk about how racism (and sexism) are systemic and cultural and not primarily person/individual.
  
  But that essay when it was published in 2015 generated a lot of hate mail, emails and voicemails. So the second chapter recounts the backlash. The third chapter dissection the backlash and places it in a context of how many respond to discussions of racism and the fourth chapter is a 'where do we go from here chapter'.
  
  There is a lot of strong language here. Minorities should be aware of a significant trigger warning. There is a lot of vile language and racist sentiment that is recounted here. But White people should understand that the language here is not gratuitous, it is the language that was actually sent to Yancy.
  
  This is a book that I really needed to read, but it is also a book that I would not recommend unless you are somewhat familiar with discussions of racism and concepts like White fragility. Yancy is not playing around here. And I think if you are dipping your toe into the discussion of race in America, this might be a book that goes over your head.
  
  
  Longer thoughts are on my blog at
  http://bookwi.se/backlash/
• 
  Richard

  I don’t understand why George Yancy has caught so much flak for this book, Backlash.
  
  It’s not a comfortable read, but realistically it’s no worse listening to it than to deep, heartfelt tongue-lashings from teachers, parents, grandparents—and taking them to heart.
  
  Black people in the US carry a certain about of fear and resentment, in ways Whites do not. Not that we don’t all have struggles. Not that everyone doesn’t experience hate, inequity, and fear. It’s just that the Black experience is different.
  
  And it was good to hear one person’s, Yancy’s, account of that experience, and of how Whites like me help create and define that experience.
  
  Buck up, people, and just read the book. It won’t hurt you, make you loathe yourself, turn you into a bleeding-heart liberal. It’s just a book.
• 
  Scott Robinson

  Painful but necessary
  
  An unsparing look at the problem of systemic white racism, this book is challenging and thought-provoking. My only quibble is that the language veers from vernacular to academic in a way that makes it difficult to imagine who the intended audience is. But well worth the effort.
• 
  Stephanie

  Yancy's book should be read by those who believe that we're "living in a post-racial society." Otherwise, I found the book to be somewhat repetitive. A follow-up column in the NYT would have been better suited and it would have reached more people.
• 
  Laura

  This was indeed a gift of love. And I want to respond in-kind, by accepting the disorientation of truth and love... and to challenge other whites people to breath and to internally soften so that they, too, can hear and “tarry with” these challenging words of love.