Tonight at our local school (free tickets):
Waking up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race
Please join the Lincoln community as we welcome Debby Irving – local author, racial justice educator, and public speaker. Debby will present in a workshop format utilizing stories from her life to exploring systemic racism that goes largely unnoticed but feeds long-held radicalized belief systems. By sharing, her struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective of bias stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about color blindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole.
From Amazon:
Debby Irving is an emerging voice in the national racial justice community. Combining her organization development skills, classroom teaching experience, and understanding of systemic racism, Irving educates and consults with individuals and organizations seeking to create racial equity at both the personal and institutional level.
Irving grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, during the socially turbulent 1960s and ’70s. After a blissfully sheltered, upper-middle-class suburban childhood, she found herself simultaneously intrigued and horrified by the racial divide she observed in nearby Boston. Her career began in a variety of urban performance-art and community-based non-profits, where she repeatedly found that her best efforts to “help” caused more harm than the good she intended. Her one-step-forward-two-steps-back experience of racial understanding eventually lead her to dig deeply into her own white privilege, where she found truths she never knew existed. Waking Up White describes that journey and the lessons learned along the way.
Now a racial justice educator and writer, Irving works with other white people to transform confusion into curiosity and anxiety into action. She’s worked in private and public urban schools, both in the classroom and at the board level, to foster community among students, teachers, staff, and families by focusing on honest dialog that educates and connects people through shared interests and divergent backgrounds. A graduate of the Winsor School in Boston, she holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MBA from Simmons College. Waking Up White is her first book.
Amazon reader reviews:
A summary of the book: a white person from a wealthy, old-money, well-connected family has a crisis of conscience, then proceeds to take the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions past and present people of color, co-opts it and makes it all about herself, then sells a book to other white people and makes even more money. At the center appears to be a desperate concern about what others think about her. She wants you to think that she is a good person. Your opinion on that topic matters greatly to her.
She gave a talk at my school. Her examples are very dated and her research limited.
There are few books that will lower one’s IQ faster than this smarmy self-centered tome dedicated to the joke called “white privilege.” Leftist drivel combined with pitiful and laughable narratives combine to make a it a horrific read. My horror mounted as I realized that some poor students probably had to read this dreck and pretend that it has meaning in order to obtain the mandatory credit in a self-hate course.
Complete and utter trash. Ideal for use with an open fire, BURNS WELL!
Related:
- the school building, renovated or brand new as of 25 years ago, will soon be bulldozed and replaced with the most expensive, per-student, school ever built in the United States (residents voted enthusiastic for the spending project and are now arguing bitterly over how to distribute the burden of paying for it!)
She gave a talk at my school. Her examples are very dated and her research limited.
There are few books that will lower one’s IQ faster than this smarmy self-centered tome dedicated to the joke called “white privilege.”
This is an odd comment. It makes one wonder about the sequence of events. Did this commenter attend the author’s talk and then proceed to read the book? Did that then cause a decline in the commenter’s IQ? How low is the commenter’s IQ currently? If it’s very low, should we bother reading the comment? Also, how is white privilege a joke? Perhaps a very low IQ is required to understand the humor in white privilege.
I understood the quote as four comments from four different people.
Your’re probably right about those being separate comments. The more important point is that it’s highly unlikely that the commenters actually read the book. So the comments are not reviews. Some people became aware of an anti-racist book and decided to leave angry comments about it on Amazon.com. Some people clearly have a lot of free time.
“White is bad! White is guilty!” is not anti-racist. It’s as racist as it comes.
Obsession with race is what defines a racist. Normal people just don’t care about skin color, and certainly don’t write books about it because they understand that the world has moved on long time ago. What matters is someone’s culture (or lack of), not superficial colors or imaginary oppression.
You can read many comments like that in the comments sections of Breitbart, Daily Caller and many other right wing crackpot web sites. Of course, those comments are often surrounded by other comments from other people expressing nasty, ugly clownish racist sentiments. In some cases, the two points of view are combined in a single dopey, angry comment along the lines of “everyone knows that racism was eliminated a hundred years ago, so those GD n—ers should just STFU!”
It took me years of reading such nonsense to realize what upset those people. In their minds every mention of racism in America sounds like “white people bad” to their ears. That bothers them because they’re white and their proud of their race and upsets them to hear their race criticized. Of course, this is a very loser racial attitude in itself. I told a guy on another blog a couple of years ago that he was only responsible for his own behavior.
Vince: I hope that you aren’t denying that white males are bad. If white males are actually good then how do you explain centuries of oppression by the white patriarchy, not to mention the current gender and race wage gaps?
The quoted passages (except the reader reviews) would seem to be the very acme of concern, regret and guilt for whites’ crimes against non-white people.
This is, so far as I know, a novel phenomenon. Are there any other historic (or indeed modern) cases of similarly intense concern for “Xs’ crimes against non-X people”, for values of X other than “white”?
Is “Vince” a bot? Reminds me of Eliza…
I am looking for right wing websites to read that are not crackpot. Can anyone suggest some?