Seeing White

While everyday conversations about race amount to conversations about people of color, where race is treated as something that only people of color “have,” white is also a racial category, and reluctance to name and examine it as such has served to maintain racial inequality. Seeing White, in a true interdisciplinary fashion, makes white cultural assumptions and privilege visible by connecting theory and findings from sociology, psychology, history, and economics. Written in an accessible language with multiple compelling stories and examples, the book will challenge students to reexamine their constructed notions of the nature and consequences of race and whiteness. -- Iva Katzarska-Miller, professor of psychology, Transylvania University
Seeing White is an excellent book. It has everything from scientific studies of race and the developments of White superiority, to the intersectionality of income, gender, and race. I believe it to be the best study of White race yet written. This is a volume from which any sociologists specializing in race should read. -- Hua-Lun Huang, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
With remarkable clarity, Halley, Eshleman and Vijaya have made the often invisible workings of culture both visible and comprehensible. Focusing on one of the most knotty of problems-entrenched assumptions about racial difference and inequality-this important book will offer students the opportunity to see the familiar in unfamiliar ways, and to challenge the mental baggage that so many carry inside their heads and hearts. The book's goal is to lay the groundwork for a better historical understanding of ideas that too often remain unexamined. -- Stuart Ewen, Hunter College, CUNY
Seeing White engagingly makes whiteness into a problem—one needing to be investigated in all its human and inhuman dimensions. The great interdisciplinary reach of the authors opens up, for students and all of us, the changing ways in which race has been made over a long history and how it is remade and contested today. -- David Roediger, University of Illinois; author of How Race Survived U.S. History
This book is a rare gem. There are lots of books on race, and some on privilege, but none brings it all together in one place in such an illuminating and thoughtful way. None so ably connects psychology, identity politics, economics and policy to explain the origins of race and how it is socially modified over time. The content was both enlightening and challenging, and the examples and stories used in this book will help students really understand the complicated issues of how race affects all of our lives. -- Nyla R. Branscombe, University of Kansas
Introducing students to the concept of racial privilege is fundamental to teaching about racism, yet hard to do. Seeing White is a great resource for those who undertake this important work, providing an excellent primer for classroom discussion. -- Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, president of Spelman College, and author of "Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race"
The authors have developed a lengthy and persuasive argument—based on science, scholarship, and a constant investigation of values—about race, racism, and the role genuinely goodhearted people can contribute to the problems of race in America. This book will challenge students, and it is guaranteed to stimulate discussion and debate. -- Chris Crandall, University of Kansas
Now when some would describe our times as post-race, Seeing White offers its readers an opportunity to rethink race and power from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on sociology, economics and psychology. The great accomplishment of the book is its appeal to readers to reflect on their own view of race as well as their relationship to the privilege of whiteness. Seeing White is a must read for all of us. -- Patricia Ticineto Clough, The Graduate Center, CUNY