White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

By Saira Rao and Regina Jackson

Book Overview

An instant New York Times Bestseller!

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143136437
• ISBN13: 9780143136439
• Release Date: November 2022
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

A must read

One of the best pieces of non-fiction I’ve read in years. This book gets right to the point, no tip toeing around white women’s racism. The examples and excepts from the Race2Dinner events were eye opening and made this book hard to put down. I think for white women who haven’t started any type of reflection on their own racism or begun and anti-racist work in a real way, they will have a hard time getting through this book. Those who are on their journey already, this book provides countless examples of things we as white women do all the time that further supports white supremacy. A must read either way.