White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism

It has been argued that while white people have problems, Black people and people of color are problems. This suggests that white people's problems are tangential to their identities and that Black people and people of color are, by nature, problem people. How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem? is an unprecedented collection of critically unsettling essays, which return the question of being a problem back to white people. It does this in scholarly ways by deploying a self-narrative style. Unlike much scholarship on whiteness, George Yancy's collection asks white scholars to dwell on the experience of being a white problem without sidestepping that question in terms of its implications for Black people or people of color. Remaining cognizant of the fact that the chapters are not exercises in self-confession, white narcissism, or ways of seeking pity, each contributor remains in that profoundly uncomfortable space of being a white problem. How Does it Feel to be a White Problem? insists upon modes of criticality that engage race-talk without readily seeking easy escape routes through white-talk, bad faith, denial, and willful ignorance. The collection powerfully emphasizes the significance of humility, vulnerability, anxiety, questions of complicity, how being a "good white" is implicated in racial injustice, and how whiteness as a problem is a site of violence and narrow self-interest. This text sets a new precedent for critical race scholarship and critical whiteness studies to take into consideration what it means specifically to be a white problem rather than simply restrict scholarship to the problem of white privilege and white normative invisibility. Ultimately, the text challenges the contemporary rhetoric of a color-blind or color-evasive world in a discourse that is critically engaging and sophisticated, accessible, and persuasive.