White Lies: Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse

Rating:
Summary: An eye opener
Review: White Lies was one of the books assigned in my sexualities class this past term. In the beginning of the novel, Jessie Daniels quotes Toni Morrison: "The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters."

Daniels makes such an effort with this excellent analysis of the discourses of white supremacist organizations. She repeatedly points out the hypocrisy of these organizations, and makes the astute point that dismissing these people as ignorant or harmless radicals serves "to comfortably distance the majority of whites from those who proudly claim to be racists, and thus from any interrogation of their own position within the broader White Supremacist context" (p. 9). Daniels urges us to look at the similarities between obviously racist organizations and other groups in society, for it is only in a society already prone to racist ideas that such organizations can exist.

Rating:
Summary: An eye opener
Review: White Lies was one of the books assigned in my sexualities class this past term. In the beginning of the novel, Jessie Daniels quotes Toni Morrison: "The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters."

Daniels makes such an effort with this excellent analysis of the discourses of white supremacist organizations. She repeatedly points out the hypocrisy of these organizations, and makes the astute point that dismissing these people as ignorant or harmless radicals serves "to comfortably distance the majority of whites from those who proudly claim to be racists, and thus from any interrogation of their own position within the broader White Supremacist context" (p. 9). Daniels urges us to look at the similarities between obviously racist organizations and other groups in society, for it is only in a society already prone to racist ideas that such organizations can exist.