Beyond White Privilege

How the Politics of Privilege Hijacked Anti-Racism

This book traces the history of the concept of white privilege, analysing the manner in which contemporary usage transforms it into a form of class-blind neoliberalism. Instead, the author proposes an alternative based on ‘interest convergence’, whereby working class whites join with people of color to combat racism.

In the world of academic anti-racism, the idea of white privilege has become the dominant paradigm for understanding racial inequality. Its roots can be traced to radical critiques of racial capitalism, however its contemporary employment tends to be class-blind, ignoring the rifts that separate educated, socially mobile elites from struggling working-class communities.

How did this come to be? Beyond White Privilege traces the path by which an idea with radical potential got ‘hijacked’ by a liberal anti-racism that sees individual prejudice as racism’s primary manifestation, and white moral transformation as its appropriate remedy. This ‘politics of privilege’ proves woefully inadequate to the enduring forms of racial and economic injustice shaping the world today. For educated white elites, privilege recognition has become a ritual of purification distinguishing them from their working-class counterparts. For the white working class, whose privileges have eroded, but not disappeared, the politics of privilege often looks like class scapegoating – a process that has helped to drive increasing numbers of alienated whites into the arms of white nationalist movements.

This book offers an alternative path: an ‘interest convergence’ approach that recaptures the radical potential of white privilege discourse by emphasizing converging, cross-racial interests – in education, housing, climate justice, and others – that reveal that the ‘racial bribe’ of whiteness is ultimately contrary to the interests of working-class whites. It will therefore appeal to readers across the social sciences and humanities with interests in issues of racial inequality and social justice.

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