The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness

Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies

by Veronica T. Watson

The Souls of White African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts that says African American writers retreated from issues of “race” when they wrote about whiteness, Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names “the literature of white estrangement.”

In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates that these texts have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race

170 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2013

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent investigation into the psychologically and socially catastrophic effects of Whiteness on the White subject.

The flaws are all strictly global ones (which isn't great, but it also means that one can use the book reliably independent of its philosophical missteps.) The belief in a redeemable Whiteness, bizarrely referred to as "Creole" whiteness—even more bizarrely, on the heels of the one and only discussion of the Spanish empire, without any reference to the difference between Creoles, Peninsulares, and Creole post-revolutionary rule—the insistence on "humanization," and the implicit if unstated support for the White-Black binary in American race theory—Jewishness, Latin@s, Asian America, and Native genocide are mentioned perfunctorily, if at all—all render flawed the positive suggestions of this book.

But as far as the critical weight of it goes (and to feel the critical weight of it is the reason to pick it up in the first place), it is impeccable. Blessedly free of a trite oppressed/oppressor binary, the book at times even recognizes that Whiteness has no real subject, with all of its produced subjects constantly unable to live up to the actual ideal—and encounters with that fact are psychically devastating and an incitation to violence. It opens up, again, the possibility of thinking of Whiteness as social and psychic malaise, not as an enviable position of psychic and social security.

As proved in each of the three tightly-wound and lucid chapters, the book deserves its five stars, whatever its flaws.

[Kyle Wyman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read

An incisive, provocative take on Whiteness, racial consciousness, and the still-pervasive effects of white privilege and white violence in America.
It certainly gave me much to contemplate personally.