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Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness
In this unflinching, honest narrative, an award-winning journalist discovers his family’s heritage as slave owners in the South and grapples openly with his whiteness to inspire others to do the same.
"Bracing, candid, and rueful." —Kirkus
Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy.
But when a white guy from his hometown of Columbia, S.C.—also the birthplace of secession— massacred nine Black people in Charleston in the name of Southern whiteness, Woods began to delve into his family’s history—and the ways that history has affected his own life.
Upon discovering that his family—both the Baynards and the Woodses—collectively claimed ownership of more than 700 people in 1860 and that his great-grandfather had assassinated a Black politician in 1871, Woods realized his own name was a confederate monument. With assiduous research and brutal self-analysis, Woods uncovers the details of his family’s crimes and all of the mundane ways he inherited them…and their coverup. Along with his name, he had inherited privilege, wealth, and all the lies that his ancestors passed down through the generations.
At a time where Southern states are embracing a return to authoritarian, anti-democratic principles, Woods' analysis of how we inherited our whiteness from the twisted psychology of Southern slavers is both trenchant and urgent—but always cast against the foibles and failures of his own life.
Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance is a no-holds-barred memoir that exposes the story from Trump country that you haven’t heard while excavating what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.
"Bracing, candid, and rueful." —Kirkus
Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy.
But when a white guy from his hometown of Columbia, S.C.—also the birthplace of secession— massacred nine Black people in Charleston in the name of Southern whiteness, Woods began to delve into his family’s history—and the ways that history has affected his own life.
Upon discovering that his family—both the Baynards and the Woodses—collectively claimed ownership of more than 700 people in 1860 and that his great-grandfather had assassinated a Black politician in 1871, Woods realized his own name was a confederate monument. With assiduous research and brutal self-analysis, Woods uncovers the details of his family’s crimes and all of the mundane ways he inherited them…and their coverup. Along with his name, he had inherited privilege, wealth, and all the lies that his ancestors passed down through the generations.
At a time where Southern states are embracing a return to authoritarian, anti-democratic principles, Woods' analysis of how we inherited our whiteness from the twisted psychology of Southern slavers is both trenchant and urgent—but always cast against the foibles and failures of his own life.
Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance is a no-holds-barred memoir that exposes the story from Trump country that you haven’t heard while excavating what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published June 28, 2022
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2540 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
October 16, 2022
3.5 stars
This was an interesting read. As a black woman it is always with side eye that I look at / view ⚪️ people looking at their whiteness and being honest with it. And even more so when it is someone who benefits the absolute most from it.
I only decided to read this after hearing the author’s interview / discussion about this book on Code Switch. As I was reading this, I did get the sense that the author was and did sit with things. But I also felt there were times he *still* wanted a cookie for for acknowledging his privilege and doing stuff to show he *gets* it.
Maybe this is as deep as he could go, but it felt like maybe he could have dug deeper. If his digging into things gets other ⚪️ people to dig deeper and recognize what black and brown people know about yte people then great. And if it is just a bit of cover for someone who is still being performative, then I fear that no one who is white will understand race ever. And perhaps he is still digging.
I wonder if he has ever thought about what he needs to know about black and brown people to function in the world versus what black and brown people have to know about white people to function. Or really have any white people thought about that.
This was an interesting read. As a black woman it is always with side eye that I look at / view ⚪️ people looking at their whiteness and being honest with it. And even more so when it is someone who benefits the absolute most from it.
I only decided to read this after hearing the author’s interview / discussion about this book on Code Switch. As I was reading this, I did get the sense that the author was and did sit with things. But I also felt there were times he *still* wanted a cookie for for acknowledging his privilege and doing stuff to show he *gets* it.
Maybe this is as deep as he could go, but it felt like maybe he could have dug deeper. If his digging into things gets other ⚪️ people to dig deeper and recognize what black and brown people know about yte people then great. And if it is just a bit of cover for someone who is still being performative, then I fear that no one who is white will understand race ever. And perhaps he is still digging.
I wonder if he has ever thought about what he needs to know about black and brown people to function in the world versus what black and brown people have to know about white people to function. Or really have any white people thought about that.
October 15, 2022
This is not a middle review, it is an ambivalent one. There are parts of this book that I loved, and parts I really did not care for. Bay Woods has a fascination with self-exposure of his unpleasant bits that reminds me of a flasher as much as it does a journalist. He has deeply ambivalent feelings about himself and his own history, and he seems to want the audience to share his shame and his pride. Many parts of this book are a stretch to connect everything and anything in his life to his central theme regardless of how connected they really are, and you can tell he was a poet long before he was a writer. I think he was trying to write a book to help antiracist whites think critically about themselves by using himself as a sacrificial totem, and in that and only that he succeeds completely. Do not give to the non-converted, it only works as a sermon to the choir.
Worth reading, but with a heavy dose of salt and a critical eye.
Worth reading, but with a heavy dose of salt and a critical eye.
October 15, 2022
It's hard to articulate what ends up feeling insufferable about this author. There is something so performative, so precious, so begging for approval, so unaware, even at what is ostensibly the height of his own awareness about his own whiteness and how that impacts his worldview, his everything. It's like 330 pages of mansplaining/white-splaining whiteness and often in some very heavy-handed and basic/obvious ways, at least for anyone who has done any real thinking and learning about this.
That said, white people should be investigating our whiteness and our racist inheritance and learning about why that matters to this day. We should be exploring what work we can do to upend this system of white supremacy, so I don't want to criticize him too much, but still I found him insufferable, pedantic, and performing a kind of awareness, where he acts as if he is unflinchingly examining himself, but which ends up feeling again and again like something he is doing for praise. Maybe he does it in the interest of helping white people be able to do that for themselves, examine and be honest about our own inherited racism and white supremacists views, but... it ends up feeling mostly like him telling his own story about himself and overlaying some concepts of whiteness in there as he begins to research his family's own racist history (slavers and white supremacists in South Carolina).
There is a concept that he uses throughout the book about how white people are protected by the law but not bound by it, while people of color are bound by the law but not protected by it. This gave me something to think about. But it characterizes this author to note that he literally uses this concept all throughout the book but only in the LAST CHAPTER does he acknowledge a quote and an author that actually gave him that concept. Is that not whiteness and white maleness encapsulated? He could have attributed the idea in the very beginning of the book when he introduces it, and perhaps tell us some of the "ending" of the book in the beginning so he can be looking back at himself with a greater critical eye. Instead, he wants to "save" this moment at the end for its sense of denouement or peak "narrative arc"-ness, trying to create some building sense of racial reckoning. It really kind of made me sick off and on throughout the book. But it is a very good demonstration of whiteness.
That said, white people should be investigating our whiteness and our racist inheritance and learning about why that matters to this day. We should be exploring what work we can do to upend this system of white supremacy, so I don't want to criticize him too much, but still I found him insufferable, pedantic, and performing a kind of awareness, where he acts as if he is unflinchingly examining himself, but which ends up feeling again and again like something he is doing for praise. Maybe he does it in the interest of helping white people be able to do that for themselves, examine and be honest about our own inherited racism and white supremacists views, but... it ends up feeling mostly like him telling his own story about himself and overlaying some concepts of whiteness in there as he begins to research his family's own racist history (slavers and white supremacists in South Carolina).
There is a concept that he uses throughout the book about how white people are protected by the law but not bound by it, while people of color are bound by the law but not protected by it. This gave me something to think about. But it characterizes this author to note that he literally uses this concept all throughout the book but only in the LAST CHAPTER does he acknowledge a quote and an author that actually gave him that concept. Is that not whiteness and white maleness encapsulated? He could have attributed the idea in the very beginning of the book when he introduces it, and perhaps tell us some of the "ending" of the book in the beginning so he can be looking back at himself with a greater critical eye. Instead, he wants to "save" this moment at the end for its sense of denouement or peak "narrative arc"-ness, trying to create some building sense of racial reckoning. It really kind of made me sick off and on throughout the book. But it is a very good demonstration of whiteness.
August 22, 2022
4.5 stars
June 23, 2022
Inheritance is such an important book by an author who is searing in his journey to explore the truth of his white male privilege at the cost of those around him - present and past.
His family from both his mother and father's sides had owned a large number of enslaved individuals. How does one begin to reckon with this past and how does it inform a present for a white man seeking to understand and repair his own white privilege?
Woods leaves no turn unturned in his pursuit to be turn the past into a better future - seeking to slash the vines of white supremacy that bind us all.
I cannot recommend this book - and this author - enough.
I must add that Woods co-wrote another amazing books about the gun task force in Baltimore City. It, too, is quite brilliant.
Rarely does one find such an honest and gifted author.
His family from both his mother and father's sides had owned a large number of enslaved individuals. How does one begin to reckon with this past and how does it inform a present for a white man seeking to understand and repair his own white privilege?
Woods leaves no turn unturned in his pursuit to be turn the past into a better future - seeking to slash the vines of white supremacy that bind us all.
I cannot recommend this book - and this author - enough.
I must add that Woods co-wrote another amazing books about the gun task force in Baltimore City. It, too, is quite brilliant.
Rarely does one find such an honest and gifted author.
June 30, 2022
So many virtues accumulate here; among them a fascinating story of a far-ranged life. But it is the striking through of his name, symbolically connecting and taking ownership of the hurt behind so much of white culture, that is in its own way the boldest move. This is a book of deep honesty and a reminder to all of us that while we have all inherited a troubling past, we can choose to make a better future, one without white supremacy.
December 23, 2022
Baynard Woods, an nth-generation white South Carolinian, does indeed chronicle his life through his whiteness, first by showing the ways (invisible to him at the time) that whiteness shaped his view of the world and the (ditto) privilege and expectations it bestowed, and then his transition into awareness. It sounds gimmicky, but is surprisingly effective, particularly in the early chapters when he offers episode after episode to make often profound points about whiteness. Woods does overindulge in liberal frustration and virtue-signaling toward the end, but I forgive him (mostly) since it's in service to his story and message.
October 13, 2023
In this memoir, a white South Carolina native confronts the slave-owners in his family tree and the racism that infects his own parents and friends. Then he examines the white privilege from which he has benefited throughout life.
This was a bold and perhaps even noble undertaking. This memoir is very personal and reveals much about Baynard Woods that is not directly relevant to his central topic. In fact, I found much of the early chapters about his childhood and misspent youth (countless mentions of drunkenness and drug use, casual sex, and failure to support himself) to be distracting and not all that interesting. He stated openly that he is prone to "mansplaining," talks over people, and feels that he needs to win every argument. In fact, up until about age 30, he seems rootless and self-indulgent, which does not make him a sympathetic narrator.
The book becomes much more compelling once he marries Nicole, gets excited about academics and learning, earns a Ph.D. and starts teaching and writing. He applies his analytical and research skills to delve into the false assumptions that prevent Southern white people from taking responsibility for the ravages of slavery, the evils of the Jim Crow era, and mass incarceration of black men. By moving to Baltimore (where I live), he gained a front row seat for a lot of racial tension and injustice. As a reporter for the City Paper, he covered the "Baltimore Uprising" resulting from the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police. He was also present at the Charlottesville clash between white supremacists and anti-fascists. In addition, he was much affected by the MAGA insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
At times, Mr. Woods is capable of amazing self-awareness, such as acknowledging the possibility that he found the racial strife to be entertaining and exhilarating since he was not one of the injured parties. As a white reporter, he could pontificate about social justice but he lacked first-hand experience of discrimination and violence based on race. He is also aware that he feels a burden of guilt for the slave-owning of his great-grandparents that is almost all-consuming. He actually counted up how many human beings were enslaved on his family plantations and the number turned out to be in the thousands. He wallowed in information about how his great-grandfather seems to have produced a number of black children by a young, enslaved woman. These cousins of Mr. Woods were born into bondage and subject to all the horrors of that status.
Toward the end of the memoir, Mr. Woods began to contemplate what he could do to make amends to those injured by his family. He makes some contributions to relevant causes and of course publicizes the issues by writing this book and publishing other articles and commentary. He also makes the point repeatedly that all of us need to call out injustice and discrimination whenever we see it. He says that toxic whiteness results not only from greed and sadism but also from passivity and neglect.
As someone whose family tree is also full of confederate soldiers and defenders of the Lost Cause, I found this memoir of particular interest. It has definitely stimulated me to do more systematic thinking about what my role ought to be in ensuring fairness for Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds.
I gave this book high marks for the concept but lower marks for the execution, which resulted in a three-star rating.
This was a bold and perhaps even noble undertaking. This memoir is very personal and reveals much about Baynard Woods that is not directly relevant to his central topic. In fact, I found much of the early chapters about his childhood and misspent youth (countless mentions of drunkenness and drug use, casual sex, and failure to support himself) to be distracting and not all that interesting. He stated openly that he is prone to "mansplaining," talks over people, and feels that he needs to win every argument. In fact, up until about age 30, he seems rootless and self-indulgent, which does not make him a sympathetic narrator.
The book becomes much more compelling once he marries Nicole, gets excited about academics and learning, earns a Ph.D. and starts teaching and writing. He applies his analytical and research skills to delve into the false assumptions that prevent Southern white people from taking responsibility for the ravages of slavery, the evils of the Jim Crow era, and mass incarceration of black men. By moving to Baltimore (where I live), he gained a front row seat for a lot of racial tension and injustice. As a reporter for the City Paper, he covered the "Baltimore Uprising" resulting from the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police. He was also present at the Charlottesville clash between white supremacists and anti-fascists. In addition, he was much affected by the MAGA insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
At times, Mr. Woods is capable of amazing self-awareness, such as acknowledging the possibility that he found the racial strife to be entertaining and exhilarating since he was not one of the injured parties. As a white reporter, he could pontificate about social justice but he lacked first-hand experience of discrimination and violence based on race. He is also aware that he feels a burden of guilt for the slave-owning of his great-grandparents that is almost all-consuming. He actually counted up how many human beings were enslaved on his family plantations and the number turned out to be in the thousands. He wallowed in information about how his great-grandfather seems to have produced a number of black children by a young, enslaved woman. These cousins of Mr. Woods were born into bondage and subject to all the horrors of that status.
Toward the end of the memoir, Mr. Woods began to contemplate what he could do to make amends to those injured by his family. He makes some contributions to relevant causes and of course publicizes the issues by writing this book and publishing other articles and commentary. He also makes the point repeatedly that all of us need to call out injustice and discrimination whenever we see it. He says that toxic whiteness results not only from greed and sadism but also from passivity and neglect.
As someone whose family tree is also full of confederate soldiers and defenders of the Lost Cause, I found this memoir of particular interest. It has definitely stimulated me to do more systematic thinking about what my role ought to be in ensuring fairness for Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds.
I gave this book high marks for the concept but lower marks for the execution, which resulted in a three-star rating.
November 13, 2022
It would be good if all of us white folks looked into our history to find out about our own family’s contribution to racism. I could do without so many family arguments, but understand including them as an understanding of reconstruction of history.
December 21, 2022
I didn't finish this. I listened to an interview with the author and thought I would give his book a try even though it didn't sound like something I would enjoy. The author was basically telling his life story and how he tried to rebel against the "trap" of white privilege but didn't know he was doing it. About halfway through the book I ran out of time and patience and stopped reading it.
November 4, 2022
4.5 stars.
September 3, 2023
INHERITANCE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WHITENESS is the second audio book I’ve listened to all the way through. Though I don’t have anything against audio books, I have historically not thought of listening to them as “reading”, per se, and so my intent has been to limit myself to those books I was okay with not reading, which is to say those books on my WTRs that I wasn’t sure I would ever actually select to read, pushing them down on the list repeatedly. I did have some interest in this book, but I also worried that it could be a case of cringey navel-gazing which failed to say anything meaningful. I couldn’t have been more wrong; I ended up so impressed by the book that I awarded it five stars. Incidentally, the only other audio book I’ve listened to so far (THE EYES & THE IMPOSSIBLE by Dave Eggers), I also awarded five stars, and I would likely say that both are among my favorite books of the year. This experience is certainly making me question my previously reductionist view of audio books. Because I only listened to the book in bits and pieces when driving, it took me much longer to finish than it would have if I had read it on the page. That afforded me more time to ponder the author’s words. I’ll probably still mostly limit my audio books to ones I’m afraid I might not get to otherwise, but I now appreciate that it is a different, but not a lesser, experience than reading it from the page—just as reading the physical copy of a book versus a digital copy is a different experience, just as reading a hardcover copy versus a paperback is a different experience.
Actually, for a while at the start of INHERITANCE, I was highly skeptical of it. A lot of the first leg of the book is more autobiography than it is inspection of Woods’ whiteness, but he drops in a sentence at the end of each chapter awkwardly tying the events of his childhood to race, each time with a “Whiteness is…” tag. I was not particularly interested in Woods’ childhood and the connections to race did feel shoehorned in, but as the book tracks his growth into adulthood, he becomes more and more aware of his whiteness, the privileges it has afforded him, and the terrible history of suffering whiteness generally, and his family specifically, have inflicted on Black Americans. The first quote I wrote down, which would be one of many (and bear in mind that each time I wanted to save a quote, I had to pause and un-pause the recording repeatedly as I dictated the words into the Notes app on my phone a partial sentence at a time), came when he and his then-girlfriend watched television coverage of the riots in response to the police beating of Rodney King. They shut off the television and started making out, and as Woods reflects on this he recognizes, “Whiteness allowed us the luxury of watching a riot recreationally.”
From that initial recognition of how insulated he is because of his whiteness from the horrors that said whiteness inflicts, Woods begins looking at his life and his community with more and more scrutiny, at times aware of the ways he is privileged, as when he did poorly in school and got into trouble with the law for drug use but was saved from a DUI conviction by the wink-and-a-nod interference of his locally famous grandfather, and still managed to get a scholarship to college nonetheless based on his SAT score. He marvels, “My performance on a single test had negated all of my fuckery. Whiteness was immediate forgiveness, and also assistance.” There remain other times when he’s unthinkingly indifferent about, say, discussing the murder of a Black man by his great-grandfather in the years after the Civil Wo-ah in the presence of an elderly Black man (What? It wasn’t me who commit the murder! What do you have to be upset about?) or falls victim to the tendency toward wanting recognition for his racial consciousness, as when he objects to claims that he acted in a racist manner as a high school teacher simply because he had previously worked with a great number of Black students. These instances of self-ignorance are being presented by him now in an effort to be vulnerable, to put as much of a critical lens on himself as he does on his ancestors, including his father (more on this in a moment). The fact that Woods is being so open about his own participation in the oppressive culture of whiteness makes me a little resentful of the number of top Goodreads reviews which criticize the book as being self-satisfied. That’s certainly what I feared the book would be when I first decided to listen to it in audio format, but it’s hard for me to understand how anybody could continue to feel that way after consuming it—this is a book in which the author rejects any special dispensation: “Eventually, I would come to see each of my evasions, every insistence on my innocence, every deflection of my responsibility as an echo: not of the earlier crime, but of its cover-up. The cover-up that constitutes the contemporary sense of whiteness has whitewashed the crimes of our history and the privileges of our present so we are able to think of ourselves as victims.”
That said, a great deal of the book is about the bubbling rage he feels as he becomes more cognizant of how bone-deep racism has been baked into whiteness as an identity, especially in the political history of his home state of South Carolina, which implicates his ancestors, and in the gross bigotry of the contemporary Republican party, which implicates his father. He looks at the history of slavery in South Carolina and the United States generally through new eyes, truly recognizing for the first time the nightmare whiteness created. You may be thinking, what, do you want a trophy for recognizing that slavery was bad? But Woods’ use of the word cover-up is apt: there has been no reckoning. Rather than face the reality of what they—we—did, white people for the last 160 years have attempted to evade responsibility. We’ve convinced ourselves that everybody has equal opportunities and that our advantages are just evidence of our merit; we’ve insisted that the Confederate flag only represents some indeterminate “heritage”; and though some whites feel their whiteness indicted when a horror like the 2015 massacre by a white supremacist at a Charleston (SC) church occurs, there are dozens more who believe it justifies their own whiteness. Woods writes that it’s easy to imagine “all the casually racist white people now saying, ‘See? I’m not racist. I don’t go shooting up Black churches or anything.’”
The author uses the term concentration camps to describe what our white forebears referred to as “plantations”. If your instinct is to think that phraseology absurd or alarmist, that’s evidence of how deeply entrenched the cover-up has been. The term concentration camp is, if anything, too euphemistic for the brutality we whites inflicted on our victims. “We did this,” Woods writes. “We bought and sold, we raped and tortured, we put heads upon pikes at the mile markers, we gouged and burned and cut flesh, we engaged in every form of indignity. I needed to go back only three generations to find an ancestor who’d fought in a war for the right to treat people as property.” He goes on:
Again, if your knee-jerk reaction here is to argue about Thomas Jefferson’s valuable contributions to American government, consider the trade-off you are so blithely making. We don’t valorize Adolf Hitler’s political acumen while considering his racist ideology merely a sad asterisk on his legacy. Are Jefferson’s actions of dehumanizing, brutalizing and raping the people he held in bondage forgivable because they are “less bad” than Hitler? This is the same mindset that says anything short of shooting up a Black church isn’t racist. Or are you reluctant to consider Jefferson a monster because of what it means for your own identity? That’s the long-term effects of the cover-up designed to make us underappreciate the scale of the terror white people have inflicted. Woods writes:
Woods asks, rightfully, what it means for us, as white people, “to be heir to that kind of horror”. The fact is that “[w]e white people have not even started to plumb the depth of our ancestors’ depravity”, and that “makes us ever more susceptible to its return.” Yet as a result of the cover-up orchestrated by our predecessors, the conspiracy of silence and violence, “[i]nstead of inheriting an attitude that swore ‘Never again’, I had inherited one that promised, ‘The South will rise again.”
As I touched on above, part of the author’s racial awareness was channeled into a desire to shed light upon and perhaps even avenge a murder motivated by racism which his great-grandfather had committed; but another large part of this awakening was channeled into anger at his father. My parents and I—my father especially—had a falling out after the 2016 election. All at once I recognized how deeply invidious the Republican party was and always had been, how the sole unifying belief animating it was racism, and how actively my dad participated in that system. For these reasons, I felt a real kinship with Woods as he describes himself getting on the subway after an argument with his father: “I felt as if the entire Republican idea that Dad espoused so fervently was just an attempt to go back to that segregated world in which he was infinitely privileged while considering himself as disadvantaged as his Black neighbors who’d had to fight for 34 years just for the right to school buses. The doors opened and I got on the train, furious and disgusted at what I saw as a willful lack of courage, an abrogation of reality.” Those last phrases—willful lack of courage and abrogation of reality—they so perfectly encapsulate my own feelings of distress for MY father stubbornly holding fast with the party of, among other things, Donald Trump.
At another point, while with his dad Woods sees a monument to a Confederate soldier erected outside of a courthouse. Because of his new racial mindfulness, it strikes Woods for the first time how dystopian this all is. A monument to a traitor who fought in defense of an unspeakable abuse of human rights… in front of a courthouse, sending a clear message of hate to anybody who can see it, which most white people can’t. Woods thinks of his father as he considers the scene: “He had willed this world to me, one where a statue like this could sit for 100 years unremarked upon in front a courthouse proclaiming devotion to the idea of white supremacy, for which the white men of this region . . . had been ready to die. This monstrosity was my inheritance. It was all of ours.” He had willed this world to me, that wording… it suggests intent. He, Woods’ father, had willed this world to him, this is what his father wanted. In my day job as an APS investigator, we evaluate abuse in terms of intent: to substantiate and put abusers on a state-wide registry, their act must have been done intentionally, willfully, or recklessly. It feels like his father’s, and by the same token my father’s, racism/Republicanism isn’t of a kind with the regular blindness of whiteness because of how enthusiastically it is maintained. It feels, at the very least, reckless. Our parents are a person or entity who knows or clearly should know (RCW 74.34.020) better. All of this is to say that the later portions of the book where this division between the author and his father becomes more prevalent (a conflict which uncoincidentally also intensified during the Trump years) were, to me, deeply resonant. “I still felt that fury gnawing at me,” Woods writes. “I needed him to be better, even at this extreme moment… and he refused.” This frustration, the heartache underlying it, I feel it too. Lord, do I feel it too.
Woods of course feels obligated to come up with some answer to that feeling so the book doesn’t have a completely cynical ending. Okay, you have a growing awareness of the significance and long-term scars a history of de jure racial violence has left on us as a people and as individuals—the end? Expecting him to have the answer for how to break through to white people even more firmly entrenched in racial blindness than we remain is a huge ask, but the book cries out for it. Woods recognizes that he had “at least in part, been trying to save [his] dad. On some subconscious level, I thought that if I could find the key to the clue he had given to me, maybe I could convince him, maybe I could save him from his own whiteness.” Ultimately, my impression is that Woods never came to terms with his father’s racist impulses, but helped temper that anger by recognizing that “I needed to go back and examine my own life with the same eye I had given to [his great-grandfather] I.M. Woods. I am Woods. I am whiteness, imbued with the wretched history of my people. Whiteness is a reckoning, a responsibility, and an ever-present threat. I can save no one but myself.” I think that that relentless interrogation of oneself is an important way to develop a healthy sense of compassion: if you recall how easy it was to become inured to reality, to not see your own whiteness, in all of the forms it takes, it becomes easier to understand how others can not see theirs.
There’s probably a good argument that the book would be stronger if it put more emphasis, in the end, on that self-interrogation aspect of his revelations. That is, rather than self-interrogation being the answer to the question “How do I make peace with my aging father?” self-interrogation could have been the question and the answer could be specific tactics about how to maintain racial awareness in the face of so many culture-wide temptations to slip back into indifference. But then, Woods was upfront about his intentions from the beginning. The book is, in the end, a memoir, an autobiography—a book about himself. And the title of the book is INHERITANCE; grappling with the double-edged curse that was both unwittingly and, well, like I said, at the very least recklessly passed down to him from his father seems a fitting way to conclude the story. To me it doesn’t undermine the narrative about Woods’ racial awakening more broadly. It addresses two things which are often lost when white people do begin to become more conscious of their whiteness: the struggle to cope with other white people who seemingly refuse to see what’s become so obvious to you, and the concomitant struggle to continue holding yourself accountable, to offer “plausible culpability” (to use Woods’ terms). It is imperative to both recognize that whiteness has served as “an illusion of innocence and the freedom not to notice race” and recognize it as an obligation to subvert the illusion whenever it becomes apparent.
I was hugely impressed by this book in the end. While the connections to his whiteness were admittedly a bit contrived at the start, the book quickly finds its groove and before long was brimming with powerful and poignant thoughts. In my opinion, it is truly excellent stuff.
Actually, for a while at the start of INHERITANCE, I was highly skeptical of it. A lot of the first leg of the book is more autobiography than it is inspection of Woods’ whiteness, but he drops in a sentence at the end of each chapter awkwardly tying the events of his childhood to race, each time with a “Whiteness is…” tag. I was not particularly interested in Woods’ childhood and the connections to race did feel shoehorned in, but as the book tracks his growth into adulthood, he becomes more and more aware of his whiteness, the privileges it has afforded him, and the terrible history of suffering whiteness generally, and his family specifically, have inflicted on Black Americans. The first quote I wrote down, which would be one of many (and bear in mind that each time I wanted to save a quote, I had to pause and un-pause the recording repeatedly as I dictated the words into the Notes app on my phone a partial sentence at a time), came when he and his then-girlfriend watched television coverage of the riots in response to the police beating of Rodney King. They shut off the television and started making out, and as Woods reflects on this he recognizes, “Whiteness allowed us the luxury of watching a riot recreationally.”
From that initial recognition of how insulated he is because of his whiteness from the horrors that said whiteness inflicts, Woods begins looking at his life and his community with more and more scrutiny, at times aware of the ways he is privileged, as when he did poorly in school and got into trouble with the law for drug use but was saved from a DUI conviction by the wink-and-a-nod interference of his locally famous grandfather, and still managed to get a scholarship to college nonetheless based on his SAT score. He marvels, “My performance on a single test had negated all of my fuckery. Whiteness was immediate forgiveness, and also assistance.” There remain other times when he’s unthinkingly indifferent about, say, discussing the murder of a Black man by his great-grandfather in the years after the Civil Wo-ah in the presence of an elderly Black man (What? It wasn’t me who commit the murder! What do you have to be upset about?) or falls victim to the tendency toward wanting recognition for his racial consciousness, as when he objects to claims that he acted in a racist manner as a high school teacher simply because he had previously worked with a great number of Black students. These instances of self-ignorance are being presented by him now in an effort to be vulnerable, to put as much of a critical lens on himself as he does on his ancestors, including his father (more on this in a moment). The fact that Woods is being so open about his own participation in the oppressive culture of whiteness makes me a little resentful of the number of top Goodreads reviews which criticize the book as being self-satisfied. That’s certainly what I feared the book would be when I first decided to listen to it in audio format, but it’s hard for me to understand how anybody could continue to feel that way after consuming it—this is a book in which the author rejects any special dispensation: “Eventually, I would come to see each of my evasions, every insistence on my innocence, every deflection of my responsibility as an echo: not of the earlier crime, but of its cover-up. The cover-up that constitutes the contemporary sense of whiteness has whitewashed the crimes of our history and the privileges of our present so we are able to think of ourselves as victims.”
That said, a great deal of the book is about the bubbling rage he feels as he becomes more cognizant of how bone-deep racism has been baked into whiteness as an identity, especially in the political history of his home state of South Carolina, which implicates his ancestors, and in the gross bigotry of the contemporary Republican party, which implicates his father. He looks at the history of slavery in South Carolina and the United States generally through new eyes, truly recognizing for the first time the nightmare whiteness created. You may be thinking, what, do you want a trophy for recognizing that slavery was bad? But Woods’ use of the word cover-up is apt: there has been no reckoning. Rather than face the reality of what they—we—did, white people for the last 160 years have attempted to evade responsibility. We’ve convinced ourselves that everybody has equal opportunities and that our advantages are just evidence of our merit; we’ve insisted that the Confederate flag only represents some indeterminate “heritage”; and though some whites feel their whiteness indicted when a horror like the 2015 massacre by a white supremacist at a Charleston (SC) church occurs, there are dozens more who believe it justifies their own whiteness. Woods writes that it’s easy to imagine “all the casually racist white people now saying, ‘See? I’m not racist. I don’t go shooting up Black churches or anything.’”
The author uses the term concentration camps to describe what our white forebears referred to as “plantations”. If your instinct is to think that phraseology absurd or alarmist, that’s evidence of how deeply entrenched the cover-up has been. The term concentration camp is, if anything, too euphemistic for the brutality we whites inflicted on our victims. “We did this,” Woods writes. “We bought and sold, we raped and tortured, we put heads upon pikes at the mile markers, we gouged and burned and cut flesh, we engaged in every form of indignity. I needed to go back only three generations to find an ancestor who’d fought in a war for the right to treat people as property.” He goes on:
“I understood how so many northern whites had been able to wear cotton, profit off it without thinking of the conditions under which it was grown, because I did something similar every day when I used my iPhone with the vague knowledge of the horrible conditions the construction of that device required. But to live in this house in the 19th century, in the middle of a concentration camp, and to consider that way of living the natural, right, and highest form of human life while witnessing and inflicting tremendous suffering every single day—that was almost unimaginable. Who could live among people and believe them to be property? We white people have still not asked this question of ourselves, failing to interrogate the mindset that made us. There is some deeply fucked up shit just a few generations back and it is still destroying us, and we won’t ever be able to look at it as long as we want to heroize men like Thomas Jefferson. By any moral standard, a human who believed he had the right to own other humans is a monster. We have to come to terms with this as a culture, or else we shall remain monsters as individuals, granting ourselves all the same ethical excuses and heroic fantasies that we grant the slavers that we still memorialize.”
Again, if your knee-jerk reaction here is to argue about Thomas Jefferson’s valuable contributions to American government, consider the trade-off you are so blithely making. We don’t valorize Adolf Hitler’s political acumen while considering his racist ideology merely a sad asterisk on his legacy. Are Jefferson’s actions of dehumanizing, brutalizing and raping the people he held in bondage forgivable because they are “less bad” than Hitler? This is the same mindset that says anything short of shooting up a Black church isn’t racist. Or are you reluctant to consider Jefferson a monster because of what it means for your own identity? That’s the long-term effects of the cover-up designed to make us underappreciate the scale of the terror white people have inflicted. Woods writes:
“The whites knew how bad the slave system had been and they were terrified that Black people, if they had any power at all, would demand revenge. They were certain of this desire for vengeance because if anyone treated them the way they had treated their slaves, they would be ready to burn down the world. And so they covered the crimes up and enforced the cover-up with violence while trying to claw back as much power as possible. They passed down the cover-up and the attitudes that protect it to their children, where it became history, holy writ, and a replacement of reality.”
Woods asks, rightfully, what it means for us, as white people, “to be heir to that kind of horror”. The fact is that “[w]e white people have not even started to plumb the depth of our ancestors’ depravity”, and that “makes us ever more susceptible to its return.” Yet as a result of the cover-up orchestrated by our predecessors, the conspiracy of silence and violence, “[i]nstead of inheriting an attitude that swore ‘Never again’, I had inherited one that promised, ‘The South will rise again.”
As I touched on above, part of the author’s racial awareness was channeled into a desire to shed light upon and perhaps even avenge a murder motivated by racism which his great-grandfather had committed; but another large part of this awakening was channeled into anger at his father. My parents and I—my father especially—had a falling out after the 2016 election. All at once I recognized how deeply invidious the Republican party was and always had been, how the sole unifying belief animating it was racism, and how actively my dad participated in that system. For these reasons, I felt a real kinship with Woods as he describes himself getting on the subway after an argument with his father: “I felt as if the entire Republican idea that Dad espoused so fervently was just an attempt to go back to that segregated world in which he was infinitely privileged while considering himself as disadvantaged as his Black neighbors who’d had to fight for 34 years just for the right to school buses. The doors opened and I got on the train, furious and disgusted at what I saw as a willful lack of courage, an abrogation of reality.” Those last phrases—willful lack of courage and abrogation of reality—they so perfectly encapsulate my own feelings of distress for MY father stubbornly holding fast with the party of, among other things, Donald Trump.
At another point, while with his dad Woods sees a monument to a Confederate soldier erected outside of a courthouse. Because of his new racial mindfulness, it strikes Woods for the first time how dystopian this all is. A monument to a traitor who fought in defense of an unspeakable abuse of human rights… in front of a courthouse, sending a clear message of hate to anybody who can see it, which most white people can’t. Woods thinks of his father as he considers the scene: “He had willed this world to me, one where a statue like this could sit for 100 years unremarked upon in front a courthouse proclaiming devotion to the idea of white supremacy, for which the white men of this region . . . had been ready to die. This monstrosity was my inheritance. It was all of ours.” He had willed this world to me, that wording… it suggests intent. He, Woods’ father, had willed this world to him, this is what his father wanted. In my day job as an APS investigator, we evaluate abuse in terms of intent: to substantiate and put abusers on a state-wide registry, their act must have been done intentionally, willfully, or recklessly. It feels like his father’s, and by the same token my father’s, racism/Republicanism isn’t of a kind with the regular blindness of whiteness because of how enthusiastically it is maintained. It feels, at the very least, reckless. Our parents are a person or entity who knows or clearly should know (RCW 74.34.020) better. All of this is to say that the later portions of the book where this division between the author and his father becomes more prevalent (a conflict which uncoincidentally also intensified during the Trump years) were, to me, deeply resonant. “I still felt that fury gnawing at me,” Woods writes. “I needed him to be better, even at this extreme moment… and he refused.” This frustration, the heartache underlying it, I feel it too. Lord, do I feel it too.
Woods of course feels obligated to come up with some answer to that feeling so the book doesn’t have a completely cynical ending. Okay, you have a growing awareness of the significance and long-term scars a history of de jure racial violence has left on us as a people and as individuals—the end? Expecting him to have the answer for how to break through to white people even more firmly entrenched in racial blindness than we remain is a huge ask, but the book cries out for it. Woods recognizes that he had “at least in part, been trying to save [his] dad. On some subconscious level, I thought that if I could find the key to the clue he had given to me, maybe I could convince him, maybe I could save him from his own whiteness.” Ultimately, my impression is that Woods never came to terms with his father’s racist impulses, but helped temper that anger by recognizing that “I needed to go back and examine my own life with the same eye I had given to [his great-grandfather] I.M. Woods. I am Woods. I am whiteness, imbued with the wretched history of my people. Whiteness is a reckoning, a responsibility, and an ever-present threat. I can save no one but myself.” I think that that relentless interrogation of oneself is an important way to develop a healthy sense of compassion: if you recall how easy it was to become inured to reality, to not see your own whiteness, in all of the forms it takes, it becomes easier to understand how others can not see theirs.
There’s probably a good argument that the book would be stronger if it put more emphasis, in the end, on that self-interrogation aspect of his revelations. That is, rather than self-interrogation being the answer to the question “How do I make peace with my aging father?” self-interrogation could have been the question and the answer could be specific tactics about how to maintain racial awareness in the face of so many culture-wide temptations to slip back into indifference. But then, Woods was upfront about his intentions from the beginning. The book is, in the end, a memoir, an autobiography—a book about himself. And the title of the book is INHERITANCE; grappling with the double-edged curse that was both unwittingly and, well, like I said, at the very least recklessly passed down to him from his father seems a fitting way to conclude the story. To me it doesn’t undermine the narrative about Woods’ racial awakening more broadly. It addresses two things which are often lost when white people do begin to become more conscious of their whiteness: the struggle to cope with other white people who seemingly refuse to see what’s become so obvious to you, and the concomitant struggle to continue holding yourself accountable, to offer “plausible culpability” (to use Woods’ terms). It is imperative to both recognize that whiteness has served as “an illusion of innocence and the freedom not to notice race” and recognize it as an obligation to subvert the illusion whenever it becomes apparent.
I was hugely impressed by this book in the end. While the connections to his whiteness were admittedly a bit contrived at the start, the book quickly finds its groove and before long was brimming with powerful and poignant thoughts. In my opinion, it is truly excellent stuff.
August 24, 2022
This is a really good read. And a really important one, especially for white people and probably especially for white men.
Baynard does a great job of providing a narrative that’s easy to follow, woven with self-reflection and broader reflection on race, history and family.
I thought some of the dialogue was a liiiittle clunky and at times the writing felt a little heavy handed. But perhaps the heavy handed-ness was intentional. I am almost certain it is necessary for some (probably all) readers to some degree.
Overall a really fantastic book. An important book on a topic that isn’t examined this personally very often.
Baynard does a great job of providing a narrative that’s easy to follow, woven with self-reflection and broader reflection on race, history and family.
I thought some of the dialogue was a liiiittle clunky and at times the writing felt a little heavy handed. But perhaps the heavy handed-ness was intentional. I am almost certain it is necessary for some (probably all) readers to some degree.
Overall a really fantastic book. An important book on a topic that isn’t examined this personally very often.
October 18, 2022
Picked this up after hearing him interviewed on NPR a few weeks back. I really enjoyed the author's writing style and his bracing look at his own family history. The parts of the book that were focused on the myths that were told and the actual true stories that occurred were quite enlightening. The first half of the book was much more about his own bad behavior and crazy drug-addled teenage years than I had expected to read in a book grappling with race. I guess he included those many chapters to serve as the basis for the kinds of behavior that white dudes are allowed to get away with and to show his own personal growth. I guess even typing this review now maybe I am too harsh in my criticism of the story he tells. After all, he points out many times how the rebel white boy had always been a feature of the white supremacist system in America, so maybe those many chapters were a necessary foundation. Even so, it was compelling to read and I really flew through this book much faster than any other recent nonfiction I've tried to finish. But I found myself at the end of the book wishing that the back half of the book had been longer and had more. I wanted a lot more about the Freddy Gray protests in Baltimore, the book he wrote about the sheriff, his reporting on the Charlottesville protests, and the conflicts with his family about politics. Maybe a little less exhibitionism in the first half and more about the racist origins of NASCAR, or more about the economy that post-war Jim Crow laws enabled. I wanted a lot more information about his ancestor who likely lynched a man after the Wo-ah and was lauded for it, and how people to this day elide over the horrors that contributed to building this country. I hope he continues to write about this.
January 5, 2023
I’m giving this book three stars because the writing is excellent— you can tell the author was a poet before he got into journalism.
The book itself is… okay. As a biracial woman who grew up in the South, I understand struggling with whiteness and the process of unlearning racist ideologies. I just can’t really put a finger on why I didn’t like the author… I feel like he was reaching a little too far to try to connect things that happened to him with the themes of the book.
There are several good points about whiteness and it’s privileges, but none of them were groundbreaking. I respect anybody’s journey to become antiracist, but writing an entire novel about your own experiences while doing so feels kind of self serving? I’ll admit it was interesting to witness the process of a Southern white man discover racism (in himself and those he loved) in real time.
The book itself is… okay. As a biracial woman who grew up in the South, I understand struggling with whiteness and the process of unlearning racist ideologies. I just can’t really put a finger on why I didn’t like the author… I feel like he was reaching a little too far to try to connect things that happened to him with the themes of the book.
There are several good points about whiteness and it’s privileges, but none of them were groundbreaking. I respect anybody’s journey to become antiracist, but writing an entire novel about your own experiences while doing so feels kind of self serving? I’ll admit it was interesting to witness the process of a Southern white man discover racism (in himself and those he loved) in real time.
March 23, 2024
An admirable attempt with subpar execution. Like others, I agree that examining our witness is extremely important, and I don’t knock Woods’ attempt to do so. However, this book is full of basic, surface-level reflections about whiteness that anyone who has spent even the smallest amount of time considering racial power dynamics already understands.
The book also has an unnecessary amount of detail about Woods' life. He makes strained attempts to connect his experiences with observations about whiteness, but it often feels shallow and forced, like he's trying to hide the incessant navel-gazing in faux profoundness.
At one point Woods waxes poetic about how "whiteness is a conspiracy of both silence and violence." It's as if he wants a gold star for not only understanding his privilege, but understanding it poetically.
Finally, even in a book where he proports to uncover the dark side of his own whiteness, Woods never fails to paint himself in the best light with respect to racial politics. We never hear his own secret racist thoughts, which he undoubtably had. He also depicts his young self as the rebel, the one who would vote for a black man and who questions the confederacy and his racist friends and family.
It's simultaneously unsurprising and lamentable that this is the best a straight, cis, white man can do, but the whole book screams straight, cis, white man, so I guess he accomplished that? Woods still has a lot to learn, but I hope he continues along the path he's started on.
The book also has an unnecessary amount of detail about Woods' life. He makes strained attempts to connect his experiences with observations about whiteness, but it often feels shallow and forced, like he's trying to hide the incessant navel-gazing in faux profoundness.
At one point Woods waxes poetic about how "whiteness is a conspiracy of both silence and violence." It's as if he wants a gold star for not only understanding his privilege, but understanding it poetically.
Finally, even in a book where he proports to uncover the dark side of his own whiteness, Woods never fails to paint himself in the best light with respect to racial politics. We never hear his own secret racist thoughts, which he undoubtably had. He also depicts his young self as the rebel, the one who would vote for a black man and who questions the confederacy and his racist friends and family.
It's simultaneously unsurprising and lamentable that this is the best a straight, cis, white man can do, but the whole book screams straight, cis, white man, so I guess he accomplished that? Woods still has a lot to learn, but I hope he continues along the path he's started on.
October 14, 2023
This is a hard one to review bc I believe it's vitally important for white people to examine whiteness. The intent to do this and attempt to understand it in the context of one's own experiences, to really personalize how it plays in a white person's life should be really something that spreads more throughout society as a concept. With that said, I'm not sure this book does this despite its claim to do so. It felt very much like a life story in which the examination part was only tacked on at the end of each chapter for a few sentences. But the recounting of his own life events took not only center stage but all the stage. Oddly enough, it certainly performs as an example of white male preoccupation with the self as the star of the world show.
But I don't want to dissuade the author from the journey of learning, which did strike me as genuine but simply quite early in the process of self examination. Perhaps this book would have been better delivered after more growth. The direction is good, so keep working, keep growing. I look forward to what more in-depth understanding will bring.
But I don't want to dissuade the author from the journey of learning, which did strike me as genuine but simply quite early in the process of self examination. Perhaps this book would have been better delivered after more growth. The direction is good, so keep working, keep growing. I look forward to what more in-depth understanding will bring.
November 21, 2022
Baynard Woods is a journalist based in Baltimore. He's orginally from South Carolina and he seems not to be happy with how his skin color and family history was part of the history of this area. We see, through his first person storytelling, that he just can't totally accept his family's contributions to it. His platitudes about "Whiteness" towards the end of each chapter become the focus of the final chapters and leaves this 66 year old New Englander very uncomfortable.
This is an angry book. Wood's wife keeps reminding him that "this isn't about you" but in fact it is.As a middle class white southerner, Woods tries at first to say he's not to blame for the fact he's "inherited" whiteness.Not only that his family history is that of people who owned other people and used them in every sense of the word. Itgets a 4 star rating
[Disclaimer:I recieved this book froman outside source and chose to read and review it]
This is an angry book. Wood's wife keeps reminding him that "this isn't about you" but in fact it is.As a middle class white southerner, Woods tries at first to say he's not to blame for the fact he's "inherited" whiteness.Not only that his family history is that of people who owned other people and used them in every sense of the word. Itgets a 4 star rating
[Disclaimer:I recieved this book froman outside source and chose to read and review it]
September 25, 2022
4.25/5
'Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness' by Baynard Woods is an insightful memoir where Woods walks the reader through his life, particularly with an eye to his evolving understanding of his own whiteness. Looking back from his current perspective, Woods highlights and pokes at the underlying theme of white privilege throughout his life and how he slowly learned more about his family's history. Woods presents his own story with insight into how other white people can look at their own lives and their family's past. I think it is an important read for anyone who is white and looking to learn more about their relationship with whiteness. The different aspects that Woods delves into can pose a helpful framework for us to look at our own lives and see where and how much whiteness and white supremacy have been (and are) present.
'Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness' by Baynard Woods is an insightful memoir where Woods walks the reader through his life, particularly with an eye to his evolving understanding of his own whiteness. Looking back from his current perspective, Woods highlights and pokes at the underlying theme of white privilege throughout his life and how he slowly learned more about his family's history. Woods presents his own story with insight into how other white people can look at their own lives and their family's past. I think it is an important read for anyone who is white and looking to learn more about their relationship with whiteness. The different aspects that Woods delves into can pose a helpful framework for us to look at our own lives and see where and how much whiteness and white supremacy have been (and are) present.
March 8, 2023
Though reluctant to give my time to yet another white man, the concept for Baynard Woods’ project as I first heard on NPR’s Code Switch was too intriguing to pass up. I was promised an account of a Southerner with Confederate ancestors attempting to chronicle his whiteness—a myth with all-too-real implications—a man grappling with the legacy of cover-ups passed down through generations of family, and got so much more. A treatise on whiteness in all its insidiousness and ignorance and what it means to inherit, I flew through the audiobook.
December 3, 2023
lots of thoughts and also not exactly sure what to say. I guess, ultimately, I don't think this book is enough? there were some helpful/standout parts and analysis but a lot felt like it didn't go far enough. I don't know, maybe it is an impossible task or at least impossible in book/memoir form. but we as white people should continue to try and figure out the best way to interrogate our own race so I dont want to discourage it either.
July 11, 2022
A complex reflective memoir by a man raised in the south on the nature of whiteness and the silence that hide structural and overt racism in the way we talk about and confront our personal, regional, and national histories. Beautifully written. As a white woman who lives in a black majority area, I really appreciated the questions the book asks me to ask myself.
May 19, 2023
I expected this to be more anti-racism work and less memoir. I didn’t hate it but he didn’t go deep enough. So many times he would write something that started to show he understood his privilege…and then he wouldn’t quite get there. That being said, he seems genuinely committed to learning so I didn’t hate his perspective.
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August 19, 2023An interesting story of a man trying to come to terms with his whiteness. He not only wants to recognize what his ancestors did, but find ways to honor the victims of their racist actions. I thought it was interesting that he chose to cross out his name as the author of the book. Enjoyed the story.
August 14, 2022
Most important book I’ve read thus far this year. It doesn’t center whiteness as much as interrogate it. White guilt is an objective fact, not a feeling or a theory. There is no absolution, only engagement.
November 18, 2023
I saw a lot of my own life experience in Baynard's words and I feel this book helped me understand how to better speak to the acknowledgements I am trying to make on my own privilege in life. Well written, heavy at times, definitely worth the read.
January 23, 2025
I'm afraid I had to give up on this one. This was just one very unlikable guy. Maybe he gets better as he gets older, but I really don't know how his parents put up with him. Perhaps I should have finished before passing judgement, but my stack of great books is to large to waste time on this one.
August 16, 2022
A hard, but necessary, read.
October 30, 2022
Strong interrogation of how whiteness benefited the author personally. Covers range of history from pr civil war through recent events.
January 18, 2023
A 2022 staff favorite recommended by Natalie. Check our catalog: https://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore...
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