Inheritance Quotes

“The majority of white people saw it and loved it, bringing this racist strongman to the White House. In doing so, they were endorsing a view of the world that I knew. It was the unreconstructed southern white view of history, a view where to be white meant to be both indignantly privileged and also angry and aggrieved, always demanding more. I was pissed off and disgusted with Mom and Dad and with all of the generations of our family who had never addressed slavery or Jim Crow. We’d invented the goddamn “alternative facts” with our myths about plantations, slavery, and the Civil War. It was an awful time to be white, but it was an even worse time to be Black or Mexican or Muslim or anyone else who suffered because of our whiteness.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“I realized this was the logic of whiteness. Always deflect and defer and change the subject when your innocence is questioned, your power noted. Whiteness is like a chameleon, camouflaging its own power in order to maintain its simultaneous sense of innocence.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“I knew the appeal of having a group of whites to see as worse than yourself. We could look down on them for being racist at the same time they kept us from seeing our own racism.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“Whiteness is a conspiracy of both silence and violence.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“the attempt to keep up appearances as the All-American Southern White Christian Middle-Class family. It felt as if families like mine just passed down this lie over the generations. I was a part of this farce, and it bothered me. We often think of whiteness as the complexion of our skin, but whiteness is a fantasy that tries to minimize our failings and maximize our power. I knew from spending time with my friends’ families that this fabrication played out differently inside every white home, but that night at my house, the worst night we’d ever weathered, I felt as if I saw through the face of whiteness and glimpsed the hollowness inside.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness