THE JOHN BROWN PARTY LINKS
The John Brown Party recognizes that all action and practice must be informed by critical thinking, shaped by theoretical understanding, and supported/refuted by rigorous scholarship. Here is a brief list of some of the folks, books, organizations and networks* that have all contributed to the initial development and ongoing reinforcement of the values, ethics, and principles that embody the John Brown Party. We have tried to provide a pretty inclusive, wide-ranging selection from the purely academic, to the predominantly journalistic, to the down-right biographical. Each takes a differing approach to understanding whiteness as an abstract social construct, as a system of politics and values, and as the manifestation of every-day lived experiences and relationships.
If there are any links you would like to see added to this section, please email us at: johnbrow@johnbrownparty.org We will do our best to regularly update these lists with your recommendations.
(*Disclaimer: Any reference to or mention of an individual, published work, or organization does not, in any way, reflect their association with or approval of the John Brown Party or any views contained herein...nor does it necessarily mean we fully concur with all of their views either!).
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FOLKS, ORGANIZATIONS & NETWORKS:
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A BRIEF READING LIST ON WHITE IDENTITY, SUPREMACY & ANTRIRACISM
(Note: Please click on the image below to purchase the book through Amazon.com. If you link to the order page though the JBP, a small percentage of the proceeds are donated to our organization. We are grateful for your support and hope you enjoy the readings as much as we did!)
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Authors and Titles:
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Baldwin, James- The Price of the Ticket: Collected Essays 1948-1984
*This is the most comprehensive anthology of all of Baldwin's non-fiction work. It includes the full text from: The Fire Next Time (including My Dungeon Shook), Notes of a Native Son, A Talk to Teachers, and many other literary contributions from one of the most intensely honest and passionate essayists on whiteness.
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Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo- Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
*Gets to the heart of it. How racism proliferates in a time when racism is widely presumed to have completely ceased or, if anything, is perceived to have been reversed against whites. How racism persists in a time when no one any longer identifies as a racist!
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Clark, Christine- Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity
*A nice overview of many different aspects of whiteness written from a variety of perspectives. At times historical, at times sociological, and at times autobiographical, it is a worthwhile read for folks who may want to read a handful of essays rather than one massive book.
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Conley, Dalton- Honky
*An autobiographical approach to understanding whiteness from the eyes of a white man looking back on his days growing up in New York City.
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DuBois, WEB: John Brown
*Still one of the most informative and insightful works on John Brown, written by one of the greatest intellectuals to ever live. DuBois' work utilizes an analysis of John Brown in order to really emphasize an exploration of Black American identity development.
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Dyer, Richard: White
*Traces the representation of whiteness in Western visual culture, focusing on photography, fine art, cinema, television and advertising. Beautifully shows how whiteness permeates every feature of Western visual culture yet, for the most part, remains unengaged, unexplored, and unremarked.
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Frankenberg, Ruth: Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
*Examines the complex and vacillating cultural manifestations of whiteness as practice rather than merely as an object. Argues that whiteness "makes itself invisible precisely by asserting its normalcy, its transparency, in contrast with the marking of others on which its transparency depends." The collection of essays attempts to decentralize the normative features of whiteness by not allowing them to remain unengaged and unremarked.
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Frankenberg, Ruth- White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
*Documents the life histories of 30 white women in order to identify the significance of whiteness in structuring racial hierarchies and relationships. An important read for anyone interested in better understanding the interplay of race, gender, and power.
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Hill, Mike- Whiteness: A Critical Reader
*A mutlidisciplinary collection of essays on whiteness as it related to politics, media and popular culture, literature, pedagogy, theoretical scholarship, and philosophy.
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Howard, Gary R: We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools
*A necessary book for any white person who is thinking about teaching, especially in multiracial classrooms. Provides valuable strategies for embracing and implementing culturally-responsive teaching practices.
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Ignatiev, Noel: How the Irish became White
*This book challenges dominant narratives that Irish American immigrants, once economically and socially marginalized across the Atlantic, were somehow passive agents in their indoctrination into a white identity in the States. Like the books of Roedgier and Jacobson, Ignatiev brilliantly shows how Irish immigrants actively procured a white identity by oppressing and terrorizing Black folks through discriminatory labor practices, enacting degrading minstrel shows, or by instigating murderous race riots.
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Ignatiev, Noel & John Garvey- Race Traitor
*These are the folks who offer some of the most honest, compelling, and scathing critiques of whiteness available in the literature. From their standpoint, whiteness is nothing but an expression of racial privilege. Conforming to a white identity inherently means that one conforms to a system of white supremacy. In that sense, treason to whiteness, as they argue, is loyalty to humanity.
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Jacobson, Matthew F- Whiteness of a Different Color: European immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
*One of the best historical accounts of the way in which ethnic Europeans, who were once considered members of their own immutable races (Teutons, Slavs, Iberians, Hebrews, etc.), became white. His analysis demonstrates that race is not the product of natural differences but the result of a series of legal, political and cultural shifts in how we came to identify and make meaning of people.
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Jensen, Robert L- The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
*An important books that inverts the paradigm about who it is that needs to deal with the "race problem." Challenges white people to conceptualize ourselves as part of the problem rather than to think of racism as a problem for people of color to deal with.
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Katznelson, Ira- When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
*A fascinating historical analytics that shows how affirmative action in the New Deal-era was ostensibly created to privilege whites at the expense of people of color. Explores how legislation like the Social Security Act, the GI Bill, and the Fair Labor Standards Act were designed to maintain strict racial hierarchies and to ensure that whites profited from rising prosperity while Blacks were deliberately excluded.
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Kincheloe, Joe L, et. al- White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America
*Looks at whiteness as a cultural concept and explores the manner in which whiteness as an identity can potentially be reclaimed and employed in a more progressive, antiracist manner.
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Leonardo, Zeus- Critical Pedagogy and Race
*A powerful collection of scholarship that argues for educators to engage and explore the meaning of race on both a conceptual and practical level. Provides an exceptional discussion of the popular but problematic concepts of color-blind ideologies, race-neutral pedagogies, and white privilege. Tries to refocus the conversation on white supremacy.
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Lipsitz, George- The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
*This book is one of our favorites. It shows how white people contribute to and benefit from a system of white dominance through every day decisions, politics, preferences, values, rhetoric, and actions. We love this book so much we almost named this thinktank the Lipsitz Party.
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Mcintyre, Alice- Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers
*A must read for any white teacher who is dedicated to understanding how one's own white racial identity permeates the instructional, theoretical and pedagogical facets of education. Investigates and decenters the discourse of whiteness that remains so prevalent and pervasive in educational institutions and insulates white teachers from truly disarming whiteness as a dominant ideology.
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Morrison, Toni- Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
*A penetrating look at how the characters, plots, narrative strategies, and broader themes of white American literature in the 19th and 20th centuries have been invariably shaped by a "dark" and "abiding" Africanist presence.
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Omi, Michael & Howard Winant: Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s
*If books by Jacobson, Ignatiev and Roediger are indispensable for understanding the origins of white identity formation in previous centuries, then this book is the key to connecting their work to the ongoing development and maintenance of whiteness in contemporary society.
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Reynolds, David S- John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
*A powerful historical analysis of John Brown, the factors that contributed to his ideological development, and the enormous effects of his actions on the cultural, social and political trajectory of the United States. Good reading.
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Roediger, David R- Black on White
*A wide-ranging collection of essays, poetry, and art on the features of whiteness (whiteness as property, whiteness as terror, etc.) by Black Americans. Based on the simple yet provocative premise that throughout US history, Black people have often had much deeper insights into whiteness than have white folks themselves.
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Roediger, David R- Wages of Whiteness
*The title of this ground-breaking work is borrowed from WEB DuBois, who once argued that whiteness served as a "public and psychological wage" to those same ethnic European immigrants who were otherwise as economically marginalized and as chronically disadvantaged as their Black counterparts. Poor and working class white people could still profit from a sense of racial superiority even as they resigned themselves to a life of economic immobility.
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Roediger, David R- Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
*The latest from Roedgier. Continues to explore the transformation of European immigrants into white ethnics and how the discrimination they faced was qualitatively different from the oppression being faced by people of color. Shows quite nicely how European immigrants especially profited from New Deal-era restrictive covenants, labor policies, and interracial marriage bans.
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Thompson, Becky- A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism
*This book is a beautifully-crafted analysis of white folks who have made a commitment (a promise) to espousing the ideals of antiracism and worked throughout their lives to embody and fulfill it however the could (the way of life). More or less looks at the life histories of white antiracists and attempts to explore why and how they have chosen to invest themselves, personally and professionally, in such a way of thinking about and acting against white supremacy.
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Williams, Robert. L, III- Racism learned at an Early Age through Racial Scripting
*A valuable look from a psychological perspective, on how white children learn racism at an early age through a series of "racial scripts," or a series of programmed stereotypes and myths about other racial groups. Provides a unparalleled developmental analysis of how white children acquire racist attitudes from parents, relatives, schools, media, and religious organizations.
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Wimsatt, William "U"- Bomb the Suburbs
*A kind of bible for a lot of white kids who fell in love with Hip Hop culture and only later began to question their own role in potentially appropriating Blackness as a commodity for consumption while evading the more troubling realities about their own white identities.
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Wise, Tim- White Like Me: Notes from a Privileged Son
*A biographical look at one of the most widely-known and well-regarded white antiracist advocates out there today. Utilizes anecdotes from his own life to explore the personal and institutional features of white supremacy and to urge white people to mobilize against racism.
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Yancy, G- What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question
*This collection of essays provides a sophisticated perspective on the meanings and manifestations of whiteness from the vantage points of Black philosophers.
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