White Pages: Black Writers On Whites And Whiteness

White Pages takes as its starting point James Weldon Johnson’s assertion of 1912 that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people will ever know and understand themselves. In these provocative essays, contributors including Cornel West, bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid, Hilton Als, Darius James, and others examine the creation, evolution, and culture of whiteness in the United States and across the globe. This collection displays not only a remarkable geographic breadth of exploration, but also a quirky and entertaining range of subject matter. In The Feminazi Mystique, bell hooks ponders how Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s most successful propagandist, could be considered a feminist hero. Ann duCille examines her vexed relationship to the pint-sized princess of Depression-era film in The Shirley Temple of My Familiar. Other topics include Martin Scorsese, Norman Mailer, and Richard Leakey; race traitors, brown Aryans, black dandies, and gay skinheads; Japanese teenager black-face minstrelsy; white literature by black authors and black literature by white authors; the invention of white trash; and the genealogy of white privilege.