The Invention of Wings
Sue Monk Kidd, 2014
Viking Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143121701
Summary
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world—and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection.
Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1948
• Where—Sylvester, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.S., Texas Christian University
• Awards—Poets and Writers Award; Katherine Anne Porter
Award
• Currently—lives near Charleston, South Carolina
Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than four million copies, and was chosen as the 2004 Book Sense Paperback Book of the Year and Good Morning America's "Read This!" Book Club pick. She is also the author of several acclaimed memoirs and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Poets & Writers award. She lives near Charleston, South Carolina.
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Sue Monk Kidd first made her mark on the literary circuit with a pair of highly acclaimed, well-loved memoirs detailing her personal spiritual development. However, it was a work of fiction, The Secret Life of Bees, that truly solidified her place among contemporary writers. Although Kidd is no longer writing memoirs, her fiction is still playing an important role in her on-going journey of spiritual self-discovery.
Despite the fact that Kidd's first published books were nonfiction works, her infatuation with writing grew out of old-fashioned, Southern-yarn spinning. As a little girl in the little town of Sylvester, Georgia, Kidd thrilled to listen to her father tell stories about "mules who went through cafeteria lines and a petulant boy named Chewing Gum Bum," as she says on her web site. Inspired by her dad's tall tales, Kidd began keeping a journal that chronicled her everyday experiences.
Such self-scrutiny surely gave her the tools she needed to pen such keenly insightful memoirs as When the Hearts Waits and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, both tracking her development as both a Christian and a woman. "I think when you have an impulse to write memoir you are having an opportunity to create meaning of your life," she told Barnes & Noble.com, "to articulate your experience; to understand it in deeper ways... And after a while, it does free you from yourself, of having to write about yourself, which it eventually did for me."
Once Kidd had worked the need to write about herself out of her system, she decided to get back to the kind of storytelling that inspired her to become a writer in the first place. Her debut novel The Secret Life of Bees showed just how powerfully the gift of storytelling charges through Kidd's veins. The novel has sold more than 4.5 million copies, been published in over twenty languages, and spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Even as Kidd has shifted her focus from autobiography to fiction, she still uses her writing as a means of self-discovery. This is especially evident in her latest novel The Mermaid Chair, which tells the story of a woman named Jessie who lives a rather ordinary life with her husband Hugh until she meets a man about to take his final vows at a Benedictine monastery. Her budding infatuation with Brother Thomas leads Jessie to take stock of her life and resolve an increasingly intense personal tug-of-war between marital fidelity and desire.
Kidd feels that through telling Jessie's story, she is also continuing her own journey of self-discovery, which she began when writing her first books. "I think there is some part of that journey towards one's self that I did experience. I told that particular story in my book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and it is the story of a woman's very-fierce longing for herself. The character in The Mermaid Chair Jessie has this need to come home to herself in a much deeper way," Kidd said, "to define herself, and I certainly know that longing."
Kidd lives beside a salt marsh near Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Sandy, a marriage and individual counselor in private practice. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
A remarkable novel that heightened my sense of what it meant to be a woman - slave or free. . .will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled to find her power and her voice. . .Sue Monk Kidd has written a conversation changer. It is impossible to read this book and not come away thinking differently about our status as women and about all the unsung heroines who played a role in getting us to where we are.
O, The Oprah Magazine
A searing historical novel. . .these two women’s relationship with each other grows more complex while the culture shape-shifts around them. Their bold individual requests for independence are explored by Kidd in exquisitely nuanced language that makes this book a page turner in the most resonant and satisfying of ways.
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Kidd...is no stranger to strong female characters. Here, her inspiration is the real Sarah Grimke, daughter of an elite Charleston family, who fought for abolition and women’s rights. Handful, Kidd’s creation, is Sarah’s childhood handmaid.... Bolstered by female mentors, Kidd’s heroines finally act on Sarah’s blunt realization: “We can do little for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men.”
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Women played a large role in the fledgling abolitionist movement preceding the Civil War by several decades but were shushed by their male compatriots if they pointed out their own subservient status.... Monk's compelling work of historical fiction stands out...because of its layers of imaginative details.... [A] richly imagined narrative...of two women who became sisters under the skin. —Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] moving portrait of two women inextricably linked by the horrors of slavery..... While their pain and struggle cannot be equated, both women strive to be set free—Sarah from the bonds of patriarchy and Southern bigotry, and Handful from the inhuman bonds of slavery. Kidd is a master storyteller...with smooth and graceful prose. —Kerri Price
(Starred review.) Kidd hits her stride and avoids sentimental revisionism with this historical novel about the relationship between a slave and the daughter of slave owners in antebellum Charleston...Kidd’s portrait of white slave-owning southerners is all the more harrowing for showing them as morally complicated while she gives Handful the dignity of being not simply a victim, but a strong, imperfect woman.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The title The Invention of Wings was one of the first inspirations that came to Sue Monk Kidd as she began the novel. Why is the title an apt one for Kidd's novel? What are some of the ways that the author uses the imagery and symbolism of birds, wings, and flight?
2. What were the qualities in Handful that you most admired? As you read the novel, could you imagine yourself in her situation? How did Handful continue her relentless pursuit of self and freedom in the face of such a brutal system?
3. After laying aside her aspirations to become a lawyer, Sarah remarks that the Graveyard of Failed Hopes is "an all-female establishment." What makes her say so? What was your experience of reading Kidd's portrayal of women's lives in the nineteenth century?
4. In what ways does Sarah struggle against the dictates of her family, society, and religion? Can you relate to her need to break away from the life she had in order to create a new and unknown life? What sort of risk and courage does this call for?
5. The story of The Invention of Wings includes a number of physical objects that have a special significance for the characters: Sarah's fleur-de-lis button, Charlotte's story quilt, the rabbit-head cane that Handful receives from Goodis, and the spirit tree. Choose one or more of these objects and discuss their significance in the novel.
6. Were you aware of the role that Sarah and Angelina Grimke played in abolition and women's rights? Have women's achievements in history been lost or overlooked? What do you think it takes to be a reformer today?
7. How would you describe Sarah and Angelina's unusual bond? Do you think either one of them could have accomplished what they did on their own? Have you known women who experienced this sort of relationship as sisters?
8. Some of the staunchest enemies of slavery believed the time had not yet come for women's rights and pressured Sarah and Angelina to desist from the cause, fearing it would split the cause of abolition. How do you think the sisters should have responded to their demand? At the end of the novel, Sarah asks, "Was it ever right to sacrifice one's truth for expedience?"
9. What are some of the examples of Handful's wit and sense of irony, and how do they help her cope with the burdens of slavery?
10. Contrast Handful's relationship with her mother with the relationship between Sarah and the elder Mary Grimke. How are the two younger women formed-and malformed-by their mothers?
11. Kidd portrays an array of male characters in the novel: Sarah's father; Sarah's brother, Thomas; Theodore Weld; Denmark Vesey; Goodis Grimke, Israel Morris, Burke Williams. Some of them are men of their time, some are ahead of their time. Which of these male characters did you find most compelling? What positive and negative roles did they play in Sarah and Handful's evolvement?
12. How has your understanding of slavery been changed by reading The Invention of Wings? What did you learn about it that you didn't know before?
13. Sarah believed she could not have a vocation and marriage, both. Do you think she made the right decision in turning down Israel's proposal? How does her situation compare with Angelina's marriage to Theodore? In what ways are women today still asking the question of whether they can have it all?
14. How does the spirit tree function in Handful's life? What do you think of the rituals and meanings surrounding it?
15. Had you heard of the Denmark Vesey slave plot before reading this novel? Were you aware of the extent that slaves resisted? Why do you think the myth of the happy, compliant slave endured? What were some of the more inventive or cunning ways that Charlotte, Handful, and other characters rebelled and subverted the system?
16. The Invention of Wings takes the reader back to the roots of racism in America. How has slavery left its mark on American life? To what extent has the wound been healed? Do you think slavery has been a taboo topic in American life?
17. Are there ways in which Kidd's novel can help us see our own lives differently? How is this story relevant for us today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Andrew's Brain
E.L. Doctorow, 2014
Random House
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400068814
Summary
This brilliant new novel by an American master, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster.
Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves.
Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 6, 1931
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—A.B., Kenyon College; Columbia University
• Awards—3 National book Critics Circle Awards; National
Book Aware; PEN/Faulkner Award
• Currently—lives in Sag Harbor, New York and New York City
E.L. Doctorow, one of America's preeminent authors, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (three times), the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation For Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published a volume of selected essays Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, and a play, Drinks Before Dinner, which was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival. (From the publisher.)
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Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is an American author whose critically acclaimed and award-winning fiction ranges through his country’s social history from the Civil War to the present. Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent. He attended city public grade schools and the Bronx High School of Science where, surrounded by mathematically gifted children, he fled to the office of the school literary magazine, Dynamo, where he published his first literary effort, The Beetle, which he describes as ”a tale of etymological self-defamation inspired by my reading of Kafka.”
Doctorow attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied with the poet and New Critic, John Crowe Ransom, acted in college theater productions and majored in Philosophy. After graduating with Honors in 1952 he did a year of graduate work in English Drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the army. He served with the Army of Occupation in Germany in 1954-55 as a corporal in the signal corps.
He returned to New York after his military service and took a job as a reader for a motion picture company where he said he had to read so many Westerns that he was inspired to write what became his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. He began the work as a parody of the Western genre, but the piece evolved into a novel that asserted itself as a serious reclamation of the genre before he was through. It was published to positive reviews in 1960.
Doctorow had married a fellow Columbia drama student, Helen Setzer, while in Germany and by the time he had moved on from his reader’s job in 1960 to become an editor at the New American Library, (NAL) a mass market paperback publisher, he was the father of three children. To support his family he would spend nine years as a book editor, first at NAL working with such authors as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, and then, in 1964 as Editor-in-chief at The Dial Press, publishing work by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines and William Kennedy, among others.
In 1969 Doctorow left publishing in order to write, and accepted a position as Visiting Writer at the University of California, Irvine, where he completed The Book of Daniel, a freely fictionalized consideration of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Published in 1971 it was widely acclaimed, called a “masterpiece” by The Guardian, and it launched Doctorow into "the first rank of American writers" according to the New York Times.
Doctorow’s next book, written in his home in New Rochelle, New York, was Ragtime (1975), since accounted one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library Editorial Board.
Doctorow’s subsequent work includes the award winning novels World's Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), The March (2005) and Homer and Langley (2010); two volumes of short fiction, Lives of the Poets I (1984) and Sweetland Stories (2004); and two volumes of selected essays, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993) and Creationists (2006). He is published in over thirty languages. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
We'll add more reviews as they appear.
From the start of this magnificent novel, we’re told that “Andrew” has done bad things. “I am numb to my guilt … incapable of punishing myself,” he tells the unnamed man he calls “Doc.” The things we don’t know about these two men are numerous. Where is Andrew? Who’s he speaking with? A shrink? A cop? And why? It gives nothing away to state that the unraveling of those and other questions is what makes this such a strange and compelling page turner.
Neal Thomas - Amazon Editor Review
Discussion Questions
1. Near the beginning of the story, Andrew says that he is indirectly responsible for Briony’s death: “indirect—not directly causal.” How might he have reasoned that he was responsible for her death? Do you agree that Andrew ultimately has a hand in it, or not?
2. Andrew switches back and forth between telling the story in the first person and the third person, sometimes describing what happened to him, sometimes describing what happened to “Andrew.” Why might he do this switching back-and-forth? Did you notice any patterns in the moments at which Andrew switched from one form of narration to another?
3. In speaking to “Doc,” Andrew says, “Your field is the mind, mine is the brain.” What do you understand to be the difference between mind and brain, within the context of this book? Would the meaning of the title have changed for you, if it was called Andrew’s Mind instead of Andrew’s Brain?
4. Andrew says, “What else can we do as eaters of the fruit of knowledge but biologize ourselves?” Does the quest to “biologize ourselves” contain pitfalls or dangers? How might it relate to the tension, within the story, between the biology of the brain and the more intangible aspects of the mind?
5. Andrew describes the Wasatch mountains as ruling the town, as a “mountain bureaucracy” that negotiated the light and colonized the townspeople. Why might Andrew have decided to describe the mountains in such specific and unusual terms, as a “bureaucracy”? How might this connect with Andrew’s later experience with a different kind of bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.?
6. When Andrew connects Briony to the brain graph machine, he says, “I saw things more intimately Briony’s than if I had seen her undressed.” What does he mean by this? What are the implications of this “cephalic-invasive” voyeurism for Andrew and Briony’s relationship?
7. Mark Twain is a recurring motif in the book. Why do you think Andrew is so drawn to Twain? Think of when Andrew refers to the “imperial outrages annotated by MT in the last years of his life.” Twain lived through a different imperialistic era in America (the late 1800s and early 1900s), but how might this resonate with “imperial outrages” in Andrew’s own lifetime?
8. Andrew describes the possibility of a human yearning for a group brain, a larger social mind: “Perhaps we long for something like the situation these other creatures have— the ants, the bees— where the thinking is outsourced.” He mentions that this kind of thinking “brings us to politics.” What does he mean by this? How might this relate, specifically, to his encounters with the White House later in the book? What are other instances, in the book and in real life, when humans are drawn to this kind of “group brain” phenomenon?
9. Briony seems to transform Andrew. He speaks of how “watching her lifted me into a comparable state of happiness.” How do you think Briony manages to rescue Andrew from his “cold clear emotionless pond of silence”? What is it about her that inspires such life in him?
10. Andrew also remarks about Briony that he finds “redemption” in “the loving attentions of this girl.” Then, at the very end of the book, he describes how Mark Twain found a different kind of redemption in the world, when his children “remember this tale and laugh with love for their father.” What is similar about their two kinds of redemption? What is different?
11. How does love transform Andrew? Is it a permanent transformation, or is it temporary? Andrew describes love as “the blunt concussion that renders us insensible to despair.” He also describes the happiness that stems from love as a feeling “possibly induced by endormorphin, the brain’s opiate.” Why do you think Andrew gravitates towards physical metaphors to describe the power of love?
12. By the end of the story, how much did you trust or believe in the literal truth of what Andrew was saying? Did your attitude towards his narrative reliability change at all, over the course of the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Egypt In My Looking Glass
Yuri Kruman, 2014
Author House
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781491847763
Summary
Twenty-five years after their hellish emigration—thirty from their famous father's exodus—a sister and her brothers hear his voice again. All three have long since "made it" in the States, despite—maybe, because of—his abandonment.
Forced by his own divorce to question everything, Vlad reels and frolics to forget himself—and learn to live again. Skirt-chasing author Mark, seething with writer's block, commits himself to marry by a verbal slip. Alla's precocious children prod her to examine who she is and why. A sleazy cousin—Tolik, hopeless Brighton product—is about to score his one big hit, again. His brother, Boris, now religious, struggles to transcend his past.
A family get-together threatens to ignite their old resentments. Edouard Yablonskiy, freshly minted dissident, has one last chance to make amends. His three grown children now must choose—to exit their own Egypt and forgive or let the past demand their satisfaction.
Author Bio
• Birth—April 13, 1983
• Where—Moscow, Russia
• Raised—Lexington, Kentucy, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; J.D.,
Benjamin Cardozo School of Law
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Yuri Kruman was born in Moscow and, at the age of nine, moved to Kentucky where he grew up. He studied neuroscience and anthropology at University of Pennsylvania before receiving his law degree from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has worked on Wall Street and in healthcare. He lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Visit the author on Goodreads.
Discussion Questions
1. What does Vlad's "rebellion" signal about his internal state?
2. What effect do her kids' questions about childhood and heritage have on her self-understanding?
3. Which of the three kids and/or two cousins is the most sensitive to their Russian heritage and why?
4. What is the nature of the tension between the three kids and their cousins, other than leftover childhood resentment? Is this typical of the Russian community or all immigrant group in New York?. Discuss.
5. How is the mother depicted in this book, as seen through the eyes of her children and nephews? Discuss her role in her children's lives at this stage.
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)
The Napoleon Connection (Jewel Trilogy 1)
Claude Brickell, 2008
Bricbooks
210 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780557139064 (Kindle)
Summary
The Napoleon Connection—the first installment in The Jewel Trilogy:
Set in the French Quarter of present-day New Orleans, young, accomplished art historian Michael Bennington is hired by one of that city’s prominent denizens to search for the whereabouts of a priceless artifact—purported to be a rare jewel—curiously missing from the city’s Cabildo historical museum.
Bennington dives into the assignment with an uncanny passion—his specialty is 19th century jewels—and ends up taking a virtual roller coaster ride through the city’s fascinating historical past uncovering both real and purported, if not positively bizarre local legends, descends into the city’s eclectic alternative underground and even encounters a quasi-religious, homoerotic Roman Catholic cult. It is an introduction into the colorful escapades of the likable Bennington character in the mystery trilogy.
This is the first book in the Jewel Trilogy; the second is Carlota's Legacy (2014), and The Brotherhood Wars (2014) is the third.
Author Bio
Claude Brickell is a New York-based writer of art history adventure mysteries. His Jewel Trilogy introduces readers to young, likable and accomplished art historian Michael Bennington as he searches the world for rare and missing artifacts in three thrilling installments: The Napoleon Connection, Carlota's Legacy and The Brotherhood Wars.
Claude's formal education was with the American University and the Sorbonne in Paris, Oxford University in England and graduate of New York University. He is a world-traveler, a certified fine arts appraiser, a filmmaker, a former ice hockey league player and an equestrian enthusiast. He is currently an instructor at New York University. (From the author.)
Visit the author's book website — and his art blog.
Visit Claude on Facebook.
Discussion Questions
1. What is Michael Bennington all about? What drives this artifact enthusiast to the ends of the world to discover their whereabouts?
2. How does Bennington compare with other artifact hunters such as Robert Langdon? Does his age-difference add to or hinder his success?
3. How does Bennington add up in the area of love and intimate relationships? Is he struggling or hopeless? (most discernible after reading all three installments).
4. How convincing are the author's depictions and descriptions of the various locales Bennington visits?
5. How would you define exactly the genre of The Napoleon Connection?
6. What age range and reader group do you feel The Napoleon Connection is best suited for?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack
by Peggy McIntosh
Through the work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the
curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-
privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say
they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the
curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials which
amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s
disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged,
lessened or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized
that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a
phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white
person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a
disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white
privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught
not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is
like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of
unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was
‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of
special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s
Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so
one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I
do to lessen or end it?”
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I
understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered
the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are
oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when
we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned
skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an
unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to
see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.
My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out:
whites are taught to think of their lives as a morally neutral, normative, and average,
also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow
“them” to be more like “us.”
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects
of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case
attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege that to class, religion, ethnic status, or
geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately
intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American co-worker, friends and
acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time,
place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.
- I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the
time. - If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing
housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. - I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or
pleasant to me. - I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not
be followed or harassed. - I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely represented. - When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am
shown that people of my color made it what it is. - I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to
the existence of their race. - If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white
privilege. - I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented,
into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions,
into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair. - Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to
work against the appearance of financial reliability. - I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might
not like them. - I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without
having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the
illiteracy of my race. - I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
- I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
- I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
- I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who
constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such
oblivion. - I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and
behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider. - I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be facing
a person of my race. - If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I
haven’t been singled out because of my race. - I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys,
and children’s magazine featuring people of my race. - I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling some-
what tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held
at a distance, or feared. - I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers
on the job suspect that I got it because of race. - I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot
get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen. - I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against
me. - If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode
or situation whether it has racial overtones. - I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or
less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realization on this list until I wrote it down. For
me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to
avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things
are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors
open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible backpack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of
daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated
taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for
everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant
and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of
assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main
piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the
turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could
think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant
cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly free.
In proportion as my racial group was being make confident, comfortable, and
oblivious, other groups were likely being made less confident, uncomfortable, and
alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence,
which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color.
For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually
think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck.
Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically overempower
certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power
conferred systematically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it
is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are
inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or
that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society.
Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the
holders as well as the ignored groups.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we
can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always
reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the
human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege of a few.
Ideally it is an unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned
male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like
is whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage
and conferred dominance and it so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we
need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many,
perhaps most, of our white students in the US think that racism doesn’t affect them
because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In
addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need
similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage,
or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many.
Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated
with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects
of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion,
sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are
interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind
us eloquently.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both
active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the
dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as
a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by
members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance
on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to
think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. [But] a “white”
skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the
way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end,
these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen
dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned
advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by
whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to
get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness
about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to
maintain the myth of meritocracy the myth that democratic choice is equally available to
all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a
small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the
hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions
for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the
perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know
from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned
advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our
arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.