THE RIGHT KIND OF WHITE

An activist unpacks “good” whiteness.

Bucks is the founder of the Barnraisers Project, which equips “White organizers from across the country to mobilize their own communities for racial justice.” As he explains in the introduction, his debut book is his attempt to tell “the story of White people’s obsession not just with who we are in relation to Black and Brown people, but who we are in relation to each other.” (Bucks capitalizes White because to not do so when capitalizing Black and Brown makes whiteness seem like the default category.) While the author set out to write a “sociohistorical analysis,” he decided that he couldn’t execute that project properly without first interrogating the ways in which he has tried to differentiate himself from other white people throughout his life. Consequently, he chose to write a memoir. Bucks has set himself an extremely difficult task: making himself the central figure in a narrative that is, essentially, the story of a white person learning to decenter himself in the cause of justice. The author is nothing if not self-effacing. He gently pokes fun at the painful sincerity of his younger self, a peace and global studies major at Earlham College, “a Quaker school…that primarily attracted self-consciously earnest do-gooders,” and he recounts his nervousness at being perceived as a white savior while working on a Navajo reservation. However, the anecdotes about the ways in which he identifies, rejects, and uses various kinds of whiteness aren’t terribly revelatory. What we learn, ultimately, is what we knew at the beginning: Bucks is a sincere guy doing his best to do good. “It’s a gift,” he writes, “to share my story of ‘the right kind of being White.’ It will be an even more profound gift if my doing so encourages others to share theirs as well.”

An earnest but mostly unenlightening work.