FACING THE WHITE SHADOW

Watson, a therapist, and co-author Markowitz, a journalist,offer a guide to confronting and overcoming lingering biases, aimed at white allies of people of color.

This bracing book focuses less on structural racism in favor of addressing what the authors call the “White shadow” of ingrained bias, ranging from “white rage” (the “hot” rage of white supremacists and the “cold” rage of politicians defending racist laws) to “white voyeurism” and cultural appropriation. Throughout, Watson, who’s Black, and Markowitz, who’s white, unsparingly describe the many unconscious assumptions that affect white people’s interactions with people of color. In each chapter, they emphasize the many harmful effects of unconscious racism, and they conclude each with practical questions and self-examination exercises. The book pulls no punches and is open about the discomfort that this might cause its intended readership; the authors temper their rebukes with compassion, but they’re powerfully unsparing in their descriptions of casual racism, especially in the workplace. That said, the work is weakened somewhat by a lack of nuance in some sections. For example, one interviewee tells of dealing with internalized antisemitism in addition to bias against people of color, which could have been explored more deeply; she notes that in college, she “wanted to shed my Jewishness and fit in better,” and that she later came to a painful realization that she felt comfortable with her Black and biracial friends “because in the racial hierarchy, being a White Jew was culturally, socially, and institutionally far superior to being a Black man or biracial woman.” The book also seems to engage in stereotypical assumptions at times, as in generalizations about white people’s reactions to a well-known photo of an Afghani girl on the cover of a 1985 issue of National Geographic. Still, this is a compelling and necessary book that grapples with important and timely issues.

A bracing and thoughtful work on a complex topic.