White on White/Black on Black (review)

George Yancy writes that he edited White on White/Black on Black in order "to get white and Black philosophers to name and theorize their own raciated identities within the same philosophical text. . . . My aim was to create a teachable text, that is, to create a text whereby readers will be able to compare and engage critically the similarities and differences found within and between the critical cadre of both white philosophers and Black philosophers" (7–8). White on White/Black on Black collects together essays by fourteen philosophers—seven identified as white, seven Black—who explore, by turns, their identities, the natures of whiteness and Blackness, and conceptualizations of race more generally.

Contributors to the volume interpret the call to "theorize their own identities" in significantly different ways. A number of the essays use particular moments, events, or ongoing themes in the authors' own lives as focal points around which to philosophize. For example, "Act Your Age and Not Your Color: Blackness as Material Conditions, Presumptive Context, and Social Category," by John H. McClendon III, explores "how Blackness (as a predication of racial identity) plays an instrumental role in my life and how it is linked to the more philosophically (rigorous) considered definition I have of Blackness" (283). Other essays use a feature of the author's identity more as a springboard that moves them quickly to more general analysis of some concept. Crispin Wright's essay "Wigger" starts with Wright's "laying down a few cards" about his own wigger history but devotes its bulk to an exploration of the emergence of that concept, and a reflection on two specific wiggers. On the other hand, Monique Roelofs, in her essay "Racialization as an Aesthetic Production," quite explicitly rejects the autobiographical approach altogether—and perhaps the very premise of Yancy's call for papers—because of her skepticism about "the power of white self-declarations . . . to help decentering [sic] whiteness from the grounds of cultural normativity" (112).

The largest plurality of essays in the volume draws theoretical resources from existentialism, phenomenology, and/or psychoanalytic theory—particularly the works of Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Jean Paul Sartre. The writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, and contemporary philosophers Charles Mills, Naomi Zack, Leonard Harris, Lucius Outlaw, and Lewis Gordon also inform a number of essays.

I noted that Yancy intends this book to be a "teachable text." As luck would have it, I am reading it while teaching an introductory philosophy course on racism and sexism; notably, I have found myself recommending essays from the book regularly to students in that class. Recently, I suggested Robert Bernasconi's "Waking Up White and In Memphis" to a student writing a paper about the ways her identity—and her privilege—as a white woman changed when she moved from the United States to Germany for a semester. Bernasconi's essay presents an existential reading of his move from England to the United States—a move that forced him both to learn about the history of race relations in the United States and to acknowledge the fact that, in the U.S., he was perceived as white, not English. Bernasconi provided her both with theoretical grist for developing her own idea and a philosophical model for doing the kind of work she was attempting. Bernasconi's essay is just one of many in the volume that has the capacity to resonate with students who are scrambling to assemble for themselves some resources with which to reflect upon their own racial locations—and to act from those locations (with all the complexity that term "from" entails).

One significant merit of this volume as a teachable text is the fact that several of its essays ground unfamiliar readers in central arguments in contemporary race theory, even while they carry out their own original agendas. Several essays provide framing and orienting discussions about the "nature...