The White Issue

A Special Issue of Transition

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Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Michael Colin Vazquez

Soft Skull Press

Due/Published June 1997, 200 pages, paper

ISBN 0822364425

The now long-awaited issue of Transition. As the social construction of whiteness becomes a hot topic, here the contributors are scholars, critics, journalists, and visual artists of color who consider the meaning of white identity. Taking James Weldon Johnson's comment of 1912 as a starting point--"I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people will ever know and understand themselves."--these essays consider the creation, evolution, and culture of whiteness in the U.S. and across the globe. The White Issue explores a wide range of subjects and individuals, including Leni Reifenstahl, Norman Mailer, Martin Scorsese, Shirley Temple, and Richard Leakey; white mercenaries, race traitors, brown Aryans, black dandies, and gay skinheads; minstrelsy, gardening, passing, Causasian dreaming; white literature by black authors, and lback literature by white authors; the genealogy of white privilege and the invention of "white trash." The contributors include: Hilton Als, Don Belton, Rebecca Carroll, Michael Chege, Ann duCille, Howard French bell hooks, Darius James, Susan Koshy, Adolph Reed, Ilan Stavans, France Winddance Twine, and Armond White.

Table of Contents

White Skin, White Masks--Editorial


Positions
The Overcoat--Hilton Als
The Shirley Temple of My Familiar--Ann duCille
Ethnic Hash--Patricia Williams
The Yellow Negro--Joe Wood
The Little Revenge from the Periphery--Jamaica Kincaid
Africans of European Descent--MIchael Chege
Along the Color Bar--Klaus de Albuquerque
White Like Canada--George Elliot Clarke
The Mercenary Postition--Howard French
Autobiography of an Ex-white Man--Walter Benn Michaels

Under Review
The White Mother--France Winddance Twine
The Feminazi Mystique--bell hooks
How to Make Love to a White Man--Don Belton


Conversations
I'm Ofay, You're Ofay--William "Upski" Wimsatt, Noel Ignatiev, Cornel West
Pale Face, Red Neck--Darius James and Jim Goad