The Anti-Racist Bookshelf: Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness by Baynard Woods

"The logic of whiteness is that we are supposed to be protected by the law without being bound by the law, and the people of color are supposed to be bound by the law and not protected by the law." (—Baynard Woods, "Wilhoit's Law")

In planning the columns that appear in "The Anti-Racist Bookseller" SIBA does a lot of trolling through information on small business operations, human resource management initiatives, workplace culture discussions, and DEI strategies for creating ethical and equitable workplaces. Mostly, the focus is on the things businesses can do to better understand and therefore meet the needs of their under-served and under-represented employees and, by extension, communities.

That is step one. There is a step two.

Changing things for others is one thing. But unless it comes with a willingness to examine and change ourselves it is not enough. We have to understand—intimately—how being a part of the dominant group—being white, being straight, being male, being able-bodied—is not just "the way things are" but makes us part of an active force to keep things the way they are. We usually call it "privilege" but Baynard Woods calls it "inheritance." Or, sometimes, "infection."

In a recent interview on the Code Switch podcast about his new book, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, Woods admitted, "You know, I find discussions of structural racism very useful. But I also found that they could let me off the hook because it's easy to say, oh, everything is racist." Woods, a Baltimore journalist originally from South Carolina and from a family with a Confederate history, felt pushed to put himself back on that hook. "...having to situate it within the details of my own life, within the memoiristic details of my life and that of the people that I love, to see how white supremacy intersected all through the—my family connections. I felt that was the only way to—for me to tell this story."

"To see how white supremacy intersects" throughout our lives is not easy to do if you are white because you have been raised to ignore it, not to see it. But re-evaluating our lives is just what we have to do. Woods' memoir is his attempt to follow how "whiteness" worked, and worked against, his life. He notes that there is no such thing as a white identity that is not tied to white supremacy. Full stop. A white person who values social justice and equity has to interrogate their own life for how much of their self-conception is built on being white and therefore built upon power and privilege. "Whiteness" notes Woods, "is not only a lie that is told to us, it's a lie that we tell to ourselves about the world. And it keeps us from seeing the world, but it actually shapes the way we live in the world."

Resources:

What does it mean to "inherit whiteness?" NPR Code Switch Podcast

Wilhoit's Law Explained Slate

Writing a Book About My Whiteness Forced Me to Confront My Own Lies LitHub