Being White, Being Good White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy

Contemporary scholars who study race and racism have emphasized that white complicity plays a role in perpetuating systemic racial injustice. Being White Being Good seeks to explain what scholars mean by white complicity to explore the ethical and epistemological assumptions that white complicity emails and to offer recommendations for how the subject can be taught. The book highlight how well intentioned white people who might even consider themselves as paragons of antiracism might be unwittingly sustaining an unjust system that they say the want to dismantle. What could it mean for white people to be good when they can reproduce and maintain a racist system even when and especially, when, they believe themselves to be good to answer this question. Barbara Applebaum advocates a shift in our understanding of the subject of language and of moral responsibility. Based on these shifts a new notion of moral responsibility can be articulated that is not focused on guilt and that can help white students understand and acknowledge their white complicity. Book jacket.

Barbara Applebaum, is associate professor in cultural foundations of education at Syracuse University.