When George Yancy penned a New York Times op-ed entitled “Dear White America” asking white Americans to confront the ways that they benefit from racism, he knew his article would be controversial. But he was unprepared for the flood of vitriol in response. The resulting blowback played out in the national media, with critics attacking Yancy in every form possible—including death threats—and supporters rallying to his side. Despite the rhetoric of a “post-race” America, Yancy quickly discovered that racism is still alive, crude, and vicious in its expression. In Backlash, Yancy expands upon the original article and chronicles the ensuing controversy as he seeks to understand what it was about the op-ed that created so much rage among so many white readers. He challenges white Americans to rise above the vitriol and to develop a new empathy for the African American experience.

Following the deaths of Trayvon Martin and other black youths in recent years, students on campuses across America have joined professors and activists in calling for justice and increased awareness that Black Lives Matter. In this second edition of his trenchant and provocative book, George Yancy offers students the theoretical framework they crave for understanding the violence perpetrated against the Black body. Drawing from the lives of Ossie Davis, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as his own experience, and fully updated to account for what has transpired since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Yancy provides an invaluable resource for students and teachers of courses in African American Studies, African American History, Philosophy of Race, and anyone else who wishes to examine what it means to be Black in America.

Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder's charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy's essays map out a structure of whiteness. He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its "danger," and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a "gift" to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively. Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Across Black Spaces gathers and builds on a diverse array of essays and interviews by American philosopher and leading public intellectual George Yancy. Within this multidisciplinary framework are works from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other major media outletswhich have drawn international acclaim for their spotlight on vicious racial tensions in American academia and society at large. With this collection of revised and updated works, Yancy engages a vast scope of social, political, historical, linguistic, and philosophical themes that together illustrate what it means to be Black in America. Four sections of the book engage, first, moral outrage at contemporary ethical crises; second, the search for identity and value of vulnerability; third, the history and present values of Black and Africana philosophy; and fourth, the essential role of African American language in understanding Black lived experience. Representing twenty years of persistent inquiry and advocacy, Across Black Spaces celebrates Yancy’s undeniable importance in American intellectual progress and essential social change.

This daring and bold book is the first to create a textual space where African American and Latin American philosophers voice the complex range of their philosophical and meta-philosophical concerns, approaches, and visions. The voices within this book protest and theorize from their own standpoints, delineating the specific existential, philosophical, and professional problems they face as minority philosophical voices.

Sociologist George Yancey critiques four models of race (colorblindness, Anglo-conformity, multiculturalism and white responsibility), and introduces a new model (mutual responsibility). He offers hope that people of all races can walk together on a shared path toward racial reconciliation--not as adversaries but as collaborators and partners.