The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives

Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Part I: The Present Moment
The Killing of Philando Castile and the Negation of Black Innocence
Black Lives Matter and the Social Contract
From the Harlem Riots to Ferguson, Baltimore, and BLM
Part II: How We Narrate the Past
White Memory and the Psychic Sherpa
Racial Epistemologies and Ontologies
Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and the Purposes of History
The Master/Slave Dialectic and the Signifying Monkey
Amistad, the Film and the Novel
Faulkner and Morrison
Lincoln Was a Great American, Lincoln Was a Racist
Trump, Obama, and the Legacy of Reconstruction
The Contemporary White Literary Imagination
Racial Absence and Racial Presence in Jonathan Franzen and ZZ Packer
Psychotherapy and a New National Narrative
Part III: Where Do We Go from Here?
Questions of Identity
I Am Not Your Negro
Abandoning Whiteness
“I Can’t Breathe”
Daunte Wright
Appendix: A Brief Guide to Structural Racism
The Current Epistemology of White Supremacy
Acknowledgments
About the Author