George Yancy

Part I: “Dear White America”

Write down your immediate thoughts about this.
● Love is absent in the world climate nowadays; politics, media, etc.
● People’s egotistical voice on the inside keeps them from compassion towards others and their issues.
● Despite people’s best efforts to sway from the trap of sexism, it is so easily perpetuated and force-fed
down our throats without us realizing it; perpetuating the same thing without realizing it.
● Even unintentional effects are burdens of responsibility on a person nonetheless.
● It’s impossible for white people to accept the fact that at the end of the day, they are the people that
run the world. No matter how liberal or how much you try to compensate, none of it matters until
you look internally. All the little things that make white people feel safe, not being scared of the
police, not worrying about skin color in grocery stores or banks, is what white people need to
address. Not just saying that they support this cause or another.
● Being white already grants you a contract of safety, stability, and comfort that is not afforded to
others. This contract becomes invisible to white people because it is ingrained from birth. In stores,
encounters with law enforcement: encounters with people in general.
● Despite efforts to give this gift to white people over the years, it has been met with unconditional
hate, no matter the actions of the gift giver: the loving actions of the black gift giver (MLK)
● Overall, the letter was very moving, as a white straight man myself, it gets easy to not see the
privilege that I encounter every day of my life. After all, this system was built for me. I’m not scared
when I see officers or when I walk into a store. I get to live in a bubble of white love in the world. I
don’t know the pain that black people and other minorities face: my imagination can’t even grasp the
simplest parts of it. It is such a fundamental thing that I fail to notice every day because I think that
everybody experiences life the same way as me. However, this is painfully untrue. This country is
not kind to minorities, I have been racist in not accounting for these privileges that I have. This
letter truly is a mirror to oneself.
Part II: “Dear N* Professor” (25-45)
How did you feel reading this?
● The N-word itself, not only historically being terrible for dehumanizing, is continued throughout
society today whenever a black person wants to stand up to the white privilege in society.
● Us thinking that certain white racists are just the bad apples out of an orchard is completely absurd
because everything white people base their lives upon is built upon the backs of discrimination.
● The N-word is such a thing that exists beyond time, it is a slur that is eternal: eternally disgusting
and lowering one to a position of a rabid animal.
○ It completely blocks off any possibility of social mobility to the white racist trash mind. It is
something completely from a joke book. “You can’t be this because you’re this”
● White people mold black people in their minds to be the least threat to them. That can be black
women being masculinized which means they have nothing feminine for men to protect. Black men
can be effeminized posing no threat to white men.
● Reason in white America isn’t just reason, it’s white reasoning to fit whatever established picture in
mind.
● The “gift” and “thanks” required for someone being lucky to be born in America work for white
people, but not for the people that the system oppresses. The system is stubborn in so many ways
and twisted in too many knots to be even a little empathetic and understanding.
● Facing the privilege of one’s whiteness requires enormous will that even the most “enlightened”
white people of our time cannot hope to surmount.
● White men work so hard to protect whiteness especially white women from being “contaminated”
by black men, performing heinous acts to justify some nonexistent aggression and so-called blemish
on whiteness.
● The lengths white America will go to persecute somebody that was trying to spread love and a
positive message. Even if you don’t agree with someone, you don’t think of these excruciatingly
creative ideas about how to degrade someone simply because of the color of their skin. Responses to
back up why they should be able to say the n-word, are pulled out of the darkest, most unintelligent
crevices of their anal cavity.
●

What strikes you about Yancy’s revelations about whiteness and racism?
 ● It is so well put together and so logical, it seems almost unthinkable that this could be misinterpreted
in a white audience to sexual advances or being one of a collection of many vulgar terms used to
describe black people. He outlined how the n-word is the worst word in the world, which is meant
to degrade a black person to the point of feces on the ground. The reality of the fact that white men
fight to protect whiteness and white women from such a heinous impurity of blackness. The reality
that white people overly sexualize black people to paint them out as always wanting sex. White
people mold the image of a black man into a preconformed view of an animal, a sub-human.

Yancy argues and implies that there is no such thing as white innocence. Do you agree?
● Yes, I do agree because while my forefathers weren’t there enforcing plantation policy, I am here today,
benefitting from what was built of the back black people. I do benefit every day from a system that gives me a
free pass to get away with almost anything because the color of my skin. I get to live and thrive with
confidence instead of fear in a system built on oppressing and degrading blacks. I am not innocent of the
crimes of the white man and I get to benefit from them.