In her book Good White People, Shannon Sullivan takes the sanctimonious middle-class goodwhites to task for projecting their own guilt complexes onto the easily despised and perennially maligned rednecks and white trash.
So far, so good. I appreciate her gesture in calling goodwhite sanctimony out for the self-serving vanity project that it is.
However, she and I reach a fork in the road when she encourages both the goodwhites and badwhites to accept their role in dismantling the “illness” of whiteness and forge ahead hand-in-hand to build a racially just and equitable society—but, as is ALWAYS the case, she offers no timelines or quantifiers for exactly how or why our society is currently unjust, nor any spreadsheets with graphs that will show exactly when “justice” has been achieved and everyone can finally quit whining once and for all. Unlike her, I think it’s OK being white. And what the goodwhites don’t realize is that I wouldn’t care either way if they hadn’t beaten me over the head since childhood with the idea that there’s nothing OK with being white.
