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In the United States, the presidential administration is actively working to erase past gains in civil rights and environmental justice. This tendency is manifesting in many ways, including curtailing voting rights, whitewashing U.S. history teaching materials, and rolling back social services that disproportionately affect people of color. In this context, one of the most important books I’ve read from the last decade is George Yancy’s Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America. I strongly believe that every white person needs to read and reckon with the ideas in Yancy’s book. Backlash is a tougher but more necessary book than most popular books on race, especially in the context of 2026 being the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence. At a time when many cling to the myth of this nation as fair and equal while white supremacy continues to dominate national and global politics, Backlash is a stern yet compassionate reminder of the importance of defining racism in terms of power. Within this context, I conducted this exclusive interview with George Yancy, who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University, a frequent contributor to Truthout, and the author, editor, and coeditor of over 25 books.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Josh Friedberg: Let’s start with the letter you wrote in 2015, “Dear White America.” What motivated you to write it?

George Yancy: In terms of context, the letter itself was my essay contribution to a series of popular interviews that I conducted with philosophers on race for The New York Times philosophy series, “The Stone.” The motivation had to do with the desire to find a critical discursive format for addressing the issue of whiteness. How does one speak to white people about something that is so familiar to them, like water is to fish, so normative and yet opaque, and thereby invisible? Indeed, how does one deploy a mode of address that attempts to speak the truth about their whiteness without resulting in forms of irrational defensiveness on their part? I wanted to communicate something about whiteness that critiqued its normative structure and how it falsely equates itself with humanity per se.

In his book Performing Purity (2003), whiteness scholar John T. Warren argues that “like layers of sand constituting a rock, the repeated enactments of [white] identity become sedimented and seemingly fixed, as if they had always been there.” I wanted to communicate to white people that their identity as white — along with the tropes of whiteness as “superior,” “virtuous,” and “pure” — was historically constructed, and that it is through their complicity that whiteness is sustained as a process of racial privilege, domination, and oppression. And I wanted them to own this hard truth. I thought that through my own show of vulnerability — where I talk honestly about my own sexism — I could perhaps touch the souls of white readers. I wanted to get them to use my capacity to expose my own complicity with sexism as a bridge that encouraged their own capacity to be honest about their whiteness and its link to anti-Blackness.

Trump Relies on Centuries-Old Notions of Whiteness to Activate His MAGA Base

I saw the letter as one grounded in love. Like James Baldwin, I wanted to demonstrate a form of love “not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” I was asking for nothing short of self-confrontation. As you know, the invitation was met with hatred and denial. I was called by the n-word more times than I would like to remember. Being called........

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