Bailey has found a way to engage with and weave together feminist theory, philosophy of race, historical events, and personal stories to form a tapestry for the present. The Weight of Whiteness illustrates a way of employing critical whiteness studies that invites the reader to invest their whole self in personal reflection about racial identity, racial privilege, and white supremacy.... A major advantage of this book is the extent to which Bailey theorizes not only about the personal or the political, but about how these mutually reinforce one another according to the logic of white supremacy. Furthermore, she gracefully attempts to express the multifarious ways in which whiteness attempts to insulate itself from criticism. This book will cause many to pause. It may raise some eyebrows. A few readers will shake their heads; more will applaud. Although sometimes challenging, it is accessible to a wide audience and well worth the read. Recommended.

Choice Reviews

Alison Bailey’s book could not have come at a more opportune time, a time when, on the one hand, white supremacy in its narrow and structural sense is being normalized by the highest levels of authority in our country and, on the other hand, where resistance and activism for racial justice is broadly and increasingly gaining recognition. Bailey’s work, courageous in its deeply personal humility and epistemic honesty, and compelling in its philosophical acuity, boldly exposes the ways in which the weight of whiteness is discounted by white people and demonstrates how this weight must not be ignored. This book offers important tools to help white people to cultivate opportunities for the weighty conversations of race that are so desperately needed today.

Barbara Applebaum, Syracuse University

Alison Bailey’s The Weight of Whiteness provides a timely engagement with the embodied comportments and habits of emotion that compose whiteness as a citadel of white privilege and supremacy in the United States. The weight of whiteness, Bailey argues, has pressed upon Black, Indigenous, and people of color for far too long, but dismantling it requires white people to inhabit the world differently. It’s not enough to make whiteness visible. White people must learn to feel its costs and losses. Her book provides indispensable resources for doing the affective work necessary for grappling with what white people are taught to ignore.

Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Miami University, Ohio

The achievement of racial justice in the United States will require both social and individual transformation. In this rich and insightful exploration of the multi-dimensionality of 'whiteness,' Alison Bailey gives us an expert philosophical guided tour of the patterns and structures of white privilege, white discursive evasion, white pedagogical resistance, and self-inflicted white moral damage, climaxing in a moving and heartfelt account of her discovery of her own ancestors’ deep involvement in American slavery, and the 'weight' she inherits.

Charles W. Mills, CUNY Graduate Center