Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America

Following the deaths of Trayvon Martin and other black youths in recent years, students on campuses across America have joined professors and activists in calling for justice and increased awareness that Black Lives Matter. In this second edition of his trenchant and provocative book, George Yancy offers students the theoretical framework they crave for understanding the violence perpetrated against the Black body. Drawing from the lives of Ossie Davis, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as his own experience, and fully updated to account for what has transpired since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Yancy provides an invaluable resource for students and teachers of courses in African American Studies, African American History, Philosophy of Race, and anyone else who wishes to examine what it means to be Black in America. Review This second edition of philosopher Yancy's book updates the cases and events since its 2008 publication. The new edition adds two chapters to expand the philosophical examination of whiteness in the US. Yancy challenges philosophers to engage the world, rather than focusing just on theory. Beginning with the 'myth of a post-racial America, ' the author examines the impact of the white body as seer on the black body as 'not mattering.' Yancy (Emory Univ.) explores the ontological element of the white gaze in US cultural constructs, noting that 'the white gaze in its active form, [is] implicative of a site of white power, hegemony, and privilege.' In the second edition, Yancy establishes the concept of suturing and unsuturing in a way that will open dynamic conversations with students. The second edition is a mandatory read for those interested in critical race theory. The book is engaging, but challenging in content. A background in philosophy is helpful, but not required. This intense and enlightening work will require all readers to self-assess, is a required purchase for libraries, and will be useful in upper-level race/philosophy courses. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Professionals.--CHOICE "George Yancy's work shows what engaged philosophy can be, taking on the complex and embodied processes of racialization to show that how we think and how we act is informed by the living legacies of racism. Yancy demonstrates what an ethically committed philosophy can be, asking its readers to examine their racial formations, whether to discover long-standing forms of racist subjugation or to examine the permutations of white complicity in anti-Black racism. His theory of the "white gaze" supplements and complicates the historical "male gaze" of feminist theory. Drawing from anti-racist writings, including the capacious work of women of color feminism, Yancy gives us a new way to think of philosophy as living, ethical, and engaged, demonstrating the violent toll on black bodies that accepted racism takes. This is critical thought that is rooted in the situation it seeks to clarify and transform. This is courageous and necessary work for our times, opposing at every instance the violence from which we too often look away."--Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley "Professor Yancy offers eloquent testimony for a dangerous historical moment. He lucidly explicates America's bifurcated perceptual field where "whiteness" constructs and defends its narcissistic privilege by defining (through power alone) what is human and what is not. From the nation's founding to America's present state-sponsored murder and derogation of black lives, the white gaze has refused to acknowledge its brutal "bad faith." Enslavement, impoverishment, incarceration, and deaths of blacks are consequences principally of white ethical blindness. Yancy brilliantly defines and exemplifies an "embodied black philosophy" that charts the course for an examined national life, one