Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs
David Ikard
Abstract
Why do race relations appear to be getting worse instead of better since the election and reelection of the country’s first black president? David Ikard speaks directly to us, in the first person, as a professor and father and also as self-described working-class country boy from a small town in North Carolina. His lively account teems with anecdotes—from gritty to elegant, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes endearing—that show how parasitically white identity is bound up with black identity in America. Ikard thinks critically about the emotional tenacity, political utility, and banka ... More
Why do race relations appear to be getting worse instead of better since the election and reelection of the country’s first black president? David Ikard speaks directly to us, in the first person, as a professor and father and also as self-described working-class country boy from a small town in North Carolina. His lively account teems with anecdotes—from gritty to elegant, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes endearing—that show how parasitically white identity is bound up with black identity in America. Ikard thinks critically about the emotional tenacity, political utility, and bankability of willful white blindness in the 21st century. A key to his analytic reflections on race highlights the three tropes of white supremacy which help to perpetuate willful white blindness, tropes that remain alive and well today as cultural buffers which afford whites the luxury of ignoring their racial privilege and the cost that blacks incur as a result of them. The tropes are: lovable racists, magical negroes, and white messiahs. Ikard is definitely reformist: teachers, parents, students, professors can use such tropes to resist the social and psychological dangers presented by seemingly neutral terms and values which in fact wield white normative power.
Keywords:
racism,
white nationalism,
privilege,
normative power,
black identity,
white identity
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226492469 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.001.0001 |
