Dr. Shannon Sullivan has written about well-meaning white liberals that she sums up as “white middle-class goodness,” an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity and outlines four ways this orientation is expressed, each serving to establish one’s lack of racism: the denigration of lower-class white people as responsible for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness—especially in the context of white childrearing—and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, shame, and betrayal. To move beyond these distancing strategies, Sullivan argues, white people need a new ethos that acknowledges and transforms their whiteness in the pursuit of racial justice rather than seeking a self-righteous distance from it.
Shannon Sullivan is Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology at UNC Charlotte. She teaches and writes in the intersections of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy.
You can find the following works by Dr. Sullivan in the James B. Duke Library:
- Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism (2001 – print and ebook)
- Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006 – print and ebook)
- Good White People: The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism (2014 – print)
- The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015 – ebook)
She is co-editor of four books including: