Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Yes, "white privilege" is a real thing. Yes, Black Lives Matter. Yes, we all need to do much more to understand why life is very different for white and black (and brown and Latino and Asian and...) in America. Still, this book is such an unrealistic portrayal of life for most white people in the US that it is likely to exacerbate tensions rather than help resolve them. As other reviewers have pointed out, Ms. Irving has conflated much of her economic privilege into her white privilege. She readily admits to a very upper class (let's not even try for "upper middle class") background but then seems to think that this kind of upbringing has given her the same experiences as the "rest of us," who have often had to deal with limited choices because of the less than affluent communities and schools we inhabit. Further, it is almost beyond belief that a person given the privileges she has had could be quite so uninformed about the real world. Are all white people as blind to reality as she seemed to be before "waking up white?" I find that difficult to believe. Here, for example, is one of her early experiences in the real world of work. Irving completed four years of college at "very white" Kenyon college and then spent an extended time on a study abroad program in "also very white" Vienna. She then returned and used her father's extensive connections to get an internship at WGBH, Boston's premier public radio station. On her very first day at the station, this new intern with no job experience is approached by another staff person and is offered a position as managing director of a local dance company! Though she admits that she may not be well qualified, she still takes the job. As Irving tells it, one of her first grants at the dance company provides funding to bring 500 "inner city children" to the Boston Shakespeare Theater to watch a daytime dance program. She expects that this experience will be a wonderfully welcome opportunity for the kids. Imagine her surprise then when the lines of school buses begin bringing the students to the theater. "When the kids started pouring off the buses, I couldn't believe how many were black...I had never seen so manyh black faces in one place in my life. I felt complete shock that 'inner-city' seemed to equate with 'black!'" (page 108) Really? One can spend more than 20 years in the US, at apparently good schools, can listen to a public radio station with all kinds of diverse programming, and still be "shocked" that inner-city and black are synonymous in her city? It is this kind of removal from everyday life that makes Waking Up White a very unhelpful book. It can only reinforce stereotypes some of other races may have about all whites, and it is so totally not real world that most whites with far less economic coddling are likely to just blow it off as so much "liberal pandering." There are far better works out there that address what is a real problem without making things worse.