Economies of Whiteness

"Lombardo has perfect aim and wicked wit in this stinging expose of enduring white-skin privilege. Take to Starbucks, read aloud, and watch the hipsters squirm." - Mike Davis, author of " City of Quartz "

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," " Economies of Whiteness " (EoW) takes its theme largely from King's exasperation with the calls from so many of the white liberals of his day to "go slow" in seeking justice. 50 years later, white liberals are still going slow. This book is an attempt to assess what, if anything, such a strategy has gotten them and what its implications might be for all the rest of us.

How do we understand white liberals' near complete disregard for financial fraud? Or their cowardice-fueled collaborationism in the face of Bush's wars of fancy? Or their deafening silence regarding the everyday horrors of the Drug War? The rapid turnover of the media cycle predisposes us to understand the ideological positions of white liberals as rational calculations in the interest of short-term political gains and indeed they are. However, there is a deeper question that the short-term analysis of white liberal policy failures leaves unasked: what is it that makes white liberals so ready to play a game they know to be rigged against them?

The more perplexing, serious, and immediate question is not "What's the Matter with Kansas? " but rather "What's the matter with San Francisco?" In the effort to pose such a question, "Economies of Whiteness" endeavors to provide a social ecological account of white liberal existence. Looking at the whole chain of production, what is it exactly that white liberals do? How do they feed themselves? Who do they serve and upon whom do they rely? In the process of asking these basic questions, EoW examines contemporary white liberal culture (with its emphasis upon valueless irony), white liberal social myths (the stories that get passed down among white liberals intergenerationally, such as Education-for-Education's-sake), and the best and worst of white liberal intellectual history (from Mill to Ricardo to Thomas Frank). In its most comically accusatory moments, EoW aspires to the biting tone of W.E.B. Du Bois' tragicomic classic "The Souls of White Folk."