© Radical Philosophy Review Volume 16 number 3 (2013): 805–808
DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201316360
Whites, Tarry Here!:
George Yancy on Whiteness
V. Denise James
Under Review:
George Yancy, Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on
Whiteness.Philadelphia:TempleUniversityPress,2012.
Pp. 207. $26.95, paperback. ISBN 9781439908549.
T
he weeks I spent reading George Yancy’s “Look, a White!” early in the
morning at local chain restaurant where I often eat and write were
revealing. The place is a hub for white retirees who spend a couple of
hours there each morning to talk politics, sports, and gossip. I am a curios‐
ity (to say the least). I am a youngish black woman who comes trudging in
alternately wearing gym clothes or fancied up to teach my classes. I’m al‐
ways typing furiously at my laptop and, most curiously, I always have a stack
of philosophy books that I’m using for research that I ritualistically stack
on my table, even if I don’t get to them. My fellow breakfast club members
openly stare at me, some have even ventured to guess my profession (they
are always wrong and never once have I been asked directly), and, often in
hushed tones, they wonder, “where do they read those books?” Emphasis on
Those and They. Yancy’s book received far more side glances and whispers
than even The Communist Manifesto—which I happened to overhear from
my retiree friends was “banned in schools.”
Reading “Look, a White!” created tension with folks I try to pay little
notice of; it perplexed them, read to them from their distance as something
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looked at me, as I tried to go about my business? Was the book and me read‐
ing the book an indictment?