White Minds: Everyday Performance, Violence and Resistance

Description

It is widely understood that race is a social fact with profound implications for life chances, group identity, collective representation and for the social order. 'Whiteness', the source of race-based inequality and injustice is perpetuated through power, violence and an array of complex processes which help protect the status quo. While there has been much focus on the psychological harm of racism on people of colour, less attention has been paid to the role of psychological functioning of white groups in maintaining unequal social configurations. In this much-needed book, Guilaine Kinouani, a leading thinker and commentator on race, deftly cuts to the heart of the problem, arguing that whiteness is a historically and socially located psychological phenomenon. She examines how the psychological and psychic factors involved in the reproduction of whiteness intersect with macro structures, shedding light on everyday race dynamics, race inequality and racial violence of interest to all who seek to understand the impact of 'whiteness' so they can be more effective anti-racists.

Guilaine Kinouani is a psychologist and the director and founder of Race Reflections, a social enterprise dedicated to tackling inequality injustice and oppression which features a widely read anti-racist blog https://racereflections.co.uk/. For most of her career Kinouani has been involved in anti-racism which has deeply influenced her scholarship and work. Guilaine teaches critical psychology and black studies at Syracuse University in London. Her award-winning work and writing have appeared in the national press and on television. Kinouani 's first book Living While Black (Ebury: Penguin Random House) is a powerful expose of the lived experience of racism and their impact on black minds and bodies.