Books with category Cultural Critique
Displaying 4 books

White Women

A no-holds-barred guidebook aimed at white women who want to stop being nice and start dismantling white supremacy.

It's no secret that white women are conditioned to be nice, but did you know that the desire to be perfect and to avoid conflict at all costs are characteristics of white supremacy culture?

As the founders of Race2Dinner, an organization which facilitates conversations between white women about racism and white supremacy, Regina Jackson and Saira Rao have noticed white women's tendency to maintain a veneer of niceness, and strive for perfection, even at the expense of anti-racism work.

In this book, Jackson and Rao pose these urgent questions: how has being nice helped Black women, Indigenous women and other women of color? How has being nice helped you in your quest to end sexism? Has being nice earned you economic parity with white men?

Beginning with freeing white women from this oppressive need to be nice, they deconstruct and analyze nine aspects of traditional white woman behavior—from tone-policing to weaponizing tears—that uphold white supremacy society, and hurt all of us who are trying to live a freer, more equitable life.

White Women is a call to action to those of you who are looking to take the next steps in dismantling white supremacy. Your white supremacy. If you are in fact doing real anti-racism work, you will find few reasons to be nice, as other white people want to limit your membership in the club. If you are not ticking white people off on a regular basis, you are not doing it right.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

2022

by Rafia Zakaria

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption offers a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights. For too long, upper-middle-class white women have been heralded as the 'experts' on feminism, presiding over multinational feminist organizations and writing much of the feminist canon.

Rafia Zakaria, an American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, champions a reconstruction of feminism in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto. She centers women of color in the dialogue, challenging the global, long-standing affinity of white feminism with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.

Zakaria covers topics like the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and the condescension of the white feminist-led 'aid industrial complex.' She critiques the conflation of sexual liberation as the 'sum total of empowerment,' following in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde.

In this staggering, radical critique, Zakaria refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment, placing Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.

The Witches Are Coming

2021

by Lindy West

In this wickedly funny cultural critique, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir and Hulu series Shrill exposes misogyny in the #MeToo era.

This is a witch hunt. We're witches, and we're hunting you.

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author Lindy West turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one.

In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics.

West writes, “We were just a hair’s breadth from electing America’s first female president to succeed America’s first black president. We weren’t done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form—like the Balrog’s whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can’—white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.”

We cannot understand how we got here—how the land of the free became Trump's America—without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact-checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. On the brink of fatherhood, facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf, his casual questioning took on an urgency.


His quest for answers required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits—from folklore to pop culture to family traditions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.


Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told—and the stories we now need to tell.

Are you sure you want to delete this?