Nice White Ladies: The Truth About White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It

In this blunt and well-reasoned account, Hunter College sociology professor Daniels (White Lies) challenges white women to “reach beyond the strictures of niceness and the constraints of ladyhood” and work to dismantle the systemic racism they have upheld. Details about her family background, including her grandfather’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan, enrich Daniels’s history of how white women have “instigated, encouraged, and benefited from white supremacy.” She notes that white women in the antebellum South gained power by inheriting enslaved people; that white suffragists opposed giving Black men the right to vote; and that white women have benefited “disproportionately” from affirmative action. Daniels also connects recent cases of white “Karens” calling the police on innocent Black people to historical episodes such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till; argues that negative emotional and health outcomes result from believing the lie that “being white will save us from social isolation and disconnection through materialism, individualism, and the satisfaction of superiority”; and guides white women on how to “divest from white spaces” and “acknowledge and repair harm.” Buttressed by Daniels’s personal reflections and lucid readings of American history and culture, this is a bracing yet actionable call for change. (Oct.)