Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority (City Lights Books) by Tim Wise

In America, being white has long meant never having to think about race. Whites have been able to assume that the culture, political leadership and their own neighborhoods would “look like them,” and the economy would work for them, so long as they played by the rules.

Now, facing chronic economic insecurity, a multicultural pop culture, a Black president and a future in which they will no longer be the majority, whites are growing anxious.

This anxiety has helped create the Tea Party phenomenon with its call to “take the country back." By means of a racialized nostalgia for a mythological past, the Right is enlisting fearful whites into its campaign for reactionary social and economic policies.

In urgent response, Tim Wise has penned his most pointed and provocative work to date. Employing the form of direct personal address, he points a finger at whites race-based self-delusion, explaining how such an agenda will only do harm to the nations people, including most whites. In no uncertain terms, he argues that the hope for survival of American democracy lies in the embrace of our multicultural past, present and future.