The right kind of white

The Right Kind of White describes how the ideal American persona is often attained by using white male privilege to set the status quo of appropriate responsibility and the bar of reasonable aspiration for becoming a better individual. And yet, as Bucks, an organizer and activist, notes, his own privilege and idealism prevent him from creating significant relationships within his own white race. This book is intended to serve as a bridge between mainstream white Americans and the Other, and as a call to connection through dialogue and respectful social relationships. It aims for better future tolerance and shared harmony. To this end, Bucks highlights the importance of self-awareness and self-knowledge to participate in activism and cultivate more meaningful connections. Through these connections he hopes to integrate all aspects of American diversity and further awareness for all American experiences. The Right Kind of White aims to highlight unconscious bias on race and identity. It depicts a deep sense of individual liberalism and social change to question race and privilege in the US, with the intention of building better communities in an increasingly globalized world. This is a must-read volume for anyone ready to take on the difficult task of working toward social and racial justice. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, lower-division undergraduates, and faculty. --Kholoud Al-Qubbaj, Southern Utah University

An activist unpacks "good" whiteness. Bucks is the founder of the Barnraisers Project, which equips "White organizers from across the country to mobilize their own communities for racial justice." As he explains in the introduction, his debut book is his attempt to tell "the story of White people's obsession not just with who we are in relation to Black and Brown people, but who we are in relation to each other." (Bucks capitalizes White because to not do so when capitalizing Black and Brown makes whiteness seem like the default category.) While the author set out to write a "sociohistorical analysis," he decided that he couldn't execute that project properly without first interrogating the ways in which he has tried to differentiate himself from other white people throughout his life. Consequently, he chose to write a memoir. Bucks has set himself an extremely difficult task: making himself the central figure in a narrative that is, essentially, the story of a white person learning to decenter himself in the cause of justice. The author is nothing if not self-effacing. He gently pokes fun at the painful sincerity of his younger self, a peace and global studies major at Earlham College, "a Quaker school…that primarily attracted self-consciously earnest do-gooders," and he recounts his nervousness at being perceived as a white savior while working on a Navajo reservation. However, the anecdotes about the ways in which he identifies, rejects, and uses various kinds of whiteness aren't terribly revelatory. What we learn, ultimately, is what we knew at the beginning: Bucks is a sincere guy doing his best to do good. "It's a gift," he writes, "to share my story of 'the right kind of being White.' It will be an even more profound gift if my doing so encourages others to share theirs as well." An earnest but mostly unenlightening work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.