Letters to My White Male Friends

April 5, 2021
Journalist and educator Ross (Make Me Believe) discusses in this astute and accessible account the challenges and double standards he faces as a Black man in America and what white people can do to help bring about change. Ross documents his “socialization inside white-dominant institutions,” beginning with his enrollment at age 12 in a Washington, D.C., private school, where “you were rewarded for pontificating even if you didn’t know what you were talking about.” At Rutgers University in the 1990s, Ross and two other Black males were the only students (out of hundreds) charged with reckless endangerment for participating in a protest that shut down traffic on a local highway. The summer before his third year of law school, Ross was standing on a D.C. street corner when he was arrested, beaten, and charged with assaulting a police officer (the charges were later dropped). Ross folds analyses of Supreme Court rulings, gentrification, the “war on drugs,” and income disparities into his candid personal reflections, and offers a useful framework for how white men, in particular, can “shift culture and advance equity” by paying attention to how they receive feedback and by drawing on their own feelings of powerlessness to empathize with marginalized groups. This commonsense guide tackles a pressing social issue head-on.

Starred review from May 1, 2021
A Black man speaks hard truths to White men about their failure to dismantle systemic racism. A "child of the Black bourgeoisie," journalist Ross first learned "the shadow history of Black revolutionary struggle" in college. He accepted that he "directly benefited from the struggle that generations of Black folks had died in the name of, yet I wasn't doing anything to help those who hadn't benefited." The author calls the White men of his generation, Gen X, to also recognize their complicity and miseducation. "We were fed cherry-picked narratives that confirmed the worthlessness of Black life," he writes, "The euphemistic 'culture of poverty, ' not systemic oppression, was to blame for the conditions in which so many Black people lived." The story that White people have been told about Black people is "missing a major chapter," and Ross thoroughly elucidates that chapter with a sweeping deep dive into decades of American social history and politics that is at once personal, compelling, and damning. Through a series of well-crafted personal letters, the author advises White men to check their motivations and "interrogate the allegedly self-evident, 'commonsense' values and beliefs" that perpetuate inequality and allow them to remain blissfully unaware of the insidiousness of racism and the ways they benefit from it. Ross condemns the "pathological unwillingness to connect the past with the present" and boldly avoids the comfortable "both sides" rhetoric that makes anti-racism work more palatable to White people. "It is on you," he writes, "to challenge the color-blind narratives your parents peddle." The letters are consistently compelling, covering wide ground that includes the broken criminal justice system, gentrification, and the problem with framing equity work as "charity." Finally, Ross offers practical guidance and solutions for White men to employ at work, in their communities, and within themselves. Pair this one with Emmanuel Acho's Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man. A fiery, eloquent call to action for White men who want to be on the right side of history.

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