Book Review
“White Male Privilege: How This Happened and Why It’s Even Worse Than We Thought” by David Goldenkranz
Reviewed by Michael Goldenkranz
I remember as a young teen reading Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin in the mid-’60s. The author, a white journalist from Texas, recounted his experiment of temporarily changing his skin color for six weeks and traveling throughout the Deep South to record and share his experiences. As a white Jewish idealistic youth I felt sad, angry, and inspired to “do good.”
We were not immune from persecution. Members of my extended family had perished in the Holocaust. My grandparents had fled for their lives from pogroms. Now at 70 I’ve just finished reading “White Male Privilege, my son’s first book. Notwithstanding my attempts over all these years to be a “helper,” I felt defensive.
My son appreciated getting my almost real-time (email and phone) reactions, thoughts, pushback, and questions, as I struggled to “hear” this well-researched, analytical and comprehensive look at our history, politics, science, and psychology — through the lens of white male privilege.
While the depth, breadth, and scope reminded me of Yuri Harari’s Sapiens or Collin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, David’s writing style, despite copious footnotes, was much more engaging.
David’s book retraces American history starting from the 1600s to explore our “white lies.” He explains how science was used to justify racism; tackles health care disparity; sexual myths; bias in census data collection (“so which box do I check?”); religion and the bible; language bias; cultural appropriation and assimilation as two sides of the same coin; affirmative action; and nationalism on steroids
And yet my son’s book was difficult for me to read. I felt like David was deliberately “poking this bear” by unequivocally showing how “white male privilege” has defined us and our world throughout history, and still does. While I don’t spend time thinking about “Whiteness” per se, I take pride in my Brooklyn roots and accent, as well as my Jewish and eastern European heritage, religion, and culture. But I recognize that being White while a genetic dice roll provides potential privileges we are not aware of or take for granted.
Whether you demonstrated in the Deep South for integration and voting access in the ‘60s, support Black Lives Matters, work or volunteer to help immigrants, or seek peace in the Middle East — no one enjoys being blamed for creating or contributing to injustices suffered by BIPOC. So I squirmed at having my own identity being lumped into the category of “Whiteness,” with its implications of implicit racism and resented that the book so quickly linked white privilege to white supremacy.
Yet as David shares in his introduction “In our progressive culture, most White folks are more afraid of being accused of being racist than being racist. As Heather Dalmage, an assistant professor of sociology at Roosevelt University, so eloquently puts it, “To admit to [our] racism would mean questioning [our] own identity.”
After reading David’s book and engaging in difficult conversations, this old white centrist/liberal male realizes (as David himself writes) ‘it would be dangerous to fool myself into thinking that Whiteness is simply a facet of my heritage.’
White Male Privilege, How This Happened and Why It’s Even Worse than We Thought is available at Barnes & Noble and from Amazon.
Reviewed by Michael B. Goldenkranz, pro bono attorney and community volunteer. Recipient of both the King County Bar Association and Washington State Bar Association Pro Bono and Public Service Awards. And proud father of both David Goldenkranz (the author) and Sarah Salomon who have devoted their careers to helping to repair the world.
