White Kids

A terrific book tracing the different trajectories of racial meaning young white children make about themselves and others as they navigate the worlds of school, friendship, and neighborhood, as well as the larger world beyond. This book is full of rich insight that should give us both pause and a sense of possibility. -- Amy L. Best,Author of Fast Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties Hagerman's book is a careful, painful and convincing argument that when white people give their children advantages, they are often disadvantaging others. Racism is so hard to overturn, in part, because white people prop it up when they work to make sure their children succeed. * NBC's Think blog * Margaret HagermansWhite Kidsbrings to mind two words: must read....Hagerman unearths the segregation, income inequality, and racial biases which run rampant in her subjects lives... Hagermans writing is crisp and riveting...She puts forth a crucial analysis on the 'well-meaning,' 'colorblind' racism that her subjects perpetuate, stripping down the coded language of suburbia until it reveals the ugly truth underneath. -- STARRED * Foreword Reviews * This innovative, absorbing ethnography reveals that there is no single way that whites learn about race. Environmental influences such as schools, neighborhoods, and even extracurricular activities profoundly shape the ways that affluent white children think about racism and its impact on people of color. Its fascinating to learn how one child develops a critique of police shootings while another insists that racism does not exist at all. This immersive study will transform the way we think about racial socialization among the privileged. White Kids is a must read for anyone interested in how racial attitudes in America take shape in their earliest moments. -- Monica McDermott,Author of Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations [The author] examines how affluent white children think about race Hagerman spent two years immersed with 30 privileged white Midwestern families to produce this timely...study. [S]he provides revealing portraits.[and] is especially good on the & conundrum of privilege.A complex and nuanced...book. * Kirkus Reviews * By studying how affluent white children think about race, we can see how racist attitudes permeate the structures of power in our society and what it would take to change them... its sobering message should be required reading for all affluent white parents (and affluent white college students)-and especially those who believe in social justice. * American Journal of Sociology * More than anything else, whiteness is an everyday practice constructed out of mostly mundane, seemingly & beyond race interactions. In her masterful White Kids, Margaret A. Hagerman demonstrates this fact by showing how privileged children in a Midwestern town are socialized into whiteness and, more significantly, make choices to reproduce whiteness. Hagermans book deserves to be read widely as it is a sociological gem!-Eduardo Bonilla -- Silva,Author of Racism Without Racists