INHERITANCE

A journalist reckons with the free passes and blinkers his White privilege has bestowed on him.

Growing up in South Carolina, Baltimore-based journalist Woods inherited “the freedom not to notice my race.” He didn’t think twice about his father referring to Black people as “bears,” his casual defense of the Confederacy, or his willful ignorance about slavery. This book is an effort to uncover what benefits he reaped from this unthinking, and he’s as honest as he can be on the matter without lapsing into self-pity or false proclamations of allyship. (He styles his name crossed out, to signal his complicity and regret over his family’s slave-owning past.) As Woods demonstrates, Whiteness has always afforded him leniency when it comes to the criminal justice system; his punishment for any wrongdoing, including marijuana possession, was never severe. But the benefits he has reaped are also more subtle: In his conversations, his reading choices, and his disinterest in race issues, he has perpetuated the problem. His slow awakening arrived as a high school teacher working with Black students and as a journalist covering cases like that of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died in police custody in Baltimore. Woods frames his chapters in lessons-learned fashioned, sometimes didactically, about what various conflicts say about Whiteness. But the book is generally rooted in fine storytelling, as the author focuses on two overarching stories: first, his relationship with his father, an immovable stars-and-bars Fox News enthusiast; and Woods’ search for the truth about his great-grandfather and his covered-up history of racism and crime. The author eschews discussion of policy solutions; rather, he suggests that White people should look in the mirror. Failing to reckon with the depravity of the past, he writes, “makes us ever more susceptible to its return.”

Bracing, candid, and rueful.