The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself

The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself uncovers the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression.

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country's founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy. These include Jefferson's defence of slavery, Lincoln's frequently minimised racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow, illustrating how white identity is based on shared beliefs in pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions. These fictions allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. Mura argues that white supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, a belief that dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.

Mura turns to literature, comparing the white saviour portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelisation of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists. He examines depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison and considers race's absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen, and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin's essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.

Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives. He addresses what white people must do to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.