Autobiography of an ex-white man : learning a new master narrative for America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Autobiography of an ex-white man : learning a new master narrative for America
University of Rochester Press, 2005
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-132) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience.
Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American storyas a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project.
Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.
Table of Contents
Preface
Autobiography of an Ex-White Man
Mr. Shapiro's Wedding Suit
A New Master Narrative for America
The American Griot
A Concluding Word
Notes
The Original Syllabus of Fifty Major Works of Afro-American Studies
Books by Robert Paul Wolff
Index of Names
by "Nielsen BookData"