Derald Wing Sue

This book does an excellent job of explaining why being “color-blind” is actually harmful to improving race relations. Sue also breaks down the concept of white privilege and why it’s important for white people to be aware of their privilege. However, the book is so repetitive that reading it becomes tedious. He cites his sources within the text instead of using footnotes or endnotes and this interferes with the flow of reading the book.

I didn’t agree with his section on communication styles. His source for the basis of his analysis was from 1985. I think more recent research into communication styles of different races would have been more accurate.

The last thing that bothered me about this book was the overuse of the phrase” brothers and sisters”. For instance, “Persons of color, more than their White brothers and sisters, are aware of the frightening implications of this expectation.” He used this phrase dozens, maybe hundreds of times. To me, it’s too touchy -feely or just plain weird for this type of book. A small quibble but one that really irritated me as I was reading.

This book has some great information but it’s overshadowed by its flaws. If it were paired down by cutting out all of the repetitive pieces., it would be a great in-depth magazine article. I think there are better books out there that make the same points as Sue.… (mere)

Well...I like the IDEA of this book. However, I felt that it was too repetitive (repeating the same thing multiple times in a chapter).

This book was thought-provoking and helped me to understand my own thoughts and experiences with my racial identity, and realize that I have a lot of white privilege. (This is something I may have thought I had before...but not to this degree of understanding.)

The inconsistent parts of the book being the last half or so. The first half of the book kept emphasizing how no ethnic/racial identity is the same...and the last half were chapters devoted to discussing (& generalizing) each racial group, and then special population (elderly, women, Jewish, GLBT) with tips and suggestions on how to work with each group (which is what it said you couldn't really do..). Oh well.

I feel WHOLE HEARTEDLY that I would have given this book a higher rating if the redundancies were taken out. If you have to say the same thing over and over, and over again...obviously the book should just be shorter.… (mere)