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Diversity
2004 Speaker Melanie E. L. Bush Publishes New Book
Sign up for Bush's session
at Diversity 2004 and look for her new book at the Barnes
& Noble booth.
Melanie
E. L. Bush has announced the publication of her new
book, Breaking the Code of Good Intentions Everyday
Forms of Whiteness.  Bush
has been an educator and administrator at Brooklyn College,
CUNY since 1990. She has published numerous articles
in scholarly journals and presented at a range of national
conferences particularly in the fields of sociology
and anthropology.
Through
an examination of the contemporary white experience,
Breaking the Code of Good Intentions examines why most
white people in the United States believe we have achieved
racial equality, even though social and economic indicators
suggest otherwise. Drawing on systematic research conducted
at the largest urban public university in the country,
Melanie Bush explores white students' perceptions about
identity, privilege, democracy, and intergroup relations.
The
book explores mechanisms that reinforce adherence to
dominant narratives and thereby functioning to maintain
and reproduce racialized structures of inequality. It
also identifies "cracks in the wall of whiteness," circumstances
that can foster understanding about systemic and racialized
patterns of inequality. The author illuminates the connection
between everyday thinking and the policies and programs
that structure society.
Framed
within an analysis of economic and political transitions
that have occurred within the United States and globally
in the second half of the twentieth century, the author
examines the shift in public opinion from a presumption
of collective responsibility for the common good and
toward a belief in the social survival of the fittest.
She explores the extent to which these transitions led
to the sense of white victimization that is widely portrayed
by the media.
Concluding
with recommendations for academia and society at large,
the author contends that the time is overdue for the
dismantling of narratives that align ordinary whites
with global elites. Indeed, she argues, the very future
of humanity depends on challenging this persistent pattern.
You
can purchase Ms. Bush's new book at the Diversity 2004
Conference Barnes & Noble booth.
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