Journalist Baynard Woods grew up in the last quarter of the 20th century, son of white parents raised in the Jim Crow South, descendant of forebears who had enslaved hundreds of Black people in South Carolina. His memoir Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, traces his dawning awareness of the crimes and outrages of his dead ancestors, … and his parents’ failure to confront that history and the privileges it created. Woods identifies whiteness as the problem, and calls for it to be dismantled.
“Our skin is the place that’s part world and part us. It’s where we meet the world. And similarly, whiteness is where our subjective experience, our mental state, merges with the structures of power around us.”
