Black Bodies, White Gazes

George D. Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of over 20 books and known for his national and international influential essays and interviews at the New York Times, "The Stone."

• Introduction: (Im)possible Life Under the Weight of the White Gaze1. Black Bodies and the Myth of a Post-Racial America2. The Elevator Effect: Black Bodies/White Bodies3. The Return of the Black Body Part 1: Early Vignettes4. The Return of the Black Body Part 2: Contemporary Vignettes5. The Agential Black Body: Resisting the Black Imago in the White Imaginary6. Exposing the Serious World of Whiteness through Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographical Reflections7. Desiring Bluest Eyes, Desiring Whiteness: The Black Body as Torn Asunder8. Whiteness as Ambush and the Transformative Power of Vigilance9. White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as “Disgust,” and the Aesthetics of Un-SuturingCoda: The Symbolic Death of the White Gaze

This book was a classic philosophical text since its initial publication—not simply because of its brilliance, but also because it sought to do something. This updated third edition only raises those stakes, reminding us why critical reflection, perhaps now more than ever, remains necessary; for in this text George Yancy listens to the dead, hears their blood crying out from the ground, refuses to abstract away from the concrete effects of the violent and vicious gaze of white supremacist antiblackness. This work is a powerful and painful expression of a prophetic cry for justice. If we listen, we will be changed. Or at least I was.