White Thinking
How Racial Bias Is Constructed and How to Move Beyond It
What does it mean to be white? Beyond just a skin color, is it also a way of thinking? If so, how did it come about, and why?
In this book, drawing on history, personal experience and activist literature, the former soccer player and World Champion Lilian Thuram looks at the origins and workings of white thinking, how it divides us and how it has become ubiquitous and accepted without challenge. He demonstrates how centuries of white bias and denial justified slavery and colonialism, and have reinforced norms and structures of oppression, limiting the roles and horizons of both non-whites and whites alike.
Crucially, while White Thinking is a critique of ingrained structural inequities, it calls for an inclusive approach to solving the problem, and aims to raise awareness and imagine a new world in which all of humanity is given equal weight.
Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe in 1972, had a prestigious international career in soccer for the French national team – World champion in 1998, European champion in 2000, World Cup finalist in 2006 – and played for elite European clubs such as Juventus and Barcelona. In 2008, he created the Lilian Thuram Foundation to educate against racism, and he has become a high-profile activist himself. He is the author of various non-fiction books.
David Murphy is Head of School of Humanities at University of Strathclyde. He has published widely on various aspects of modern and contemporary Francophone West African culture, including the monographs, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (2000) and (with Patrick Williams), Postcolonial African Cinema (2007). He has also published numerous edited volumes, including (with Charles Forsdick) Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World (2009) and The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966 (2016).
