MLK Convocations
Title
MLK 2016: Waking Up White
Files
Download Full Text
Download Debby Irving (10 KB)
Description
Debby Irving brings to racial justice the perspective of working as a community organizer and classroom teacher for 25 years without understanding racism as a systemic issue or her own whiteness as an obstacle to grappling with it.
As general manager of Boston’s Dance Umbrella and First Night, and later as a classroom teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she struggled to make sense of tensions she could feel but not explain in racially mixed settings.
ISBN
978-0991331307
Publication Date
1-20-2016
Publisher
Elephant Room Press
Keywords
Biographies, Memoirs, Education, Teaching, Ethnicity
Disciplines
African American Studies | American Politics | Civic and Community Engagement | History of Religion | Political History | Politics and Social Change | United States History
Recommended Citation
Irving, Debby, "MLK 2016: Waking Up White" (2016). MLK Convocations. 4.
https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/mlk/4
Comments
In 2009, a graduate school course, Racial and Cultural Identities, gave her the answers she’d been looking for and launched her on a journey of discovery.
Debby now devotes herself to working with white people exploring the impact white skin can have on perception, problem solving, and engaging in racial justice work. A graduate of the Winsor School in Boston, she holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MBA from Simmons College. Her first book, Waking Up White, tells the story of how she went from well-meaning to well-doing.
Waking Up White is the book Debby Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole.