White Racism: A Psychohistory - Softcover

Kovel's book is a mind-blower, a serious attempt to grapple with racism simultaneously on historical and psychological levels, incorporating a concise and readable history of the specific human relation called 'white racism' by a perceptive culling of many different sources. Telos A brilliant book, admirably and provocatively written...Books on 'race' are legion, but they are seldom as original and interesting as Joel Kovel's book...very much worth reading for the many insights it provides into the depths of a profound human tragedy. -- Ashley Montagu A singularly impressive and well written book. The New York Times

In an unusual, novel approach to critical race theory, Joel Kovel manages to tackle a subject that stumped so many theorists in the 1960s and 1970s: unconscious bias. White Racism: A Psychohistory presents a psychohistorical matrix of racism in an analysis of unconscious bias. Kovel's psychoanalytic approach to race is haunting in its approach to Western culture. With psychoanalytic calculation, White Racism probes the deep psychological and historical embedding of racism in Western civilization and provides a pessimistic view of future reform.