Inheritance

January 1, 2022

Woods grew up in South Carolina loving all things Southern but began questioning his culture and eventually left the state. He was shocked to discover that in 1860 his ancestors enslaved 1300 Black people, and he espoused progressive values as a reporter who won awards for his coverage of the Baltimore Rising and Charlottesville. But Woods truly began acknowledging the advantages conferred by whiteness after the 2015 Charleston Church massacre, perpetrated by someone from his hometown, which compelled him to plunge deep into investigating the story of his great-grandfather's lynching of Black county commissioner Peter J. Lemon in 1871. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

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May 15, 2022
A journalist reckons with the free passes and blinkers his White privilege has bestowed on him. Growing up in South Carolina, Baltimore-based journalist Woods inherited "the freedom not to notice my race." He didn't think twice about his father referring to Black people as "bears," his casual defense of the Confederacy, or his willful ignorance about slavery. This book is an effort to uncover what benefits he reaped from this unthinking, and he's as honest as he can be on the matter without lapsing into self-pity or false proclamations of allyship. (He styles his name crossed out, to signal his complicity and regret over his family's slave-owning past.) As Woods demonstrates, Whiteness has always afforded him leniency when it comes to the criminal justice system; his punishment for any wrongdoing, including marijuana possession, was never severe. But the benefits he has reaped are also more subtle: In his conversations, his reading choices, and his disinterest in race issues, he has perpetuated the problem. His slow awakening arrived as a high school teacher working with Black students and as a journalist covering cases like that of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died in police custody in Baltimore. Woods frames his chapters in lessons-learned fashioned, sometimes didactically, about what various conflicts say about Whiteness. But the book is generally rooted in fine storytelling, as the author focuses on two overarching stories: first, his relationship with his father, an immovable stars-and-bars Fox News enthusiast; and Woods' search for the truth about his great-grandfather and his covered-up history of racism and crime. The author eschews discussion of policy solutions; rather, he suggests that White people should look in the mirror. Failing to reckon with the depravity of the past, he writes, "makes us ever more susceptible to its return." Bracing, candid, and rueful.

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June 13, 2022
Journalist Woods (I Got a Monster) misfires in this disconcerting attempt to “see own whiteness.” “It might strike people of color strangely, that the force of whiteness remains so obscure to us white people,” he writes before proving that in a narrative that feels achingly out of touch. Woods grew up in South Carolina, in a family where calling Black people “bears” instead of the N-word was considered a mark of some degree of tolerance. He grew apart from them, and shares that process, while reckoning with his family’s troubling legacy: “In 1860... the Baynards and the Woodses combined held more than seven hundred people in bondage. My name is... a testament to a totalitarian slavocracy.” Woods’s penchant, however, for trite summations about his whiteness and the bewildering explanation behind his deliberate choice to keep his name (“to change would only continue the cover-up that has constituted whiteness for the last 150 years”) may cause readers to wonder if he fancies himself some sort of modern-day martyr. Bloviated sentences that try to imbue gravitas into trivialities—after eating a boiled peanut, he “dropped the shell into the water, where it drifted like a canoe in a naval battle... as the sun cut through bloated clouds”—suggest a writer in need of an editor. Good intentions aren’t enough to save this one.