Natasha Stovall’s beautiful, difficult, and leisurely stroll through whiteness flirts a little too often with psychopathologizing racism for my comfort, but all of its other discomforts should be willingly endured, much in the way you’ve hopefully endured the discomforts of White Fragility and So You Want to Talk About Race.
On that one point, with the white nationalist President of the United States running around stigmatizing mental illness by insisting that mass shooters are just “crazy people”, despite the mentally ill being more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of it, I doubt the efficacy of any argument that risks being appropriated, say, by defense attorneys claiming that someone who commits racist violence isn’t responsible for their actions because, you see, racism is a mental illness.
Stovall does make me wonder, however, if there’s a social benefit to looking at whiteness itself through a lens of psychopathology. I’m sure someone will say that’s splitting hairs, or distinction without a difference, but I don’t think so.