Penetrating Whiteness: How White Supremacy Built America (Navigating The Landscape Of Racism, Sexism, And America's Cultural Divide)

by Ralph Remington

Overview

At a time when America faces escalating racial tensions, the re-emergence of white nationalist movements, and growing threats to democracy, Ralph Remington's Penetrating Whiteness is an urgently needed clarion call. 

This powerful and timely collection of essays offers piercing insights into the realities of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the damaging legacy of Donald Trump's divisive presidency. With Trump mounting another run for the White House in 2024 amid the fallout of the January 6th insurrection, the national atmosphere is tinged with volatility and civil war rhetoric. Into this powder keg moment steps Remington, one of America's leading Black multi-sector voices on identity, social justice, and the path toward racial healing. His essays boldly confront the uncomfortable truths about the persisting toxicity of white supremacy and systemic discrimination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781963667349
Publisher:	Jim Dandy Publishing
Publication date:	02/03/2026
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ralph Remington is currently the Director of Cultural Affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. He has extensive professional experience in arts administration and government, and has experience as a director, actor, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. He is the founding producing artistic director of Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis where he is also a former City Councilmember.

Prior to joining the City and County of San Francisco, he served as the Deputy Director for Arts and Culture for the City of Tempe, Arizona. In that role, he was responsible for Tempe Center for the Arts’ comprehensive performance and visual art programming, as well as overseeing public art, the Tempe History Museum, arts engagement and municipal arts granting. He previously served as the former Western Regional Director and Assistant Executive Director for Actors Equity Association in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he was Director of Theater and Musical Theater at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) under President Obama in Washington, D.C, where he was the first Black man ever appointed. In 2010, he received the NEA Chairman's Distinguished Service Award. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Howard University. Ralph Remington currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Read an Excerpt

I was born in exile. Wanted by no one, belonging nowhere. My life has been a quest to belong, while owning some sense of dignity and respect. And in belonging, to somehow find meaning. So, I have consistently interrogated my own identity and the environment that shaped it. However today in this American moment I am lost and alas still in exile.

I didn’t know the world that I was coming into. Some say that we choose the lifetimes that we will lead. I don’t know. It’s complicated. I would’ve chosen a world without religion or divisions of race or gender or sexual orientation or class. I would have chosen a world where we could be with who we wanted to be with physically and spiritually without societal taboos. Instead, I found a world where we walk in lockstep behaving according to societal norms and entirely afraid to disrupt the status quo. We are a nation and a world of cowards.

Enter Donald Trump. He knew that we were a nation of cowards. So, it was very easy for him to bully his way to the presidency of the United States and to tromp all over civility on the way there. We were so married to the rules of decorum that we couldn’t realize when an enemy of the people was truly among us. Our collective marriage to etiquette killed America.

Marginalized and disenfranchised populations always knew that the only way to be heard was to make noise. To live out loud. To disrupt. If African Americans were loyal to the rules of civility, we’d still be slaves today. Harriet Tubman helped overturn the apple cart when she ushered enslaved Africans from lands of bondage in the southern US to lands of freedom in the North. Martin Luther King, Jr. helped lead a revolution during the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Panther Party figured out that White folks only respected the bullet and the fear of death; so they donned black berets, black leather jackets and shotguns to storm major metropolises throughout this country, while administering self-help within ghettoized communities. That is the America that I entered. I was born in 1963.

I was raised in a cauldron of fire and shaped by JFK, MLK, RFK, Lyndon Johnson, West Philadelphia, the Black Panther Party, nightly Vietnam telecasts, the Black Church, the Beatles, the Stones, Motown, the Weather Underground, Jesse Jackson, hippies, yippies, the Nation of Islam, the ’60s, the ’70s, the KKK, the Brady Bunch, white citizens councils, Vernon Jordan, arts and culture immersion, the Partridge Family, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Earth Wind and Fire, Stokely Carmichael, Howard University, RUN DMC, Stevie Wonder, Watergate, presidential resignation and assassinations…and so it goes. But most importantly I was shaped inside of a nation dedicated to White Supremacy.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

I—Genesis: The Architecture of Inequality
II—Trump's America: How One Presidency Changed the Conversation on Race
III—Intersections of Oppression: Examining Racism and Sexism
IV—Seeking Refuge: Black Exodus to White American and European Cities
V—Reclaiming Our Love Story: Navigating Black-White Relations in America

Acknowledgments
About the Author