Everyday Whiteness and the Failure of the Private Life

Abstract This chapter focuses on the words of James Baldwin—his prophetic insights into the relationship between American public stances and private lives. How do White people live with such massive contradictions between how they present their lives publicly and how they live those everyday lives as individuals and as people with roles in institutions and professions oriented toward Whiteness? This chapter is written into the chasm between White people’s public stances and their private lives through an interrogation of Whiteness, performances of White people in social work (and the profession as a whole), and their everyday, mundane actions and behaviors. The chapter ends where it began, with Baldwin: “The price of change is awful and it is also extremely concrete, and one’s got to be prepared, I think, to lose everything one hoped for and everything one has.”