Invisible Privilege : A Memoir About Race, Class, and Gender

Rating:
Summary: PRIVILEGE: HOW DOES IT HELP? HOW DOES IT HURT?
Review: "Invisible Privilege" is a multilayered book that I will enjoy reading more than once. It has the liveliness, humor, and candor of a good autobiography. But instead of merely telling one person's story, the author wears the analytical and critical lenses through which she views our society, to look at her own life -- without apology or mea culpa. She gives up the dearly held privilege of many of us "white liberals" to pretend that, in spite of the impact of race, class, and gender on American life, we somehow wriggled through unscathed, perhaps because of our own "natural" goodness. The author provides funny, poignant, eye-opening examples of how no one can rest on the laurels of being a good person with good intentions in this whirlwind society of ours. She is deepening the discussions of discrimination and exclusion, prejudice and hate, as well as of being human, and I look forward to her next book.

Rating:
Summary: Perceptive Insights into Significant Problems
Review: A very well-done combination of personal recollection and political insights. The questions of gender, race and class are often presented in an off-putting manner that only appeals to the already committed. Because of the genuiness and the clarity of this book, it can serve as an introduction to these areas for those who still have something to learn about them.

Rating:
Summary: A Propaganda Manual for the Committed
Review: If you are entirely committed to viewing human destiny almost exclusively in terms of group identity, you will love this book. Rothenberg cheerfully acknowledges that she has no pretentions toward disinterested inquiry in her college courses or in her writing. She procedes from the assumption that racism and sexism are the underlying conditions of life in the United States and sets out to illustrate this. The book is an amusing compendium of the leisure-class totalitarian orientation and quasi-Marxiast group think that has become the status quo in American "higher" education.