Touring Derrick Bell's Afrolantica, Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies, Part 1

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

In the prologue to Afrolantica Legacies Professor Derrick Bell claims whites base their self-worth on skin color:

For without black people in America, what would it mean to be white? Of what value whiteness, the privilege of preference, the presumption of normality, the reassurance of majority status? Were the advantages of color to disappear, how would whites replace their carefully constructed but ever-fragile self-esteem based on whiteness? Blacks doubted that many whites would ever ask themselves these questions, but the questions were not less real because unacknowledged.