Gregory S. Jay's White Writers, Race Matters: Fictions of Racial Liberalism from Stowe to Stockett covers so many standards of American literature – Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird – that it might easily be dismissed as yet another analysis of the muddied racial politics of American fiction. However, Jay's book approaches its well-trodden subject matter with a genuinely refreshing perspective that heralds an important turn in American literary studies. In his exploration of liberal race fiction, Jay focusses on texts by white authors, not to the exclusion of authors of color who appear throughout the text as important touchstones, but rather to highlight the racialized category of whiteness and its effects. Instead of treating white authors as an assumed standard, Jay explores how whiteness shaped authors from Fannie Hurst to Kathryn Stockett. Jay wisely recognizes the instabilities and conflicts inherent in any racial configuration, noting how whiteness evolves from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period.

White Writers, Race Matters is especially concerned with the “affective tools useful in fighting injustice” (6) that arise through liberal race fiction. Jay traces how white authors have historically aimed to inspire their white audiences to feelings that might lead to greater racial equality. The antebellum task of Stowe echoes in the “postracial” comedy of Stockett's best-selling book The Help. Jay is sensitive both to the critique of the sentimental as a means of reifying dominant groups and to the merits of its progressive objective. Rather than present iconic texts as either progressive champions or dependent upon racist constructs, Jay traces the contradictions evident in the history of racial liberalism. This requires attention both to the texts and to their reception. His account of the rise and fall of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high-school and college curricula demonstrates how racial liberalism has become more self-critical through the widespread acceptance of works by writers of color as well as a newfound attentiveness to nonwhite audiences. In other chapters, Jay turns to instructional guides of select texts to elucidate how they are presented to high-school and college readers. Such analysis highlights the paternalism and cultural superiority often at work in the cultural adulation of American classics.

Most of the texts that Jay considers, including Laura Zametkin Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1944), are by women. Recognizing the inextricable relationship between race and gender, Jay is especially adept at parsing the sexual politics evident in these novels. In chapter 5, he notes the tension at work in To Kill a Mockingbird’s doubled narration; Scout's child perspective presents a striking contrast to the sardonic tone of adult Jean Louise especially within the context of Lee's publication of Go Set a Watchman (2015). Emphasizing Scout's rebellion against normative gender roles, Jay presents a compelling reading of the book as “a queer coming-of-age story” (273) that runs parallel to its narrative of racial injustice.

Jay's readings are both thorough and insightful. His final chapter argues that the wildly popular novel The Help, which was made into a hit movie, dramatizes the privatization and consequently the occlusion of racism, a cornerstone of racial neoliberalism. Jay ties this development to earlier discussions on black abjection and the threat of the black body. While White Writers, Race Matters is fundamentally a work of literary criticism, it is deeply attuned to the political consequences of its analysis. Identifying himself as a white scholar early on in the book, Jay recognizes the overlap between his subject position and his subject matter. These are matters as personal as they are political, an observation typically applied to the work of women writers. Jay's book recognizes that “efforts to undo racial injustice will have to focus much effort on explicating the consciousness and moral psychology” of white Americans, “for they are the ones with the power, the group that must be moved and persuaded to act against what may well seem its own common interest” (13). White Writers, Race Matters offers an important model for the kind of antiracist, feminist scholarship increasingly necessary in the twenty-first century.