George Yancy’s new book, Backlash, grew out of Dear White America, a piece on the pervasiveness of white racism that he wrote for the New York Times’ philosophy column, The Stone. After the piece was published on Christmas Eve 2015, Yancy received an extraordinary number of responses from white readers, many of whom were aggressively defensive and included racist epithets and threats of physical violence. Backlash extends the argument made in Dear White America, and turns personal and philosophic lenses on the vile responses it received.

What was the message of Dear White America, and why do you think it proved so provocative?

Dear White America was a letter of love. And by letter of love I mean that it was a letter that was an invitation for white people to engage honestly with their racism, to be vulnerable and to let go of their “white innocence”.

After conducting 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals at The Stone, I decided to write a letter that was direct and candid. I tried to create a mutually vulnerable space where white people could reveal the ways in which they harbor racist assumptions, emotions and embodied habits.

I also invited white people to explore the ways in which they are complicit with white systemic and institutional power and privilege. It doesn’t follow from this that all white people are members of the KKK or that white people are born racists. That would be ridiculous. Yet, that is what many white people assumed that I meant.

I think that the anger resulted from a defensive posture, one that is linked to a failure of nerve and honesty that is needed for white people to confront courageously the truth about how racism is insidious and constitutes the DNA of white America. Fear can breed anger, but I wanted a courageous white America, one prepared to remove the masks of self-deception, to love in return.

What sorts of response did you get to the piece?

The majority of the white responses were vile, despicable and unconscionable. I was told to commit suicide immediately. I was told to go back to Africa, called a “monkey”, “boy”, “hoodrat”, “pavement ape”, and referred to as excrement. One white person fantasized about using a meat hook on me and another white person said that I ought to be beheaded “Isis style”. Of course, I was also called by that most horrible, dehumanizing and insulting of words, “nigger”. I couldn’t even keep count of the number of times the N-word was used.

White racism dripped from their lips. The responses pulled from old white racist imagery that depicted black people as bestial and animalistic. What became clear to me are the deep ways in which that discourse, those assumptions and imagery are still quite palpable within the white American psyche.

So much of white America is unprepared and unwilling to have a courageous conversation about racism. They would rather avoid the conversation, blame me, call me a “race baiter”. Some even said that I wrote Dear White America to sexually seduce white women. What does that say about the problematic and racist myth and fear of the so-called black male rapist?

Given the racist insults, one might argue that the point that I was trying to make was, in many ways, confirmed. I did receive a few very powerful and beautiful responses from white readers who said to me that they accepted the gift that I offered and that they would critically and honestly engage their racism even as they knew that the challenge was real and requires serious work. But after so many insults, I have come to have profoundly less hope in white America.

How does Backlash take up that response, and take forward the argument of Dear White America?

Backlash is a continuation of the letter of love that began with Dear White America. I make no effort in the book to avoid sharing the racist vile responses that I received, and engage my own personal trauma as the target of so much white racism. And I engaged this with as much clarity and vulnerability as possible.

White America, all Americans, must witness the vileness. Backlash inundates its white reader with unmitigated reality, and asks white readers to dwell within a space of black trauma. And it asks the white reader to linger, to touch the truth about their whiteness and its complicity with that trauma. So, it dares to ask “good whites” to explore their racism, their hated, their white racist microaggressions and complicity with white racist macroaggressions. The book is an outgrowth of a post-racial America that was always a lie. And it asks white readers, in the words of James Baldwin, to use it as a disagreeable mirror to look at themselves.

You compare white racism to sexism. What do you mean by that?

I am a sexist. I don’t say this with pride. And I don’t say it in order to receive praise. I am not a hero for being honest. I don’t think that any of us men, raised within a culture that promotes pornography, the degrading sexual objectification of women, the fragmentation of women’s bodies and the perpetuation of rigid gender roles, escape such problematic forms of masculine “normalization”. Let’s admit it. Patriarchy is powerful. It shapes men’s habits, perceptions, conceptions of romance, authority, pleasure, emotions, body comportment. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we are incapable of resisting. We certainly can resist, and we must.

In Dear White America, my aim was to model for white people, to demonstrate what courageous speech looks like expressed publicly, what public vulnerability looked like. That was my aim. For the most part, it was a missed opportunity for so many white people. They became so obsessed and defensive that they failed or refused to bear witness to the ethical thrust of my public disclosure.

When you talk about “whiteness” in the letter and book, what do you mean?

Whiteness is a structural, ideological, embodied, epistemological and phenomenological mode of being – and it is predicated upon its distance from and negation of blackness. This is what so many white people forget or refuse to see: their being racialized as white and socially and psychologically marked as privileged has problematic implications for my being black.

Whiteness is what I call the “transcendental norm”, which means that whiteness goes unmarked. As unmarked, white people are able to live their identities as unraced, as simply human, as persons. And this obfuscates the ways in which their lives depend upon various affordances that black people and people of color don’t possess.

White racism is thus a continuum, one that includes the KKK, the loving white Christian and the antiracist white. Even good, moral white people, those who have black friends, friends of color, married to people of color, fight for racial justice and so on, don’t escape white racist injustice against black people and people of color; they all continue to be implicated within structures of white privilege and to embody, whether they realize it or not, society’s racist sensibilities. White people possess white privilege or white immunity from racial disease. And because of this, others of us, black people and people of color, reap the social, political and existential pains of that racialized social skin.

Are you hopeful about your gift being accepted?

I am torn. History, after all, is not closed and time is open-ended. Yet, there is nothing about time that guarantees the end to white supremacy. White supremacy is capable of conceding some things and yet preserving its core values and sustaining a place for black people that no white person will ever inhabit, no matter how poor that white person. The logic of the 13th amendment to the US constitution made involuntary servitude unconstitutional and yet white power was preserved through the criminalization of black people. In this way, white power continued to hold sway.

White America needs to engage in a form of crisis regarding its false and oppressive identity. It needs to grapple seriously with why it needed to project its vileness onto black people and people of color in the first place. Perhaps it needs to see its emptiness, to truly love itself beyond its continued de facto segregated spaces, its insularity. The gift contained in Backlash offers an embodied way of rethinking, re-feeling and re-positioning what it means to be white. It is a gift that offers loss, which is so counterintuitive.

Today is white America’s time to weep, to become vulnerable, and un-suture itself, which means, for me, a process of suffering oneself to be seen, of remaining wounded. The gift of Backlash is a radical call to white America to tarry with its own racist vomit, and to linger with the stench of the racist catastrophe of which it is responsible, before any talk of “reconciliation” is even possible.

• George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author, editor and co-editor of over 18 books. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times’ philosophy column The Stone.