Summary

Co-Whites discusses race and gender politics and traces the role of women in Western and non-Western political systems. Aniagolu examines the dynamics of race and gender in the United States, starting from the colonial and antebellum periods, leading up to the American Civil War and Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, to the present day. The work explores how white American women, in their search and struggle for gender equality in the United States, related to three principal streams in America's socioeconomic and political history: white supremacy, women of color-especially African American women, and the freedom and civil rights struggle for racial equality. The United States has irreversibly become a multiracial and multicultural democracy and white supremacy has become untenable; however, Aniagolu concludes that white American women collaborated with white American men as 'Co-Whites' or co-partners in the management and maintenance of white supremacy in the United States. Well-researched and lucidly written, the work makes intellectually and historically coherent a subject matter often muttered in small circles and that takes the form of scholarly 'civil wars' inside 'Women's Studies' between white American and African American women scholars and schools of thought. The work grapples with a serious issue in light of the 2008 presidential elections in the United States, offering insightful explanations certain to evoke lively debate in university classrooms, amongst professorial colleagues, and in the general public.