Following the 10:30 am service next Sunday, the Anti-Racism Project will meet in the Brent Room. Masks will be worn, so you can feel safe attending the session.

Guest Speaker: We are extremely fortunate to WELCOME acclaimed young author and journalist Baynard Woods.

Baynard Woods will be talking about his important new book Inheritance: Autobiography of Whiteness, in which he faces the fact that his family on both sides in South Carolina were holders of hundreds of slaves for generations. How he reconciles feelings of love and revulsion for family and legacy is what distinguishes this raw excavation of his past brought into the present. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Oxford American Magazine and many other publications. He also writes opera libretti and songs with his band The Barnyard Sharks.

What has been said of Inheritance:

Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy. He’d fled the South long ago, transforming himself into a politically left-leaning writer and educator.

Then he was accused of discriminating against a Black student at a local university. How could I be racist? he wondered. Whiteness was a problem, but it wasn’t really his problem. He taught at a majority Black school and wrote essays about education and Civil Rights.

A white kid from his hometown massacred nine Black people in Charleston, Woods began to delve into his family’s history—and the ways that history has affected his own life.

When he discovered that his family—both the Baynards and the Woodses—collectively claimed ownership of more than 700 people in 1860, Woods realized his own name was a confederate monument. Along with his name, he had inherited privilege, wealth, and all the lies that his ancestors passed down through the generations.

In Inheritance, Woods takes us along on his journey to understand how race has impacted his life. Unflinching and uninhibited, it explores what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.

What Baynard says of Inheritance:

My book Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness addresses my life from the perspective of race, of my whiteness. And one of the first things I realized about whiteness, is that it is itself a lie that spawns other lies and keeps us from seeing the truth about ourselves.

First, I avoided the problem by writing a draft that was more social history than memoir. I was able to look at the history of whiteness and how it intersected with me. But I did so as a witness, rather than a perpetrator. 

My editor, Krishan, saw through it immediately. She pushed me to tell the story from the inside, to let her know what it was like to be white right now.

I started a new draft as my father, who was raised under Jim Crow and later became a Trump supporter and is a big part of the story, a foil against whom I tried to fashion my sense of myself, was dying of ALS. I loved him deeply but I was furious at the lies he had both accepted and passed on. Part of the writing became an attempt to reconcile that love and that fury, which seems necessary if we ever hope to really disrupt white supremacy in the end In other words, I learned that white people can’t overcome the white supremacy that still dominates us with fury alone. We also need to fight it with love and compassion—for ourselves as well as others.