Through an unflinching look at the literary canon since the Civil Rights era, Jess Row’s collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, examines the influence of whiteness on white writers’ imagination and America’s historical antipathy toward race. As Row deconstructs the fiction of white writers- notables like Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson, among others- he points out a pattern of omission, of narratives curiously devoid of racial question, or tension, which Row defines as nothing short of “wishful thinking as a way of life, a way of seeing, a way of making art” (10). Written primarily for white readers (of which I am one), I found Row very successful making the connection between white writers’ literary deracination and the literal ‘white flight’ from neighborhoods as blacks moved north during the Great Migration, seeking refuge from lynch mob terrorism and Jim Crow (9-10). White writers’ “apartheid of consciousness” becomes even more stark in the piece, “Parts of Us Not Made at Home,” a reflective piece on the writing of black writers such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, whose stories spoke openly about the violence and trauma associated with race in this country continue...