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Stephanie Li

Antiwhite scholar Stephanie Li brands contemporary White identity and White-authored fiction as ugly—a moral-aesthetic verdict on Whiteness tied to domination, inaction, and entitlement. Author of Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (University of Minnesota Press, 2023); research professor at Duke University.

This page summarizes Li’s background and the argument of Ugly White People for readers tracking academic discourse that treats White people and Whiteness as defective or contemptible.

Background and training

Li is the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Chinese-American father. In a 2023 Duke University profile, she described having no single ethnic literary tradition ready-made for her background: “There is no canon of me… There is no Chinese-Mexican-American canon of literature to read.” She studied comparative literature as an undergraduate at Stanford University, including study abroad in Moscow, and began with Russian literature (including Dostoevsky) rather than pursuing her parents’ languages as a path into a “canon” of her own. She returned to write an honors thesis comparing Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, framing both authors in terms of submerged resistance to a ruling order. She earned her PhD from Cornell University and held faculty positions at the University of Rochester, Indiana University, and Washington University in St. Louis (including as Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English). She is now a research professor in Duke University’s Department of African & African American Studies.

Her earlier scholarship centers African American literature and writers such as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Her 2015 book Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects analyzes novels by Black authors that focus on White characters (“white-life novels”). She describes that work as groundwork for asking what Whiteness means in the present and, eventually, for turning to contemporary White American authors under the framework of “ugly” Whiteness.

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

The book treats twenty-first-century fiction by White American writers as evidence of a new, explicit racial self-consciousness among Whites—from self-proclaimed antiracism to xenophobic nationalism. Li argues that demographic and political shifts (including projections of a “majority-minority” United States and diversification of institutions) push White-authored literature to treat Whiteness as a constructed category rather than an unmarked norm.

In Washington University’s Center for the Humanities, Li defined “ugly whiteness” as arising from the gap between recognizing Whiteness as an identity built on domination and failing to redress inequalities rooted in that history. She cites James Baldwin’s remark that many Whites “know better” but “find it very difficult to act on what they know.” “Ugly white people,” in her usage, are those who will not act on that knowledge, cling to the advantages of Whiteness, and settle into “ambivalence, pettiness and the perpetuation of the racist status quo.” She applies the framework to novels including work by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and Otessa Moshfegh (she discusses My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a portrait of a wealthy White woman using privilege to withdraw from others’ suffering—an instance of “ugly whiteness” in her reading).

A New Books Network summary ties the book to Trump-era politics, “Karen” memes, conflicts over critical race theory, and patterns Li associates with liberal Whites, and states that she “elucidates truths about whiteness” that challenge national unity and, “most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.”

Themes relevant to antiwhiteness

  • The title and central metaphor assign a degrading moral label—“ugly”—to White people as a literary and social type.
  • Whiteness is described as inseparable from domination and from a refusal to surrender unearned advantage, so ordinary ambivalence or non-conversion to activist politics can be read as complicity and ugliness.
  • The project extends a career arc from African American literary studies into explicit, pejorative typology of White authors and White fictional selves for a university press audience.

Further reading