What is the author's perspective in the nonfiction book, White?

Richard Dyer uses a first-person perspective in “White,” though this is not evident in any chapter except for the first, titled “The Matter of Whiteness.” Here, Dyer launches into a series of personal anecdotes outlining his experience growing up as a victim of bullying and a homosexual white man in a predominantly white part of Britain. His personal experiences – and use of the pronoun ‘I’ – bring the events closer to the reader, drawing them into the matter of whiteness itself and revealing to them the potential personal significance which a study of whiteness may have for them. For Dyer, the use of the first-person helps him to show that his own sense of solidarity with marginalized people and non-white people specifically helped him to understand the importance of recognizing the existence of whiteness as a construct and becoming more aware of the assumptions and expectations it entails.

The rest of the chapter does not use the first-person, instead turning into a less personal and more objective or scholarly study of whiteness and why it matters to academia. The rest of the book, too, fails to return to a personal tone and does not extensively use first-person pronouns. The book is written as a scholarly study and thus is highly self-conscious of the author’s own role in presenting and interpreting information. Though not every scholarly study of similar subject matter is written from this perspective, the use of a first-person perspective in this particular book is effective in that its initial use shows a real-life dimension to this otherwise highly abstract subject matter. It also allows Dyer to explain to the reader a series of personal choices he made involving which terminology to use for a number of contentious labels, and to also refer to his own previous works on related but separate subjects in which the matter of whiteness appeared relevant.