Shannon Sullivan’s White Privilege and Antisemitism in James Gray’s Armageddon Time

This paper investigates Shannon Sullivan’s concept of white privilege through the lens of James Gray’s 2022 film, Armageddon Time. Sullivan investigates the concept of white racial privilege and the problem with middle-class, white anti-racism. In Armageddon Time, the Graff family, “good white people”, progressives with anti-racist intentions, actually strive to achieve the white privilege Sullivan analyzes. The dynamics of white privilege in the film are more complex because the family is Jewish. I argue that antisemitism provides a problem for Sullivan’s analytical matrix regarding white privilege, provide an alternative strategy for dealing with ethnic and religious nuances within the category of whiteness and offer a conjecture as to why Sullivan relies on a mostly binary white and non-white analysis.