At the heart of passionate antiracist writing by white people often lies a personal narrative--a narrative of awakening in which the writers see for the first time the unearned prvilege their skin color affords them, and one that reveals the historical, familial, and cultural trajectories of race difference they are linked to and perpetuate. In this essay, the author examines the role played by affects such as shame in the process of disidentifying with whiteness by focusing on the genre of the personal narrative. She limits the scope of the inquiry to post-civil rights narratives about white identity in circulation in the fields of critical race pedagogy and composition. She argues that these narratives are affiliated with the ideologies of liberal antiracism. Here, she examines personal narratives by Gary Howard and Jane Tompkins, and finds that they reconstitute whiteness as a viable identity and value liberal social projects over antiracist social projects.