White Like Me

by Tim Wise

I was told by someone else that my book had helped hasten her divorce. I apologized for any role I may have played in the dissolution of her relationship, but was told not to worry, that it had been for the best, and that it had taken my book for her and her now ex-husband to realize that their differences, rooted in racial identity and their experiences around racism, were too vast to bridge.

many who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 were persons who, by their own admission to pollsters, continue to adhere to racist stereotypes about black Americans.

If support for Obama was, in part, due to his seeming “different” from other black men, we could even say that racism, albeit of a 2.0 variety, was instrumental in helping him attract support from white voters. Finally, let us recall that Barack Obama downplayed issues of race within his campaign, rarely if ever spoke to concerns about racial inequity, and went out of his way to distance himself from his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, so as to curry favor with white voters who found Wright’s condemnations of U.S. foreign policy and our history of racism troubling.

Indeed, for people of color, it is often shocking to see white people even thinking about race, let alone challenging racism. After all, we don’t have to spend much time contemplating the subject if we’d rather not, and white folks have made something of a pastime out of ignoring racism, or at least refusing to call it out as a major social problem to be remedied.

As for the concept of privilege, here too, clarification is in order. I am not claiming, nor do I believe, that all whites are wealthy and powerful. We live not only in a racialized society, but also in a class system, a patriarchal system, and one of straight supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, and Christian hegemony.

or Jewish privilege in Israel and the institutionalized mistreatment of the Palestinians.

Here we go

“People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.”

My parents were young when they had me. My father was a few months shy of twenty-two and my mother had just turned twenty-one when I was conceived, as legend has it in a Bossier City, Louisiana, hotel.

Interestingly, my parents had opted to crash there during one of my father’s stand-up tours, because having first tried to get a room in nextdoor Shreveport, they witnessed the night manager at a hotel there deny a room to a black traveler.

Incensed, they opted to take their business elsewhere. Little could they have known that said business would involve setting in motion the process by which I would come into the world. In other words, I was conce...

it is also true that at least 5,000 blacks served the American Revolution, and virtually none of them, no matter the distinction with which they served, received land grants.

Indeed, four out of five blacks who served failed to receive even their freedom from enslavement as a reward.

A few pages later, the reader is then treated to a reproduction of Samuel McLean’s will, which reads, among other things:

I give and bequeath unto my loving wife, Elizabeth, my Negro woman, named Dicey, to dispose of at her death as she may think proper, all my household and kitchen furniture, wagons, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, and stock of every kind, except as may be necessary to defray the expense of the first item above.

In other words, Elizabeth should sell whatever must be sold in order to hold on to the slave woman, for how would she possibly survive without her? But there is more:

I also give the use and possession of, during her natural life, my two Negroes, Jerry and Silvey.

and receive an equal share of the property from the tillage, rent and use of the aforesaid 106 acres of land and Negroes Jerry and Silvey, that she may be the more certain of a more comfortable existence.

Sim went happily off to the Civil War with his master.

To his daughters, Sam McLean gave the slave woman Jenny and her child, and the slave woman Manerva and her child, and in both cases “any further increase,” which is an interesting and chillingly dehumanizing way to refer to future children.

None of these things take away from the work ethic that was a defining feature of his character, but they do suggest that a work ethic is rarely enough on its own to make the difference. After all, by the time he arrived in America there had been millions of black folks with work ethics at least as good as his, and by the time he passed at the age of ninety-three, there would have been millions of peoples of color who had lived and toiled in this land, every bit as long as he had.

Yet with few exceptions, they could not say that within a mere decade they had become successful shop owners, or that one of their sons had gone on to graduate from one of the nation’s finest colleges.

The only exceptions to the right-wing rule at Moore were the two black teachers I had while there, who were the only teachers in the school from whom I ever learned anything valuable: Milton Kennerly and Barbara Thornton. Mr. Kennerly, my geography teacher, made a lasting impression on me when explaining that Western concepts of “civilization” were subjective, and that the term should not be used when referring to the U.S. or the industrialized world, especially not in relation to non-Western societies who have their own social and cultural understandings of what a good society should look like.

It’s hard to put into words the degree of entitlement that comes from knowing even at the age of five that your parents have your back, and that if some authority figure gets out of line, your mom and dad will support you.

Not to mention, since those trees were likely being planted on land confiscated from Palestinians (whether in 1948 or 1967),

Oh god

The substance of the arguments made and the way in which the arguments are delivered also tend to appeal to whites far more readily than to people of color for whom the style and substance are often too removed from the real world to be of much practical value.

Those who haven’t seen a competitive debate (particularly in the most dominant category, known as policy debate) may be inclined to think that such a thing is a deep discussion of some pressing issue.

But if that is what you expected, and you then happened into a debate at one of the nation’s top tournaments and watched any of the elimination rounds (those involving the top sixteen or thirty-two teams, typically), y...

Even if you could understand a single word being said, which is unlikely since the “best” debaters typically speak at lightning speed (and I was among the biggest offenders here, able to rattle off five hundred words a minute), you still wouldn’t really understand what was going on. The terminology is arcane and only of use in the activity...

My own debate experience serves as vulgar confirmation of this maxim. On the one hand, I ran cases (which in debate terms means the primary position taken by the affirmative team upholding the year’s formal resolution) calling for cutting off weapons sales to Venezuela, and also for the restoration of voting rights to ex-felons: positions with which I agreed.

The reason I call this process a white one is because whites (and especially affluent ones), much more so than folks of color, have the luxury of looking at life or death issues of war, peace, famine, unemployment, or criminal justice as a game, as a mere exercise in intellectual and rhetorical banter.

For me to get up and debate, for example, whether or not full employment is a good idea presupposes that my folks are not likely out of work as I go about the task. To debate whether racial profiling is legitimate likewise presupposes that I, the debater, am not likely to be someone who was confronted by the practice as my team drove to the tournament that day, or as we passed through security at the airport.

In this way, competitive debate reinforces whiteness and affluence as normative conditions, and makes the process more attractive to affluent white students. Kids of color and working-class youth of all colors are simply not as likely to gravitate to an activity where pretty much half the time they’ll be forced to take ...

Because debaters are encouraged to think about life or death matters as if they had little consequence beyond a given debate round, the fact that those who have come through the activity go on to hold a disproportionate share of powerful political and legal positions—something about which the Nat...

Being primed to think of serious issues as abstractions increases the risk that the person who has been so primed will reduce everything to a brutal cost-benefit analysis, which rarely prioritizes the needs and interests of society’s less powerful. Rather, it becomes easier at that point to support policies that benefit the haves at the expense of the have-nots, because others ...

There is simply no chance that the officers didn’t know alcohol was being served; likewise, they had to have been able to detect the smell of marijuana in the air. Yet not once did they arrest anyone, or even tell us to get rid of the booze and the weed, so as to warn us that next time we wouldn’t be so lucky. Indeed, next time we would be that lucky, and the next time, and the next time, and the time after that, always.

These parties were at the homes of white people, surrounded by other homes lived in by white people, and attended almost exclusively by white people. There would always be a few people of color around, but for the most part, these were white spaces, which immediately gave law enforcement officials reason to cut us slack. Had these house parties been in black neighborhoods they would never have been allowed to go on at all, as large as they were, even without a single illegal substance on the premises.

But for whites, in white neighborhoods, everything was different. Our illegality was looke...

It strikes me that unless we get a hold of this, unless we begin to address the way that privilege can set up those who have it for a fall—can vest them with an unrealistic set of expectations—we’ll be creating more addicts, more people who turn to self-injury, suicide, eating disorders, or other forms of self-negation, all because they failed to live up to some idealized type that they’d been told was theirs to achieve.

Although they had been of middle-class income—my grandfather having been in the military and then civil service for his entire adult life—they nonetheless were able to afford several nice homes in “good” neighborhoods, all of which had been entirely white, and as with the apartment complex where I’d grown up, not by accident. Although the Supreme Court, in 1948, had outlawed restrictive covenants barring blacks from these neighborhoods, it had remained legal to discriminate in other ways until the late sixties. Even then, there was little real enforcement of the Fair Housing Act until teeth were added to the law in 1988,

after all, he was about to head off to the University of Mississippi, where he’d be unlikely to see so much as a Democrat in four years (at least among white folks), let alone anyone truly to the left of the political spectrum.

Tim Wise knows the Dems are not left wing lol

My mother, by proving her own weakness and exhibiting her own conditioning, taught me that one can never be too careful, can never enjoy the luxury of being too smug, of believing oneself so together, so liberal, so down with the cause of liberation that it becomes impossible to be sucked in, to be transformed. We may only do it once, or perhaps twice, but it can happen. So long as that is true, we mustn’t romanticize our resistance, but fight to maintain its presence in our lives, knowing that it could easily vanish in a moment of weakness, anger, insecurity, or fear.

Studies indicate there are twice as many whites who fail to meet normal admission standards but who are admitted anyway thanks to “connection preferences” as there are persons of color who receive any consideration from affirmative action. Yet rarely do the critics of affirmative action seem to mind this form of preferential treatment.

Most everyone I met at Tulane who was truly stupid was white and rich, like the guy who thought he was supposed to start every research paper with a thesis statement, the way he’d been taught to do it in seventh grade, or the young woman on my hall during sophomore year, who was stunned when she received an overdraft notice from her bank—after all, there were still checks in her checkbook.

I never really considered myself a Marxist, mostly because I rejected the notion of any proletarian/workers dictatorship, which for most Marxists is a requisite component of their belief system. I was certainly anti-capitalist and still find the profit system inherently exploitative. But having never seen its opposite work either, I have remained agnostic on the issue of socialism. I am far more positively disposed to it than to capitalism, but am unconvinced that such a system can avoid falling into heavy-handed statist oppression, ultimately no better than the heavy-handed corporate plutocracy it would replace.

I also have to say, I wasn’t impressed with the organizational acumen of those who were proudly calling themselves communists. They had a hard time keeping MPCA functioning, so I never could figure out how people such as this were going to be able to run a government or society. The bickering about each faction’s particular dialectic made for tedious meetings and strategy sessions, which revolved around some of the most inane bullshit you can imagine.

It was Marx versus Lenin versus Trotsky versus Mao versus Che Guevara versus Stalin (yes, there were actually some committed Stalinists in the bunch who always gave me the creeps and who believed Enver Hoxha’s dystopian regime i...

In some ways, perhaps that ho-hum indifference had been almost worse than open displays of racist contempt. After all, to have heard your parents cast aspersions upon Dr. King could be seen as almost pathetic, given the towering greatness of the latter and the rather ordinary mediocrity of the former.

But to have had his greatness and that of this movement met with blank stares, with nothing, must have been maddening. It’s not unlike the difference between the person who seeks to openly justify the death of civilians in war time with bloodthirsty logic, on the one hand, and the person who blankly stares at the TV screen as it projects images of the death and destruction while not even blinking, on the other.

The latter may not openly celebrate the carnage, but their refusal to show any emotion whatsoever is somehow more troubling. At least the celebrant of death is willing to demonstrate by virtue of his agitation that he is inde...

I have long thought I would prefer a land filled with angry and hateful people than one populated by spectators who watch the drama unfold, and no matter how bad it gets, neve...