White Like Me

by Tim Wise

If they could learn how to be responsible with money, the cycle of poverty could be broken, he insisted.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I exploded. “Have millionaires go into the projects and tell poor people how to manage money? Jesus, they don’t even manage money on their own. They...

If anything, we should be sending these poor women I meet every day out to the suburbs, or to Tulane, so they can teach spoiled motherfuckers like the ones I went to school with how to get by on three hundred moth...

WHAT I LEARNED about poor folks from my time as an organizer was how little I understood them and what their lives were like. Contrary to popular perceptions, many if not most of the poor folks I met worked hard every day, whether in the paid labor force, where their wages were still too low to allow them to afford rent in the private market, or at home, trying to raise children

Interestingly, when cash welfare had first been created back in the 1930s (and when access had been restricted to white women), allowing mothers to stay home and raise kids, and not have to work in the labor force, had been articulated as the very purpose of the program.

Only when women of color began to gain access to the same benefits did the nation suddenly decide that welfare was bad for you, made you lazy, and needed...

And as for the work ethic of such folks, Donna herself provided perhaps the best example in this regard. A few months after I started working with her, her son was murdered, becoming one of about three hundred and fifty black folks killed that year in the city. While it would have been understandable for her to have taken a few days off, she was at work the next day, insisting that she had a job to do and intended to do it.

I had called out of work plenty of times because of a headache, or because I just hadn’t felt like going in; yet here was Donna, whose son had just been killed, keeping it together and working through the pain. But in America, we are to believe that she is the one with the bad values. Go figure.

What I also came to understand was how critical it is to follow the lead of the community where you’re working, and its leadership, rather than assume you know the agenda around which to organize.

This last point came into view for me one day while sitting around talking with a community leader about some of the things they were working on in the neighborhood.

fighting racism and classism, which we agreed were inherent to these legislative items, was important. But to be an effective organizer, you had to start small.

I asked him to explain, and was surprised by just how small he’d meant. “Well, for instance,” he said. “See that corner right there?” He was gesturing to an intersection about fifty feet from where we stood.

“Yeah, sure, what about it?” I replied. “Well, we’ve been trying to get a stop light there,” he noted, causing me to realize for the first time that, indeed, despite it being a natural place for a light, there was none. The lack of the light intrigued me, but I didn’t really get the importance of it all. “Why a stop light?” I asked, puzzled, and ...

“Well,” he continued, “for a couple of reasons. First, three kids have been hit there on their bikes because folks just barrel on through without looking. And second, because we can get the stop light. It’s a winnable fight. See, people who’ve been getting their asses kicked for years need to know they ca...

He went on to explain the strategic value of small victories. Yes, the goal was social justice, the eradication of poverty and racism, and all the rest that went with it. But good organizers coul...

The odds were against winning those battles in the short run. So if you started there, you’d accomplish little, except helping folks to burn out when, as so often happened, defeat was in the cards. But if you could “help the community gain a sense of it’s own potential,” he would say, “now you were on to something.”

One of the most telling moments came when Ron asked the participants what we liked about being whatever it is that we were, racially speaking. What did black folks like about being black? And what did whites like about being white?

For most whites, it was a question to which we had never given much thought. Looks of confusion spread across most of our faces as we struggled to find an answer. Meanwhile, people of color came up with a formidable list almost immediately.

They liked the strength of their families, the camaraderie, the music, the culture, the rhythms, the customs, their color, and they mentioned most prominently, the perseveran...

When it was our turn, we finally came up with a list, and it was the same one offered pretty much every time I ask the question to white folks around the country. We like not being followed around in stores on suspicion of being shoplifters. We like the fact that we’re not presumed out of place on a college campus or in a high-ranking job. We like the fact that we don’t have to constantly overcome negat...

Once finished, we began to examine the lists offered by both sides. The ...

None of it had to do with internal qualities of character or fortitude. Rather, every response had to do less with what we liked about being white than what we liked about not being a person of color.

Our answers had laid bare the truth about white privilege: in order to access it, one first had to give up all the meaningful cultural, personal, and communal attributes that had once kept our peoples alive in Europe and during our journeys here. After all, we had come from families that once had the kinds of qualities we now were seeing listed before us by people of color.

We had had customs, traditions, music, culture, and style—things to be celebrated and passed down to future generations. Even more, we had come from resistance cultures—most Europeans who came had been the losers of their respective societies, since the winners rarely felt the need to hop on a boat and leave where they were—and these resistance cultures had been steeped in the notion of resisting injustice, and of achieving solidarity.

But to become white required that those things be sublimated to a new social reality in which resistance was not the point. To become the power structure was to view the trad...

To define yourself by what you’re not is a pathetic and heartbreaking thing. It is to stand bare before a culture that has stolen your birthright, or rather, convinced you to give it up; and the costs are formidable, beginning with the emptiness whites often feel when confronted by multiculturalism and the connectedness of people of color to their heritages.

Thinking this might make for an interesting interaction given the white woman’s fears and concerns—not to mention, the African American woman clearly wanted to be called on—I pointed to her and asked her for her input. Her response was classic, and perfect for the situation.

“Make no mistake,” she insisted, “We do hate you and we don’t trust you, not for one minute!” I thought the white woman in the front row was going to come unglued, as if her classmate’s comment had only confirmed her worst fears.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said to the black woman who had made the statement, “since after all, you don’t know me. But that’s fine, because I’m sure you haven’t got much reason to trust me...

The room was deathly silent at that point, no one knowing quite what to make of a proclamation such as that. “I mean no disrespect,” I explained. “It’s just that I’m not fighting racism so as to save you from it. That would be paternalistic. It would be like saying that black folks aren’t capable of liberating yourselves from white supremacy. I think you are, though it might be easier with some internal resistance ...

People of color don’t owe us gratitude when we speak out against racism. They don’t owe us a pat on the back. And if all they do is respond to our efforts with a terse “about time,” that’s fine. Challenging racism and white supremacy is what we should be doing. Resistance is what we need to do for us.

Although people of color have often thanked me for the work I do, it’s a thanks that I am not owed, and whenever it’s offered I make sure to repay the compliment. Accountability demands it.

Upon arriving to campus, I was handed a flier they had been passing around, in which David proceeded to “out” me as a Jew—a

was unfit to discuss white privilege. Rather, he suggested, I should discuss my role as an agent of Jewish subversion, seeking to destroy the white race. I would have been happy to do that, I said at the outset of my talk, but unfortunately, I had left my “Agent of Jewish Subversion” speech notes sitting on my table at home. Maybe next time, I promised.

Actually, I pointed out, if there’s a lesson to be learned from the automotive inadequacy of the Yugo, it wasn’t that you don’t want blacks as neighbors, but rather, that you don’t ever want to buy cars made by white people from Central Europe—in other words, from his kind of people. Better to stick with the Japanese or the multiracial teams of assembly line workers in Detroit, because those fucking Slavs are a pathetic lot of craftsmen.

First, it’s important to note that Mabel Wise was no ordinary white woman. Though not an activist, she very deliberately instilled in her children, and by extension in me (as her oldest grandchild and the one with whom she spent the most time), a deep and abiding contempt for bigotry or racism of any form. She was very proud of what I had chosen to do with my life, and although her antiracism was of a liberal sort that didn’t involve an amazingly deep understanding of the way that institutional injustice operates—it was an interpersonal level at which she tended to think of these issues—it was nonetheless quite real.

Her father had actually been in the Klan while working as a mechanic in Detroit in the 1920s, and after moving back to Tennessee shortly thereafter. It was an association that would become a problem for her several years later when, at the age of fifteen, she would meet and eventually fall in love with Leo Wise, a Jew.

Around the age of seventeen, she could no longer abide her father’s racism, and that, combined with his anti-Semitism, which she now took very personally, led her to confront him, to tell him in no uncertain terms that either he was going to burn his Klan robes, or she was going to do it for him. I can’t begin to imagine the kind of strength it would have taken to issue such a challenge in 1937, especially to a large man, given to anger, and hardly used to being accosted in such a way by a young girl, or any woman.

But it worked. My great-grandfather, having been given an ultimatum, burned his robes, quit the Klan, changed his life, and would later accept the man who wa...

Mabel decided that standing up to racism wasn’t so tough, and so she would do it again often. For instance, once when a real estate agent announced that the house he was showing to her and Leo was desirable because it was in a racially-restricted neighborhood, she informed him that he...

Which brings us then to the rest of the story, the part that provides dramatic evidence of the way in which racism is capable of diminishing even the strongest of us, even the ones who have long made a point of resistance.

As she went through these stages of the illness that would ultimately contribute to her death, she began to work out the contours of her deepening crisis upon the black nurses whose job it had been to take care of her. And how might a white person treat a black person when they’re angry, or frightened, or both? And what might they call those black persons in a moment of anger, or insecurity, or both?

Her awareness of who she had been disappeared, such that in those moments of anger and fear, she would think nothing of referring to her nurses by the term Malcolm X said was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country.

Though I’m not sure when white folks first learn the word, Maw Maw made clear a more important point: that having learned it, we will never, ever forget it. It was a word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but which remained locked away in her subconscious despite her lifelong commitment to standing against racism.

Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her children, had no idea who her husband had been, no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was; yet she knew what she had been taught at an early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a time bomb in the far recesses of her mind, it would reassert itself and explode with devastating intensity.

She could not remember how to feed herself. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a nigger. America had seen to that, and no disease would strip her of that memory. It would be one of the last words I would hear her say, before she stopped talking at all.

She didn’t call any of her family by that word, even though we were the recipients of plenty of her anger and fear as well. She knew exactly what she was saying, and to whom.

Maybe this is why I tire of white folks who insist, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” or, “I never notice color.” Maw Maw would have said that too, and she would have meant well, and she would have been wrong.

While apologizing for racial epithets is nice, I suppose, far nicer would be the ability to learn from this gift my grandmother was giving us—and it was a gift, her final way of saying look at this, see what is happening here, do something about this.

I cared deeply about the issue, but as I tried to go about the task of running an office, coordinating chapters around the state, and paying bills (even simply remembering to pay myself on time), I started to realize how incompetent I was at almost everything but that which I had been doing the past several years. Literally, writing and speaking were my only talents, and my time at TCASK would finally prove it.