White Like Me

by Tim Wise

When I managed to embarrass the associate D.A. in a debate at Vanderbilt Law School and again on the nationally-televised Nancy Grace show—along with Nancy herself, who I managed to fluster to such an extent I thought her head may explode—it was clear that the only way to get back at me would be to call Bob Bell Sr. and accuse me of “using” his son’s memory to argue against capital punishment.

Almost immediately she had come across one racist who praised the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and said he wished that whites had even half the “testicular fortitude” to carry out similar actions.

Billy Roper, head of recruitment at the time for the Hitler-worshipping National Alliance (whose founder had been the author of The Turner Diaries, which McVeigh had found so inspiring) added that anyone who was willing to fly planes into buildings in order to kill Jews (whom Roper naturally assumed predominated in the buildings since it was in the New York financial district), was “alright” by him.

In April 2003, I boarded a plane bound for St. Louis. From there I would fly to Iowa for a conference. Prior to that day, I had flown on a thousand or so individual flights in my life, but as I walked down the jet bridge that morning, I glanced into the cockpit and saw something I had never seen before, in all my years of air travel: not one, but two black pilots at the controls of the plane—a rare sight for any air traveler, considering the small percentage of commercial pilots who are African American.

Given the paucity of pilots of color in the United States, and given what I had at that point been doing professionally for thirteen years, one might think that two black men in the cockpit that morning would have been a welcome sight to me. And upon sufficient reflection it would be. But upon a mere instantaneous reflection—which is to say, no reflection at all—this had not been my initial reaction. Sadly, my first thought upon seeing who would be in charge of delivering me safely to St. Louis was more along the lines of, “Oh God, can these two really fly this plane?”

Now don’t get me wrong, almost as quickly as the thought came into my head, I was able to defeat it. I knew instantly that such a thing was absurd; after all, given the history of racism, I had every reason to think that these two men were probably among the very best pilots that ...

They would have been required to show not only that they could fly, but that they could do so over and above the prejudices and stereotypes that black fol...

I also knew that in the months before this flight, several white pilots had been hauled off of planes because they had been too drunk to fly them,

Even fewer would probably learn of the real violence during those days; namely, the white vigilante terror squad that formed in the Algiers community on the city’s west bank and shot at least a dozen African Americans for being in their neighborhood—a story that wouldn’t break until 2007, and even then, would receive very little media attention.

Of course, sometimes when New Orleanians did try and flee the city, they were met with hostility and blocked from escaping. On the second day of the tragedy, a group of mostly black residents tried to walk out of the city by crossing the bridge to the west bank of the river, only to be shot at by sheriff ’s deputies from Gretna who wanted to keep blacks out of their city.

And there were, of course, the African Americans on the west bank who tried to reach the pier in Algiers so as to get ferried out of the area, only to be shot by the white terror squad that presumed every black person

President Bush’s FEMA director would say later that day that he hadn’t realized there were people trapped in such centers until that morning, despite the fact that the rest of us had been looking at them on national television for seventy two hours.

When desperate folks attempted to get into food pantries at the Convention Center, knowing that the supplies would spoil and never be used for their original purposes, National Guardsmen aimed guns at them and told them to “step away from the food or we’ll blow your fucking heads off,”

Meanwhile, I wondered why there was no apparent presence of the Red Cross in the city, either to provide relief supplies or tend to the sick and injured. There were reports of their activities throughout the rest of the Gulf Coast, and in parts of Louisiana other than New Orleans, but nothing in the Crescent City itself, which seemed bizarre.

The need for private citizens to fill the relief gap had been intensified by the absence of the Red Cross, whose absence, Lance discovered, had been deliberate—the result of a relief blockade. Though he tried to get media to cover the blockade as a story of institutional injustice, few agreed to discuss it; this, despite the fact that the evidence for the embargo was right there on the organization’s website, where one could read that,

“The Department of Homeland Security continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the Hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.”

First, you’d hear rumblings that the real issue in New Orleans hadn’t been race, but rather, class. Money, it was claimed, is what really determined whether or not you’d been likely to have suffered major property damage or displacement because of the flooding.

And true enough, there was a definite economic element to the damage, with lower-lying and mostly working class communities bearing the brunt of the inundation.

However, within a few months, research from Brown University would bear out that race was an even better predictor of property damage and displacement than economic status, with African Americans far more likely to suffer either, relative to whites. In New Orleans, 75 percent of the people in damaged areas ...

In Mid-City, 83 percent of the population was black, and 100 percent of the area sustained damage from the flood; in New Orleans East, 87 percent of the population was black and 99 percent of the community suffered damage; in the Lower Ninth Ward, 93 percent of the population was black, and 96 percent of the area was damaged. Likewise, in Tremé, Gentilly, and all of the com...

Among white communities, only Lakeview sustained massive destruction: 90 percent of the area damaged, whi...

By comparison, the almost all-white Garden District sustained virtually no damage; the nearly two-thirds white Uptown area had damage in less than 30 percent of the community; most of the Audubon and University district remained untouched; the 80-plus percent white Marigny had damage in less than 20 percent of the area; and the almost entirely white French Qu...

A few weeks prior to my time at the U of I, the chief had done what was billed as his “final dance,” during the halftime of the Illinois-Michigan basketball game. A somber, tight-lipped white man, in a regionally inappropriate headdress, covered in buckskin, gesticulated around the gym floor, on national television, while thousands of white Illinois fans (especially the ones with the big Greek letters on their chests, signifying fraternity or sorority membership) wept openly in the stands.

The sight was nothing short of amazing; here were white people having an existential meltdown in front of millions of television viewers, all because they weren’t going to be allowed to play dress-up anymore. It was as if someone had cut off the limb of a parent, or killed a small puppy in front of their eyes.

They were being victimized, to hear them tell it, by poli...

These were people who had likely never spent one second of their lives crying over the fact that indigenous peoples had lost some ninety million souls, their traditional cultures, religions, and almost all of their land to make way for folks like themselves, but who couldn’t help but sob at the thought of losing a few seconds of entertainment.

Instead of venerating Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, we could praise the brave women who marched on Richmond in 1863 to protest his government and the war, shouting, “Our children are starving while the rich roll in wealth,” and who Davis then threatened to shoot in the streets if they didn’t disperse.

Over the years, hundreds of white parents have proudly proclaimed to me that they rarely ever discuss racism with their children. “I want my kids to be able to hold on to their innocence,” some say. Others insist that “children don’t see color until we make them see it,” as justification for their silence about race. “We’re raising our kids to be colorblind,” still others maintain, as if such a parenting plan were the ultimate antiracist technique,

Having observed disparities, children, like anyone else, will seek to make sense of them, subconsciously if not consciously; and if they’re being told—as most everyone is in the United States—that “anyone can make it if they try hard enough,” but then they see that some have decidedly not made it to the extent others have, why should it surprise us that some (perhaps many) would conclude that there was something wrong with those at the bottom: that they were, in fact, inferior?

And if the disparities have a distinct racial cast to them, how surprising can it be that those conclusions would be linked to notions of racial group inferiority?

So unless parents are discussing inequity with children, and placing it in its proper sociological and historical context—in other words, unless they are talking about discrimination and racism, past and present—those children will likely develop an internal narrative to explain the inequities they ...

In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak in dozens of middle schools, and even a few elementary schools, to kids between the ages of seven and twelve. In a few cases, I’ve even discussed issues of race and racism with pre-school children as young as five. Contrary to what many parents seem to believe, not only can they handle the subject matter, they can often lead the conversations, with very little formal facilitation.

I’ve often asked children where we get our ideas about people who are different than ourselves, especially when it comes to color; inevitably, it takes them no time to begin offering answers. “From the media,” is the most common answer, and when I ask them what they mean, they demonstrate a savvy grasp of the way that various sources of racial imagery effect their consciousness, from television to music videos to video games to things they see on the internet.

In fact, at several schools when I’ve engaged kids on these matters, they can talk for a half hour straight, with almost no active facilitation, just pointing out example after example of racial imagery, as well as gender and class imagery in media, and the way those images can somet...

One young woman at a middle school in San Francisco, for instance, told me (and her peers, all gathered in the gym for a discussion) that she had been afraid of homeless people because of the stories she had heard on the news about various crimes committed by the homeless, or how the city had been trying to move the homeless ...

She then mentioned how she had gotten to know a homeless man who often walked up and down the street where she and her family lived, by speaking to him ...

Through their conversation she came to realize that most of her assumptions had been wrong. Yes, she understood, there may be some homeless people who fit the stereotype so commonly believed to be true, and so often portrayed in the news, but she also realized that she couldn’t and shouldn’t be so rigid in her think...

Especially given the way in which female body image is influenced by advertisers—and how white women are especially given, according to the research, to heightened concern about weight and body type—these were the kinds of things that I knew we’d need to think about by the time they were in school.

One thing that had always bothered me about many of my compatriots on the left was that their ability to relate to average, everyday folks seemed compromised by their desire to view, with contempt, all aspects of the dominant material culture—to look down on the cultural diversions of working class folks, even as they claimed to be fighting for the interests of those same people.

I’ve been guilty of it too, frankly, taking more than a few sideways glances at NASCAR, for instance, but the truth is this: if progressives can’t figure out a way to speak to the people I see walking down Main Street U.S.A. in Disney’s Magic Kingdom—and that doesn’t mean telling them how the Disney-fication of the culture reinforces racism, classism, and patriarchy—then all hope is lost for a better society.

For instance, of all the problematic Disney films out there, the only one that I really didn’t want my kids to see was Pocahontas. Something about the way that Hollywood (or in this case, Burbank) had managed to characterize Matoaka (Pocahontas’s real name)—as an intensely spiritual stereotype whose ability to commune with nature allowed her to converse at length with an old lady in the form of a tree—struck me as deeply troubling.

Not to mention, Matoaka’s story is quite a bit less romantic than the Disney version, involving as it does her forced abduction by Englishmen, from which abduction she was only able to obtain release if she agreed to marry John Rolfe, whose lust for her overrode concerns like her young age at the time of their first sexual encounter. Not only does Disney ignore the coerced relationship with Rolfe, they fabricate a love interest between she and the mercenary captain, John Smith, which historians agree never existed.

When descendants of Matoaka offered to help Disney tell a more accurate version of her story, Roy Dis...

The white characters are often drawn in less-than-flattering ways too, although in the end the message seems to be that even we can get in touch with nature and live peacefully, if subjected to the wisdom of Grandmother Willow—the tree to which Pocahontas introduces Smith. That in the wake of Matoaka’s capture the English would come to decimate the Powhatan people calls into question such a sanguine account, but to Disney, historical details such as this can’t be allowed to intrude upon the telling of a good princess story.

Frankly, Ashton wasn’t really crazy about the movie. It didn’t really hold her interest, but nonetheless, I knew I’d want to speak with her about some of the details.

Fortunately for me, that task was made easier after watching a few of the “extras” on the DVD. After the movie ended we watched some of the special features and one in particular stood out: it was a few minutes during which the chief illustrator on the film was describing his artwork to an auditorium filled with peopl...

As he stood on the stage, an overhead projector displayed an image of his Pocahontas, and then contrasted it with the actual image of Matoaka, drawn during the time she was in England, after being taken there by Rolfe. Needless to say, she looked nothing like the image he had created—a fact about which he proceeded to joke, noting sarcastically something to the effect that “as you c...

I saw it as my opportunity. “Hey Ashton,” I said. “Yeah?” she replied. “Why do you think they decided to make her look different like that?” I inquired. “What do you mean?” she responded “Well, you saw that picture right?” I continued. “The one of the real Pocahontas? And how different she looked from the way the movie made her look? Why do you think they did that?” She looked puzzled for a minute, like she was trying hard to come up with a good answer. “I dunno,” she said. “Maybe they thought she was prettier t...

“Yeah,” Ashton responded. “Hmmm,” I noted. “So, how do you think you’d feel if someone wanted to make a movie about your life and decided they didn’t like your red hair, or the color of your skin, or something like that, and decided to ...

“Yeah, I bet it would,” I said. “So how do you think Native Americans might feel, seeing him joke like that about how much prettier his version of Pocahon...