Being (Tim)Wise about race in the US

 White Like Me.  

A documentary by Tim Wise You can watch it here on media cast..

Here is a transcript of the documentary.

About Tim Wise

Wise’s antiracism work traces back to his days as a college activist in the 1980s, fighting for divestment from (and economic sanctions against) apartheid South Africa. After graduation, he threw himself into social justice efforts full-time, as a Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized in the early 1990s to defeat the political candidacies of white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. From there, he became a community organizer in New Orleans’ public housing, and a policy analyst for a children’s advocacy group focused on combatting poverty and economic inequity. He has served as an adjunct professor at the Smith College School of Social Work, in Northampton, MA., and from 1999-2003 was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute in Nashville, TN.

Wise attempts to answer the questions below.  What answer does he give?  What evidence does he give?

WHAT IS WHITE PRIVILEGE?

ISN’T RACISM A THING OF THE PAST?

BUT WHAT ABOUT US?  IS THERE RACISM AGAINST WHITES?

SHOULDN’T WE BE COLORBLIND?

Sources and Evidence in the video:

Tim Wise 

Author of Between Barack and a Hard Place.

Martin Gilens, Princeton University, 

Author of Why Americans Hate Welfare.

John Bracy, UMass-Amherst.
Professor John H. Bracey, Jr., has taught in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1972. He is now serving a second stint as department chair, and is co-director of the department’s graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies. His major academic interests are in African American social history, radical ideologies and movements, and the history of African American Women and more recently the interactions between Native Americans and African Americans, and Afro-Latinos in the United States.

Imani Perry, Princeton University.
The Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies and faculty associate in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton, Perry has written and taught on a number of topics regarding race and African American culture.

Michelle Alexander, The Ohio State University.  Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. In recent years, she has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinics. In 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow, and that same year she accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.  Author of The New Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration in an Age of Color Blindness 

Nilanjana Dasgupta, UMass-Amherst
Research in our lab shines a light on unspoken assumptions about social groups, often called implicit stereotypes or biases, and the ways in which they impact people’s evaluations of, and actions toward, others. We also examine how implicit biases influence people's self-perceptions, performance, and academic and career choices. We are particularly interested in the plasticity of implicit bias—the ways in which changes in social contexts change implicit attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Charles Ogletree, Harvard University.
Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, and Founding and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, is a prominent legal theorist who has made an international reputation by taking a hard look at complex issues of law and by working to secure the rights guaranteed by the Constitution for everyone equally under the law.

America has always been a work in progress.  Our history is not just a story of oppression but also a story of triumph - the story of Americans making a better society for all citizens, even those in their outgroup.  Each success did not end racism or sexism but it brought us one step closer to realizing our founding goal;  

to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

 The history of the U.S. is as much anti-racist history as it is racist history.  

Here are some of the white allies he mentions in the documentary: 

Will Campbell - Baptist minister who walked with Little Rock nine

Jeremiah Evarts - Christian missionary who opposed Indian removal

Helen Hunt Jackson - author who wrote about and opposed the treatment of American Indians

John Fee - abolitionist minister from Kentucky

Matilda Gage

Lydia Child

Robert Flournoy?

Grimke Sisters

Joan Mullholland - sat at the counter in Woolworth in Mississippi 

Anne Braden

Virginia Foster Durr

J. Watisse Wearing

Constance Curry

Bob and Dottie Zellner

Mab Segrest