Sometimes America feels like the movie Groundhog Day: a place where we keep waking up again and again to the same shit, hoping against hope that this time — no really, this time — things will be different. So this time, the videotape of the police officer shooting the unarmed black man (or child, in […]
If, as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, then hoping against hope that this time an officer who shot a black man in cold blood would be held to account, is a type of insanity most profound. Or at the very least evidence of […]
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they see the world and others in it. Those who view the world and its inhabitants as basically good, and who remain relatively hopeful about the better angels of our nature, though occasionally caught off guard by the less salutary aspects of the human […]
Which Dr. King do you honor today? The one who said that white Americans had betrayed their professed commitment to ethicality and equality — and that the country had bounced a check to black folks, which black folks were coming to cash — or the bland and sanitized apostle of color-blindness sold to you by […]
So now we know: White nationalists have been working more on their wardrobe than tightening up the rhetoric and logic with which they defend and present their worldview. Case in point, Richard Spencer, the Nazi flavor-of-the-month and white nationalist leader whom the media has deemed the movement’s bright and shining star. Although for a while […]
“One discovers the light in darkness. That is what darkness is for. But everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found there is a light. What the light reveals […]
My appearance on WGN (Chicago’s) Morning News program, September 2, 2016, to discuss Colin Kaepernick, the National Anthem, and his ongoing protest against police violence. For some reason, the chyron at one point says Tim Wise: “Dear White People,” (the name of an excellent movie that I had nothing to do with), rather than “Dear […]
So just in case you were wondering, when a white man bellows that America is no longer great, and in fact is akin to a “third world” country, and that many other countries are better than we are at all kinds of things — and this is why we should elect him, so he can […]
It is increasingly apparent that white Americans hate the Constitution. Not all white people and not the entire Constitution of course; but certainly a frightening lot of us and some of the most important parts. We love the Second Amendment — at least in so far as it protects our right to bear arms, even […]
Possibly the only thing worse than racism itself is the pseudo-intellectual way in which some seek to justify it. For instance, consider the standard conservative response to those of us who argue that the criminal justice system is the site of significant racialized unfairness. Whether the subject is racial profiling, stop-and-frisk rates, arrest rates, rates […]
