Previously (and briefly) titled, “The Ugly Side of Disaster: Racism and the Calculus of Comparative Suffering” Disasters bring out the best and worst in people. On the one hand, millions of folks respond to the suffering of their fellow human beings with compassion, concern, and even significant financial assistance when needed. Be it a hurricane, […]
Full-length version of Tim Wise on White Privilege: Racism, White Denial and the Cost of Inequality, Mt. Holyoke College, October, 2007 White Privilege: Racism, White Denial & The Cost of Inequality from KnowYourHistory on Vimeo.
Excerpt from the DVD: The Pathology of Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality released by: Media Education Foundation For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on the college lecture circuit with his deeply personal take on whiteness and white privilege. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of […]
Not long ago, after I had written an article in which I discussed white denial–the tendency for most white folks to reject the notion that racism is still a significant obstacle for people of color in the U.S.–I received an e-mail from a white man who insisted that my argument was itself racist. His reason? […]
Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, at least not as soon as I am now compelled to write it: It may well be the case that the United States is on its way to electing a person of color as President. Make no mistake, I realize the way that any number of factors, […]
Fundie Christians are an interesting bunch. On the one hand, they profess to love God “with all their heart,” and yet, on the other, they regularly send around unhinged e-mails about how God causes natural disasters or other tragedies as a way to punish the U.S. for abortion, or “taking prayer out of schools,” or […]
“The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white…This incredibly limited, not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had […]
Published on Civilrights.org, July 25, 2006 According to a poll taken late last year, the overwhelming majority of whites in the U.S. reject the idea that Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath tell us anything important about race in America (1). Blacks, not surprisingly, feel otherwise. Thus has emerged the latest manifestation of an intergenerational process: […]
Published on Black Commentator.com, July 13, 2006 Dear Sheriff Strain, I always liked Slidell, even before Lucinda Williams sang about going there to “look for (her) joy.” And my fond feelings for the town were rekindled recently when I discovered that Grayson Capps–with whom I went to Tulane in the late ’80s, and who’s quite […]
The city I called home for ten years is dying: a slow, agonizing, all-too-terribly public death, before the eyes of the nation and the world. It is dying, as are far too many of its people, because our national leaders only have the stomach, or the talent (or both) for killing, as in Iraq or […]
