August 2005

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Anti-Racist Medicine

White Like Me, Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise. Soft Skull Press, 250pp., 2005. pb $13.95.
Reviewed by Dave Taber who writes for Boston Indymedia and other publications.

Wise was born to the post-civil-rights-era US south. However, unlike most white people, he has dedicated himself to attempting to understand how his whiteness, in a white-dominated society, affects him.

Children at Sunday school class, Manzanar Relocation Center, California, 1943. Photo: Ansel Adams from the Library of Congress.

Wise's mother was just too young to participate in Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 without getting permission from her 'respectable' white Tennessee parents. Her Jewish father was a professional actor whose family operated a liquor store in the "heart of Nashville's black community."

After graduating from Tulane College in Louisiana, Wise worked to oppose and thwart Neo-Nazi David Duke's various high profile bids for elected office in Louisiana. Noting that Duke secured close to a majority of the white vote in both his senatorial and gubernatorial bids, Wise dedicated himself to white anti-racist activism. Wise has gone on to make a career for himself as a powerful -- some might even say the most prominent -- white anti-racist lecturer and activist in the United States. He has now written a memoir chronicling his experience of race in America.

Broadly, this book calls attention to a failure on the part of the mainstream "white culture" to engage in a broad-based cultural dialogue to candidly examine white privilege in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. While awareness of the implications of white privilege has increased over the last 50 years, the concept has failed to permeate our culture.

Wise knows that writing a memoir at such an early age might raise eyebrows, or hackles, but he disarms such objections by explaining, "I mean, really now: whose life has been rich enough at the age of 36 to provide insight to others? Honestly, I don't know that mine has been, at least on a whole range of topics. But I think that mine, and yours for that matter, is more than rich enough when it comes to understanding the role of race in this country, and perhaps the world."

As a professional white-person-who-is-cognizant-of-how-race-works in the US, Wise does not need to worry too much about a little competition. Judging from this effort, he is good at what he does.

Reflecting on his family and his community, on his scholastic and professional experiences, among other things, Wise flushes out a number of pertinent questions about whiteness in the US and shares some work he has done on answering them. Through these stories Wise presents a compelling argument that while white privilege is pretty convenient for those of us who are white and who want to go to college or to commit crimes and get away with them, it is important to resist it.

The argument at the base of many of his stories is that white privilege is not only morally reprehensible, but white folks' embrace of these privileges necessitates a pretty dangerous departure from reality that messes us up and makes life harder for everyone.

In the second chapter, Wise uses his experience on the debate team in high school as both an example of white privilege and a damning indictment of what white privilege can do to your brain. Nationally competitive debaters, he explains, need to attend at least one summer training camp a year to maintain and build their skill base. The camps cost $1,500 and there are not many scholarships available. What is more, Wise says, "the activity is very, very white." He recognizes that the financial constraints placed on who can become a nationally competitive debater are primarily a function of class privilege (even as he recognizes that class and race privilege are closely connected in the United States), but in the culture of debate he sees something else at work.

"For those who haven't ever seen a competitive high school debate," he writes, "You might be inclined to think that such a thing is a deep, detailed discussion of some pressing issue." Instead, he describes a form of competition where "personal principles don't matter, you might be arguing for capitalism in one round, socialism in another, and world government in the next… whatever it takes to win, because winning is all that matters."

Debate team is white, according to Wise, "because, in my experience it appeals to the way white folks, especially affluent ones that can typically afford debate, view the world, and equally seems repugnant to people of color for the same reasons. White folks have the luxury of looking at life or death issues of war, peace, famine, unemployment or criminal justice as a game."

He describes this phenomenon as an example of a white way of thinking, particularly a white US way, citing opinion polls taken shortly after the most recent invasion of Iraq, in March of 2003. "When asked if whether they would support the invasion of Iraq even if it meant the deaths of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians, the only group that said yes was white men, with white women being pretty much evenly split. Less than one fifth of Blacks or Latinos said yes."

In the course of his description of debate culture Wise takes pains to make it clear that his participation in and skill at the sport is probably what helped him get his delinquent adolescent self into college. What makes his story powerful is that he does not flinch from detailing the role of white privilege in his own life. In passages that are at times scathing, though intermixed with compassion and gratitude, he describes the ways he has been influenced by the attitudes about race held by his parents, grandparents, friends, and acquaintances.

A lot of these stories are painful to read. He talks about listening to his alcoholic father complain about affirmative action. He talks about his paternal grandmother, the woman he credits with instilling in him "a deep abiding contempt for bigotry," in the midst of late stage Alzheimer's, racializing her fear and anger and taking it out on the black nurses who were assisting her. He discusses the implications of his white Jewish grandfather's proprietorship of a liquor store in a black neighborhood.

He even admits, in the course of his professional career, to flubbing a question or two out on the lecture circuit. One day he was apparently stumped when approached by a student with a question about how to confront overt racism in his own family. Later, when Wise relayed the story to a non-white colleague, she said that she had fielded a similar question and had responded thusly:

"If you knew that your father or your mother had cancer, or some other health condition that was harming them, maybe killing them, or at least making them very sick, what would you do for them?…What if you tried to help them, maybe by telling them to go to the doctor, and they refused, they said they didn't have a problem, or that it wasn't that serious?…By the same token, if you see that racism is hurting your family, the people you love, killing at least part of them -- the good part, the decent part, the kind and gentle part -- then why wouldn't you do the same thing, give them the medicine they need, even if they don't want it, don't think they need it, and are likely to resist it?"

Tim Wise's book provides a dose of the medicine we need.

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