White Like Me : Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

Rating:
Summary: How to put Beauty back into America the Beautiful
Review: Mr. Wise, a smart and profoundly patriotic American, has written an honest and very thoughtful and engaging book that (perhaps without him even realizing it) has moved the country immeasurably closer to the goal of overcoming the single worst scourge of American history: white racism.

He has taken on, mano-y-mano, the snake coiled in the bosom of our democracy and we must all be thankful to him for his courage and honesty. At once, he has laid bare his own personal life experiences - setting them out as object lessons in how complex and difficult it is to get hands around this slippery and evil beast -- and at the same time he has cut deeply into the meat of the intellectual and psychological underbelly of the racism that is peculiarly American. THIS in and of itself is no small accomplishment. And he has done both admirably. For this accomplishment alone the book deserves five stars.

But he has done much, much more in this small volume. Among the bravest and most ambitious and challenging of the things he has tackled is to try to answer the mother of all questions facing any people of conscience who at the same time benefit from illicit structures and processes in the society they create and live within: Why would those benefiting from such structures and processes ever want to dismantle them?

Although all of Mr. Wise's answers to this important question are good and wise ones (excuse the pun) - (and I mean no disrespect to him when I say this): they reflect the intellectual style and depth of a civil rights activist.

Mr. Wise, the activist, can be forgiven for failing to see that racism, bigotry, and all other forms of chauvinism are cancers that above all else diminish, erode and corrupt the humanity of all within the society in which they take place. He thus can be forgiven for not realizing that we need to go much, much deeper than activism or community psychology for a more satisfying and penetrating answer to this pivotal question. We need also to attack the intellectual scaffolding that the question points to - that holds up the entire structure.

No one, not even whites liberal have pristine and innocent shores upon which they can stand aside (and above) to look back down into the whirling polluted maelstrom. There is no refuge or safe haven from the polluted waters of American racism. No one gets a free pass. There is no "get out of hell free card" for those trapped in the sewer of American society. You accept the tyranny of American racism, or you leave, or you take your chances and fight it, or you die either a violent or a slow un-heralded ignominious death. There are no other exits, period.

I for one believe it is an illusion to think otherwise. To his credit, Mr. Wise thinks otherWise and has convincing ideas to support his beliefs.

Like him, I too believe that we not only swim in polluted water in this country; but also believe that the very act of swimming in it left unchecked and unchallenged creates and sustains the water. The obvious point that Mr. Wise seems to have missed is that the humanity of us all is diminished each time whites eat the forbidden fruit of racism and non-whites acquiesce to it. It is not a matter of degree. One cannot be a little pregnant with racism. We are all white racists, both blacks and whites. The underling structure and nature of our society compels it to be so. A black Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima is no less a white racist than is David Duke. In the same way, a white liberal is also profoundly a white racist.

The best example of a society gone mad with racism is of course the thousand-year Reich of the Nazis, which as we know only lasted for 12 years. Yes, of course American racism on the surface appears subtler, more nuanced. But we are all whistling pass the same graveyard the Nazi whistled past: White racism will continue to make American whites grotesquely fat with their feigned and fake superiority. It is the nature of superiority-inferiority games that the appetites can never be completely sated. They are afterall flips sides of the same coin: One side is the carrier of insecurity; the other is infected with it.

The more they eat the bitter fruit, the more they will need to eat to stay ahead of those niggers. (They are ever gaining on us? Look at the cars "they drive?" Look at the salaries they are paying those Black athletes? etc., ad infinitum)

As Mr. Wise knows all too well, American racism is a well-oiled, well-rationalized 400-year old way of life. One day America's big southern barbeque eating, nigger-hating, pot-belly will just explode from the pollution, from the corruption, from the lies, from the contradictions, from the sleights of hand, foot and mouth, from the grotesque distortions of reality and human values. I fear that America seems to have become too big and too confident and too comfortable in its own personally created evil to ever be called to account?

It is true, is it not, that we are the last superpower standing; the greatest democracy the world has yet produced; and yet we are still the most racist nation on this earth -- bar none?

Thanks to Mr. Wise's book, I too can now see light at the end of this deep dark tunnel. We need just one or two more parents like his mother. We need one or two more Tim Wise's in the Deep South as well as in the Deep North. With just one or two more Tim wise's we might still overcome.

Buy this book. No matter what you think of it, it will make you a larger, better more confident person and will make America a better country. Ten stars. Amen.


Rating:
Summary: excellent account of racial privilege and racism
Review: This book absolutely blew me away. So much so that I read it all in one night. Most books I've read on racism and related topics are pletty bland, but the author in this case really cuts through the high-minded theories and scholarly analysis, to provide a compelling first person account of how racism and privilege continue to shape life in America. I think this book would be good for beginners to these subjects as well as those more experienced in the relevant discussions. Although the book might strike some as pessimistic about the prospects for change, I think the final chapter in particular--which is really more of an epilogue than anything else--wraps things up really well, and gives us all hope about the possibility that we can really make a difference and change society for the better.

The only criticism I have of the book is that there are several errors in typesetting and a few proofing errors too. These aren't the authors fault of course, but they are a bit distracting in places.

Anyway, overall a top quality piece of work, which relies on irrefuatable logic, excellent prose, and will challenge any reader to take a hard look at the society in which we live.

Rating:
Summary: Now Here Is A Wise Man, Indeed
Review: When I first opened the cover of White Like Me by Tim Wise, I was quickly captured by the magical combination of stories, soul-baring, and polemic. Then, as I proceeded on through the book, I despaired for a moment that those who need it worst would probably never read it or at least would never read it all. But as I continued, I decided that this is not true, that the ones who need to read this book the most are not necessarily those White people who have already lost their minds to the last stages of the psychosis of racism, but rather those of us who have as yet a shred of sanity that might respond to such a dose of truth. I have more than a hundred books on the socially-constructed political notion of "race." It occurred to me as I read the closing lines of this amazing treatise, that it has now become the cornerstone of my collection. There are only a relative few monumental volumes that stand through history as quintessential statements on human existence during one age or another. One hundred years from now, if we have not obliterated everything on the earth by then, this slim book will stand with those earlier works as the clarian call that led our nation to a new dawn of hope or as the announcement of the beginning of the end. Open up, White People, it's time to take our medicine.