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White Like Me by Tim Wise
Born to Belonging
Wise starts the book by explaining, “To be white in the United States is to be born to advantage, privilege, and belonging. We rarely have to prove ourselves deserving of our presence here.” He explains that he attended Tulane University in New Orleans—paying $20,000 per year—because his family was able to secure a loan against his grandmother’s house. Her house was purchased as part of the $120 Billion in FHA and VA loans from the 1930’s to the 1960’s (only 3% of those loans went to people of color!).
Privilege
Wise argues that people who reap the benefits of past actions—and the privileges that have come from whiteness are certainly among those—have an obligation to take responsibility for our use of those benefits. He points out that to be able to go through life without ever having to feel as though one were representing whites as a group is not an inconsequential privilege.
Teachers who claim to “treat all kids the same and don’t even see color” do not understand the consequences of color; and with color’s consequences, odds are good that they’ll underserve the needs of the students in question every time. Continuing to ignore the voices of the marginalized carries great risks for us all, because they often view the world differently than the privileged. Consider polls taken before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which indicated broad white support for going to war that was almost nonexistent among Blacks. Whites thought they’d be viewed as liberators, but Black folks know that invaders rarely bring true freedom.
When training law enforcement officers, Tim asks, “What’s the first thing you think when you see a young black or Latino male, driving around in a nice car in your neighborhood?” Without hesitation, “Drug Dealer.” Then, “What’s the first thing you think when you see a young white male, driving around in a nice car in your neighborhood?” “Spoiled little rich kid, daddy bought him a car.” Even though all available research indicates that young whites are more likely to use and just as likely to deal drugs as their black and brown counterparts.
Wise points out that the ability of whites to deny nonwhite reality, and indeed to not even comprehend that there is a nonwhite reality (or several different ones), is as strong as any other evidence of just how pervasive white privilege is in our society.
Denial
Ultimately, burying our heads in the sand when it comes to racism doesn’t change what’s going on above ground. White denial has been around a while. In 1962, more than 9 in 10 whites told Gallup pollsters that blacks had just as good a chance as they did to get a good education. In 1963, whites said that blacks were treated equally in their communities. If you’ve been told that everyone has equal opportunity, and you see profound inequities between whites and people of color, you can conclude that what you were taught is wrong, or there must be something wrong with people of color—they are inferior, don’t work as hard or are less intelligent.
Most people know little about the history of how ghetto communities were created by government and economic elites to the detriment of those who live there. How many were taught that one-fifth of all black housing in the U.S. was destroyed in the middle of the 20th century to make way for interstates, office buildings, malls, and parking lots even as white housing was being subsidized by tax breaks and low-interest government-guaranteed loans?
White folks often mistake being civil and kind and “nice” with actually doing something to end injustice. White privilege exists with or without bigoted actions on the part of individual whites.
Resistance
Just as we choose to correct environmental damage caused by pollution stretching back years—and which we aren’t necessarily responsible for—and just as we choose to pay down the national debt even though that was not our individual fault, so too we can opt to challenge racial inequality, even if it was brought about initially by someone else.
One point that I’ve taken to heart at work is to “be radically color-conscious, by holding up every policy, practice or procedure at your place of employment and interrogate those policies, practices, and procedures to see if they may be inadvertently perpetuating inequality on the basis of race.”
Wise points out, “I fight racism because it is an evil to which I’d rather not contribute. It is a sickness in my community, and I’m trying to save myself from it.”
Loss
Racism and white privilege are dangerous for us. When poor black kids in the inner city kill someone, no one asks why? Because we think we already know: those are bad kids, in bad families, with no values or respect for human life. But when an upper middle-class white boy does something wrong, confusion gives way to shock with leads to a parade of theories meant to explain how otherwise “good” kids could go so tragically wrong.
What if the culture of privilege creates the risk of this sort of thing by generating a set of expectations in the minds of the privileged which, when frustrated, leads them to lash out, unable to cope with setback? And not just school shooters, but workplace murderers too, who are overwhelmingly white, almost always male, and usually solidly middle class?
After 9/11, whites and only whites seemed stunned that anyone would hate the United States – “Why do they hate us?” mantra was rarely heard from people of color.
Redemption
Wise ends his book by pointing out, “What whites have rarely had to think about—because as the dominant group, we are so used to having our will be done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom, that we become human.”
So, on this National Freedom Day, may we consider the role we can play in eliminating injustice in our organizations and our spheres of influence. Only then will we become “out of this world” leaders…