Wise to Midd Wise up on racism Anti-racism expert speaks to College on white privilege

Author: Aylie Baker

"Everything I will say today I've stolen from someone else," began Tim Wise in his lecture "Profit and Loss: White Privilege and its Consequences for Racial Equity and Justice," last Wednesday in Dana Auditorium. "I'm here not because I'm better than others," but rather "because I fit the aesthetic," said Wise, who used his own personal experience to motivate his lecture.

Wise tackled, with a provocative tone and witty eloquence, the topic of privilege and its manifestations in the United States today. "We must be honest with ourselves," he urged a packed Dana Auditorium audience, "examining who we are, where we are and why."

Wise is one of the most renowned anti-racist activists and writers in the United States today. Out of college, he became the Assistant Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a group created largely for the purpose of defeating Louisiana's neo-Nazi political candidate, David Duke. Amidst an intense campaign battle, Wise spearheaded the antiracism campaign and garnered worldwide recognition for his efforts. Since embarking on the lecture circuit in his mid-twenties, Wise has spoken in 48 states at over 400 college campuses and for countless community groups. Aside from just speaking, Wise also works to battle racism and privilege in institutions nationwide, training teachers, physicians and other professionals how to combat and prevent inequalities.

Wise prefaced his talk by asserting that, despite years of lecturing and campaigning, he has nothing original to offer. "Mine is the collective wisdom shared with me by people of color." The essential difference between his words and theirs, he explained, was that by nature of his being white, Wise's words carry with them a credibility not extended to minority groups; they have more reaching power because he enjoys, however imperceptibly, white privilege.

Drawing heavily on personal anecdotes, Wise charted his own ascent to fame and prestige, demonstrating how his own life is a prime example of white privilege. Wise began his introspective study with an examination of his great grandfather, a Jewish immigrant. While he had endured his own share of struggles in Europe, upon arriving in the United States, his great grandfather was able to gain direct access to the opportunity structure because he fell under the general umbrella of whiteness. According to Wise, his ability to work his way up was directly contingent to the color of his skin.

Despite coming from a poor family, Wise was fortunate enough to attend Tulane University, in large part because of his skin color. Because Tulane's tuition was very expensive, Wise described how his grandmother had to sign for a loan, using her house as collateral. Had he been born into a black family of similar socioeconomic background, Wise asserted, he likely would not have had the same credibility with the bank and would have had significantly more difficulty in securing a loan. In this case, privilege extended from the economic realm into the psychological. The white race is not going to signify bad credit, dishonesty, Wise claimed. People are crippled by "mental schemas - a set of ideas related to one another, which the out-group triggers," he explained.

"If the President were a black man and mangled the English language in the same way President Bush does," said Wise, "his inarticulateness would trigger a set of associations which would not rub off." In other words, people of color suffer from what Wise deemed "the burden of representation," adding, "they have to be 100 percent accurate in order to be respected."

Thus, had he not come from a white family, Wise explained, he likely would not have secured a loan, or have attended college, or have been able to forge the connections which landed him a job in the anti-racism arena.

The story of his great grandfather, the story of his own rise to fame, is "not only my story," he asserted, "but the story of the white American."

Even forty years after the collapse of formal segregation in the United States, there still exists a residue of formalized white privilege. Equality is far from achieved - past inequalities continue to reverberate into the present. "Inertia is a property of the socioeconomic universe as well," said Wise. "You can't get around it."

"Today," he explained, "the average white family has ten times the net worth of the average African American family, and eight times that of the average Latino family."

Can such wide disparity be attributed to greater intelligence, to hard work, to classic rugged individualism? "Not at all," Wise insisted.

Americans must not fall into the "innocence trap," he warned. Often, he explained, we confuse culpability with responsibility. Just because today's white people were not directly involved in enforcing slavery does not mean that they can remain complacent. Too easily we fall upon passive language and passive action. People are labeled as "at risk," Wise said, "but from what?" We speak of the underprivileged, but what of the "overprivileged?"

"People of color don't need whites to save them," he said. "They need us [whites] to take respect for ourselves." White Americans need to abandon their myopic sense of responsibility. Mired by this residue of privilege, Americans have become willing victims of "hubris - this self-inflated sense of one's righteousness that doesn't allow us to see our true selves."

What can whites do to assuage existing prejudices and to dismantle the social institution of privilege? The "answers are found in community, in the everyday struggle," said Wise.

"Yell, cry, scream a little," he urged, but above all, "don't give away your agency." Whites must "relinquish that privilege of our silence, we can't leave it to the people of color." However tempting, whites cannot be content to remain voyeurs in a society which is still tarnished by marginalization. "There's a fundamental difference between culpability and responsibility," insisted Wise. There's no use dodging calls to reform by hiding behind the shield of "I didn't do it."

Demonstrating a great adeptness in his ability to link concepts, Wise alluded to inequalities, which are overarching, existing not only racially, but also in the realm of gender and ethnicity. More than ever, warned Wise, we're entering into a "toxic atmosphere, in which the stakes are increasingly high." We must not only examine what it means to be white or black, but we must also scrutinize our place in our society, who we are and how we've arrived here.