Extra Credit Blog Post

I went to the lecture hosted by Tim Wise, the author of White like Me. He was a very intelligent and passionate speaker. The overall theme of his speech was race and racism in our nation. I thought he spoke of issues that could easily be connected to the issues we have discussed in class.

His main point of the speech was to make the audience understand that racism still exists and that it needs to be talked about within our community. He related not talking about racism to not talking about starvation. Not talking about starvation is not going to cause everyone that is starving to receive food, just like not talking about racism is not going to make racism magically disappear. He explained that racism is easy to go unnoticed by the majority, also known as the white person, because our society automatically reverts to the majority. For example, in American schools we have American literature, and then we have separate Black literature. This can also be seen in Black history month. Tim Wise argues that we do not have a white history month because all of the other months are white history month. Again, we automatically default to the majority. As a society Tim urges us to recognize this and talk about this so that we can work harder to fix it.

I responded to this point by being a little bit surprised. I know that racism is present in America, that was not a shock, but I was taken aback by how much I was responsible for continuing the cycle. I grew up in a fairly diverse community and I had many friends of different races. I never really gave much thought to them being different, I saw them as the same as me, an average high school student. Tim Wise would have disapproved of this notion. In his view I need to see them as different people with different backgrounds. After listening to Tim Wise, his approach makes sense. I had always been under the impression that treating everyone the same was the goal of defeating racism, but Time Wise taught me that as a society we have to take another approach to defeat racism. We need to have talks about racism and learn what the perspectives of minorities are on the topic of racism. These talks are difficult to have. Simply listening to Tim Wise while in the back row in a packed room of students made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I have to realize that the discomfort is so minute compared to the discomfort that many other cultural groups may feel on a daily basis, and that in order to reduce racism I need to be put into these uncomfortable situations. 

I think the talk I attended was strongly related to our discussions in class, especially our discussion on silent racism. Tim Wise’s views on our racist society today are similar to the views of Trepagnier in Silent Racism. Trepagnier states in her first chapter when discussing racism that “because this racism is not recognized by most whites, even well-meaning white people contribute to the racial divide without intending to and without knowing that they do” (Trepagnier, pg. 4). Wise would agree with Trepagnier. Wise believes that most white people do not know they are being racist because of how our society operates. Many white Americans have this idea that they are not racist and that they are just operating under the societal norm, which actually happens to be racist. This can be seen by some of our class members stating that they are not racist, yet when we took the Implicit Bias Test almost everyone had some sort of racial bias. Wise believes it is hard to see the racism in our institutions as a white person but that, as Trepagnier states in her book, “blacks and other people of color see racism as permeating the institutions of society, producing racial inequality in employment, education, housing, and justice” (Trepagnier, pg. 4). In order to reveal the systemic racism in our society to those that deny it exists, we need to have discussions in our communities about racism, such as the talk with Tim Wise.

I thoroughly enjoyed Tim Wise’s speech and I took a lot away from it. I think it is great that CAB brought such an important topic to the attention to the members of our community. I would strongly suggest that Tim Wise or other experts like him be invited to our school in the future. 

Julie Thurmes