A dinnertime conversation with my husband last night prompted me to spend some time reading up on Tim Wise. I ending up spending several hours sifting through his blog (http://www.timwise.org/) and putting his newest book “Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama” in my amazon.com cart. (Disclaimer: It should, perhaps, be noted that my husband and I are both what most people would characterize as “bleeding heart liberals.”) The very interesting article that my husband was telling me about brought me to the archives of at least one hundred others, along with videos, and a whole host of thought provoking material that had me really thinking about the idea of White privilege. While I would never argue the existence of White privilege, all these hours of mulling over these articles, videos, and the texts for class made me question how we can begin to address the problems of urban schools until this much larger issue of institutionalized racism is first tackled.
I find Tim Wise to be very engaging. If you have hours to spend (tee hee) surfing You Tube, take a look at some of his speaking engagements; if not, this clip is really good:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you for doing the research for us so that we can better educate ourselves on the feelings about white privledge. I think that the feelings probably go further than just a race issue, I know as a woman working in a male dominated field I have some of the same feelings of always climbing my way out of a hole and it can be very tiresome. I think that we all can have some empathy when it comes to feeling like we are not playing on an even field. However without people speaking up about the way they feel we may never be aware of it because often times we do not come from the same backgrounds and are not sensitive to the differences.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the video and your thoughts. How sad that as a country we would rather spend the money to incarcerate than spend it to educate.
ReplyDelete