Tim Wise: On The Myth of Meritocracy: Listen to Black People
“Timothy Jacob Wise (born October 4, 1968) is an American activist and writer on the topic of race.[1] Since 1995, he has given speeches at over 600 college campuses across the U.S.[2] He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling racism in their institutions.”
——Wikipedia
A constant and recurring theme of Wise’s lectures and talks is, and has been, that re matters of race and racism, white people should be listening to Black people…
11/03/2020 @ 9:11 am
Just said this in my comment on the colorblind post. Of course Tim Wise says it best.
tl;dnr White people, shut up and listen when a Black person is willing to tell you about their experience!
11/03/2020 @ 9:19 am
P.S. I would add in the interest of shared perspectives Ron, why White people might argue with Black experience. Guilt. We bear the sin of our ancestors and people who look like us, of the people who raised us with various degrees of racism, of our own ignorant and clueless actions. Many of us want to do better. We want to be seen as one of the Good Ones. We want you to trust us. Yet we can’t expect that. Not yet anyway. Have patience as we go back to school.
Love ya, buddy and GO BIDEN/HARRIS!!!
11/03/2020 @ 9:53 am
@Greenheron;
In my view, Tim Wise is the best there is as a white person parsing and explaining racism to white people…
I have repeatedly said that such argumentation must be made and come from the white people who ‘get it’ if white people are to become enlightened re race and racism…
Black people can state and restate the issues and grievances, but it is white people who must make the persuasive case to other white people.
In that regard, you’re doing just fine…
11/03/2020 @ 10:29 am
YOU are right. YOU are a loathsome person for being white. YOU should repent for all of the repression and discrimation YOU have done. YOU need to do somethig to make up for all that YOU have done. Quit your job and give it to a black man who has been represed by YOU. Give your home to a black family who have been denied a good home becuase YOU are racist. Give all your money to black families if you know any – something i seriosly doubt. Then maybe YOU will have learned. Dont just talk about wahat a worthless piece of shit YOU are. Be about somethig.
11/03/2020 @ 11:19 am
@MH;
“Dont just talk about wahat a worthless piece of shit YOU are. Be about somethig.”
While it is true that you have the right to be openly ignorant and publicly stupid, you have no such right, despite your inclination, to use vile language and, insulting, and disrespectful epithets here…
Your comment is not a contribution to any conversation that I would countenance or participate in…
You clearly have issues re your lack of capacity to communicate…
Your grammar, syntax, and spelling here are as far off base as the thrust of your remark….
I would label or characterize you as a poor dumb bastard, but I don’t engage in name calling and, I demand that those who comment on my blog refrain from doing so…
I realize that the fact that you are intellectually and rhetorically challenged and impaired is not entirely your fault…
Be that as it may, I can assure you that if you do it again, you will be summarily deleted and barred from commenting on my posts…
11/03/2020 @ 1:15 pm
Oh thank you dad.
I see how it works now. YOU insult some one by saying you would not say that about them. So, I donot call people names either so I will not call YOU a stupid biggoted moron who sees everythig as racist. I wont say that because that would be wrong.
Thank you for teachig me how I am supposed to respond to people so I donot insult them.
11/03/2020 @ 4:34 pm
Happy Halloween Robert….
Nice costume…
11/03/2020 @ 4:11 pm
This may be the perfect Election Day thread, I mean to the point of being textbook.
Ron, as what would have been a central point but has just been rendered peripheral, if I asked Mr. Wise why something was racist, he would never say “it just is.” “I don’t see it” is not the same thing as “you’re wrong,” particularly when an explanation is requested, an observation I suppose I should be making to both my friends here, being as I suspect this is why the post was written.
However, the post has now taken a different turn. Ron, I don’t know if you want me involved here and, if so, in what capacity. Regardless of where you’d like me to go from here, I will address Mr. Hernandez with one point.
Mr. Hernandez,
I am an ally of Mr. Powell’s though my approach differs from Greenheron’s to the extent that it is likely this post was written as a rebuke to me. Allies do have our disagreements. In defense of both of my friends here, I should point out that most White Americans spent decades not believing Black people when they said they were facing police (and general court system) abuse. What changed things for a lot of them was the George Floyd video and the subsequent lack of an immediate indictment of Officer Chauvin. The difference in polling data concerning whether White people believed that Black people were not being treated anything like equally by the police was drastic, as if it suddenly occurred to a whole lot of the White population that Black people hadn’t been making this stuff up all this time. The Floyd video was immediately reinforced by the case of the Central Park dog walker who, when asked by a Black birdwatcher to leash her dog, made a phone call on camera to the NYPD saying she was being threatened by a Black man.
In other words, a lot of if not most of the White population ignored a lot of what Black people were telling them about what they (Black people) were facing on a daily basis. That ignoring, that lack of taking seriously, that lack of belief has been extremely costly to the Black community, and I’m afraid that is on us. (I’m White.) I’m not saying we owe anyone our houses or jobs, but we do owe them the courtesy of taking what they have observed seriously. If we as a nation had been more aware of the extent of what was happening, we presumably would have taken more steps toward preventing unjust treatment, as that would be the just, right, and American thing to do. Not knowing because you don’t hear about such things is one thing but not knowing because you’d rather not know is quite another, and not knowing because your sources are White guys who barely know anyone Black but pontificate on what Blacks face or don’t face because they think they have a vested interest in minimizing the scope of Black grievances is not analytically honest. It is not learning truth, it is avoiding it. If you want the truth, go to people who are likely to actually know it. Like if you want to know the truth about COVID, it makes one Hell of a lot more sense to ask your doctor than your politician or pundit because that’s who in your life is likely to actually know something about infectious diseases.
I am making some assumptions here and I apologize for those that are wrong. But the point of the post, that real witnesses make the best witnesses, stands.
11/03/2020 @ 12:48 pm
Miguel, your comment has a ring of inauthenticity…are you perhaps an alt? You speak like a White racist who believes your list of things is what Black people want. Yes I do know a large number of Black people, mostly young, several hundred maybe. None speak as you do. Yet I’ll respond to your comment, because whether you are White or Black, you seem in the dark about antiracism and reparations.
I believe in reparations, wholeheartedly, which you seem to be describing, except as a White person might, with fear and total misunderstanding. Reparations aren’t about White people turning over their houses and apartments and jobs and going to live under a bridge. That’s how Republicans threaten Whites, to gin up their fear. But increase my taxes to make community college free for POC, offer zero interest mortgages and small business loans. I’ll pay for that, happily.
Fwiw, I don’t have a ton of money but my will divides it equally between the Malala Fund, the Obama Foundation, three former students of color so that they can go to grad school, and an amazing after school arts program for children of color in my city–97% graduate from high school and 80% go on to college.
Education is of critical importance to me because I’m a high school drop out who began adult life on welfare and drugs. Education changed the game. An eccentric old gay director of admissions saw something in me and gave me a chance and a work study stipend. For nearly thirty years, I’ve been a professor at the same state college that rejected my student application because I was a drop out with a GPA of 1.09.
Which points me to your posing as an uneducated POC. Ron thinks you’re poorly educated. I think you are attempting to mimic someone who is poorly educated, even though you don’t know what that sounds like. Your ‘errors’ seem calculated. Why would you choose to do that, instead of make your comment as a White person, albeit a nasty one, since being nasty doesn’t seem to scare you? Are you embarrassed to be White but not to be an internet troll?
Btw, wondering if you listened to Ron’s vid of Tim Wise, the focus of this post. What did you think of that?
11/03/2020 @ 4:13 pm
@Greenheron;
I may be wrong, but I believe it’s Robert Pannier who is a site administrator.
He pulled the same ‘stunt’ posing as a black man on one of Bitey’s posts….
11/03/2020 @ 5:40 pm
I thought Allan Milner was the site administrator. So this Robert Pannier has administrator privileges and uses them to create fake accounts and post crazy nutter stuff?! Why does Allan Milner allow that? It totally compromises the integrity of the site, which I realize is only three or four bloggers, but still.
In light of this news, on the other post I mentioned how when I logged in to comment this morning, the site said I was already logged in as Ron Powell. I scratched my head, thought huh? then logged out as Ron Powell and logged in again as me. I wonder what would have happened if you’d tried to log in while the site had me logged in as Ron Powell. Also, how long had I been logged in as Ron Powell before I got there? Maybe someone was screwing around in your account.
Wondering why this guy would think he could fool two Black men into thinking he was a Black man while speaking pretty much exactly like an angry old White man. Seems everyone who blogs or drops in here used to be at OS, do you know who he was there? Doc Vega jumps to mind for the way he enjoyed spouting crazy righty Whitey nutter garbage.
Well Mr. Panner, I’m going now to don my flannel pjs, curl up under my down comforter with a bowl of Election Eve comfort food mac and cheese and a glass of wine, and watch your fat lying orange boy lose an election.
Ron and KS, see you on the other side!! 🙂
11/04/2020 @ 12:55 am
GH,
The site has two administrators: Alan Milner and Robert Pannier. I don’t know where that arrangement came from but it’s the one we have.
11/04/2020 @ 11:27 am
I don’t know whether Hernandez is Pannier or not. What I do know is that it doesn’t make any difference who he is. The anger and resentment in those comments is very real and is responsible for the fact that we don’t currently have a clear-cut election result when one candidate, instead of killing one American in Times Square, has essentially killed 200,000 Americans. That’s a shitload of anger.
I know my allies. I’ve been a liberal for an awfully long time. One thing I know about my allies is that if they find something absurd they are far more inclined to dismiss it than to address it. This has been true for as long as I can remember. It has been a tactical mistake for as long as I can remember.
We are looking at close to half a country full of people who think they’re being taken advantage of. More specifically, they think that they are being taken advantage of by minorities, feminists, illegal immigrants, and the undeserving poor. They think they are being blamed for racism for which they don’t feel responsible. They think that every social program picks their pockets, that their hard work supports people who don’t want to work. They mostly think that rich people got that way by being capable. They think academics view them as idiots and White Trash. This is the one thing they believe that’s actually true. Liberals have been bigoted toward poor Whites for as long as I can remember.
I can tell you why they aren’t doing as well as they used to. I can tell you why it has nothing to do with minorities, feminists, illegal immigrants, the undeserving poor, or even liberals. I can tell you as a Jew that misplaced anger like this can have very, very bad consequences.
This liberal failure to address this anger takes two forms. One is the aforementioned dismissal. I watched this during the Vietnam War with flag burning. The truth about flag burning is that most liberals didn’t approve of it. Because most liberals refused to make this clear because they thought the issue was fundamentally trivial, conservatives were able to use this as an issue to motivate their base. For all practical purposes, they still are. Watch the pickups with full-sized flags on polls flying out the back. Their drivers think this is unabashed extreme patriotism. It isn’t, of course, because it has nothing to do with what’s good for their country, but we’ve allowed them to think their gesture has meaning even though they’re standing up against mostly nonexistent opposition, like protecting the country from dragons.
The other is the adamant refusal to look at how liberalism benefits conservatives on their own terms. This one has made me talk to myself for years because it’s so God damned obvious. If you ask a conservative, they will tell you how much social programs cost. What they will not look at, and we will not look at either, is what social programs save. This is a long list, but just to touch on it, what would it mean if people currently on Federal assistance were making enough to pay taxes instead? What would it mean if currently poor people could afford to buy more from American businesses? What would it mean if a population was removed from poverty to the point where crime dropped drastically?
This principle applies all over the place. People will tell you what regulations cost but not what regulations save. Actually, they don’t believe that regulations save anything. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is a longer topic but I’ll just give one quick example: In the 1980’s, we had the S&L crisis, a somewhat smaller version of what would become the Mortgage crisis twenty years later, with billions of dollars spent in Federal bailouts. Do you know how many New York-based Savings & Loans went under during the crisis? Probably not. The answer is zero. The reason is that New York State regulations prohibited the practices that got all those Texas-based S&L’s in trouble. Those regulations saved us billions more.
Hell, it hasn’t occurred to these people that a lack of illegal immigrants from Mexico would mean they’d all be paying ten bucks for a head of lettuce. (I’m exaggerating, I think, but the principle isn’t wrong.)
Social programs, regulations, illegal immigration, but there’s more than that. One thing I’ve touched on, though I haven’t baldly stated this here, is that liberal policies have a lot of benefits for business such as protecting them from some market conditions (and environmental conditions) and enlarging their customer base. But we don’t talk about that. We don’t even look at it. We’re so afraid of looking materialistic that we avoid talking about business, even though by merits Wall Street should be supporting us because we are better for business.
We don’t want to look militaristic, so we don’t point out that liberals do far more to take care of enlisted personnel in the military than conservatives do. We’re the ones who worry about their wages, benefits, working conditions. And yet the conservatives look “pro-military” because of their support for weapons systems. Not that a lot of us don’t, and one thing you might observe is that most candidates for national office that are veterans are Democrats. Republicans are often draft-dodgers but somehow get credit for being pro-military.
It goes further than that, and here I’m absolutely including present company. There is a ton of Christian support for Republicans but this is in key respects backward. What we know about Jesus is that he spent a lot of his life reaching out to the marginalized. When confronted with sexual immorality, his reaction was “Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone.” When he saw rich people strolling blithely past the absolute misery of horrid poverty, he threw his hands up in disgust and essentially said “It’d be easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get one of these guys into Heaven.” Does this guy sound Republican to you? The party that hates the marginalized, doesn’t think it’s our job to help the poor, and wants to come down hard on the LGBTQ community claims in essence to be the party of God while liberals are so afraid of looking like they’re going near separation of Church and State that they allow this perception to stand.
Liberals are far more concerned with the actual well-being of the United States than conservatives are but don’t want to appear jingoistic and so don’t claim the greater patriotism they actually display than conservatives.
So let’s review here: Republicans get to be the party of Business, Defense, Patriotism, and God when they’re not entitled to any of it but liberals have vacated the field and allowed it. From an electoral standpoint, this is blatantly stupid.
11/04/2020 @ 12:49 pm
@Koshersalaami;
The phrase “white privelege” isn’t broad or expansive enough to cover the full range of the social, political, economic, psychological, and emotional impact and consequences of centuries of race based subjugation and slavery.
The fact that historically, white supremacy and white privilege over determine the positive life outcomes and life chances of white folks relative to black and brown people is one of the most consistent and repeated findings in all of the social sciences.
Too many white people, particularly the ones who voted for Trump, believe the hype and myths about who they are and what they’re about.
Therefore, they must cling to the narratives of Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s Burden, and, more recently, American Exceptionalism. It is because they cannot reconcile their racism and racist impulses and reflexes with their democratic “principles” and egalitarian “ideals”, that they continue to behave as though the Civil War is still in progress.
As a result, too many white folks are, of necessity, politically, socially, economically, culturally, psychologically, emotionally, morally, ethically, and intellectually bipolar, ambivalent, and conflicted when it comes to matters of race.
Hence, the belief that it’s permissible and acceptable to be of one mind publicly, and of another (the opposite) privately.
Trump has given voice to those who have grown weary of trying to maintain the false and duplicitous façade, and the untenable and unsustainable belief that they can be in favor of equality while wallowing in white privilege and denial.
Overt displays and manifestations of hatred and bigotry will continue to escalate as “normalization” takes hold among those who are able to isolate and insulate themselves because they have enough money not to be concerned about not having enough money.
As for the remainder of the less well informed and less well financially situated adherents of the Trump approach to government, they are the very people he will constantly and continuously screw over.
The very sad part of all this is, that as long as he continues to keep them focused on their racism and bigotry with the sleight of hand misdirection of smoke screen issues like religious travel bans and exclusions, racist walls and deportations, they’ll continue to buy into the supremely fraudulent notion that he’s making it great to be white in America again.
While Democrats win debates, Republicans win elections.
The primary reason for this is the primary difference between the parties:
When all else fails, Republicans are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to win.
On the other hand, when all else fails, Democrats are willing to lose and graciously concede defeat in order to look good while doing so…
11/04/2020 @ 1:56 pm
Your last two sentences are exactly the problem. Democrats think they can demonstrate the value of standing on principle by standing on principle. All they do is handcuff themselves. If I became President with a Senate majority, Republican Senators would find their parking spaces under construction, pneumatic drills operating outside their windows during working hours, ID’s that had to be updated only most Republican Senators didn’t get the memo. The Court would be packed with absolutely no input from the Republicans. I’d be looking at justices who had represented Planned Parenthood pro bono. It would be payback just to teach them we can’t be fucked with in a language they understand. I’m not ordinarily a vengeful person at all but I would be in this case.
11/05/2020 @ 12:16 pm
“This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.
I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering – enough is certainly as good as a feast – but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth – and indeed, no church – can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.
This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worse that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Also, watch the Tim Wise video above
(again?) @ 10 min 45 sec….
11/09/2020 @ 5:42 pm
There is a kernel of truth in American Exceptionalism. Unfortunately, the people we’re talking about oppose exactly that which makes America exceptional and racism is America’s biggest failure at exceptionalism. What makes America exceptional is that nationality is not based on ethnicity. When we make immigrants American, we really make them American. What this also means is that documents like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights become much more fundamental to our identity because that identity isn’t based on ethnicity – our nationality was constructed out of ideology.
That being said, the exception is that while immigrants on average do as well as everyone else within a couple of generations, that hasn’t happened to the Black population that’s already here (or the Native American population, but the reasons there are somewhat different). It is an American failure, well The American failure, not to wonder why, not to seek out why, and not to believe why when the answer is presented. And Trump’s supporters believe it least, getting their information from White pundits who know nothing about actual Black circumstances (and aren’t curious about them) and have ideological reasons to trivialize obstacles to Black people. As I have recently said elsewhere, the best witnesses are witnesses.
Part of all this is opposition to expertise. That’s the problem with COVID and masks. Again, these people are believing pundits without ever asking the people in their lives who actually know something about infectious diseases: their doctors.
Another thing to understand about American exceptionalism is that Americans are responsible for making America exceptional. It isn’t exceptional to persecute anyone. It isn’t exceptional to permit the persecution of anyone. It isn’t exceptional to tolerate mass poverty – from a national standpoint, that’s a dishonorable failure. And, most of all, it isn’t exceptional to value individualism (which at this point is selfishness pretending it’s romantic) over working on making your country exceptional.