Following is an email I received today. It's an introduction to an article on race. According to a quick Google, the author, Tim Wise, is the Director of the newly-formed Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE) in Nashville, Tennessee. This article is my first introduction to him. The article is traveling through the black community here in the Midwest, and I thought it might be of interest here.
I haven't heard much from Tim in the past few years,
Neither have I. It was an excellent article though.
but he has been doing the 'anti-racist' circuit for at least a decade or more. He was big on p + p = r and the whole "whiteness" as a social construct schtick in the 90's.
You're speaking gobbledeygook. None of that was in the article. Are you sure you're in the right thread?
If he hasn't changed, his message was and is, you are white, all whites are racist, you need to shut-up, sit down,
Well, apparently he's changed, because nothing like that is in the article at all.
listen to what non-whites (people of color in the popular vernacular of the movement) have to say,
Again, I don't think you actually read the article. He's a white guy, he's mostly talking about understanding the parts of history of these United States that we may be shocked to discover have been hidden or otherwise omitted from our education.
then get up, renounce your own 'white privilege' and go out and make it all better.
Nope, not in there. What have you been reading?
He wrote something years ago that I may still have a copy of. If so, I will post it for anyone eager to have a one-sided 'discussion' about race.
Ah, that explains it! if what you have been reading is any example of the one-sided argument you are proferring here, than no thanks, it doesn't seem beneficial really.
Or on topic. You might be a lot less confusing if you actually respond to the topic in question which, usually and in this case, requires actual reading of the cited article, and some reference to it.
Now, to add something actually substantive to the topic:
First, I didn't think the article was all that long, really, and was correct in every cite (good research - and I learned a couple things I never knew before)...
The one thing I would like to add is that the phrase "white people are shocked to find" may not apply to everyone, every time... but as much as I try to educate myself, I *have* found myself shocked, recently, by some of the things our country has done. But while it does not lead me to feel
ashamed for those things I had nothing to do with, there are two thing I cam take away from this article:
1) I understand why some people cannot in good conscience feel 'national pride'; not only are there things that have been so shameful as to cast a shadow over the great and good things the country has done, but the shameful things were done
to them. Asking them to express national pride would be akin to asking a person, whose mother or father was repeatedly beaten and raped as a child by their uncle, to honor that same person for valor in military service.
2) I, as a relative of that uncle, would not feel shame - but I also would not castigate the person for pointing out that that person was not a paragon of virtue.
More importantly, I need to make sure I don't turn a blind eye to such things, myself, either in the past or the future, and understand that other people's experience in this country are not as fortunate as my own. And it isn't that that makes any kind of a debt to them; but rather it is in both of our best interests to continue the dialog to help understand each other's point of view, and do what is in my ability to ensure that *I* am never the source of such shameful things, or allow such things to occur when I could discourage or prevent them.
