White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son / Edition 3

by Tim Wise

Overview

With a new preface and updated chapters, White Like Me is one-part memoir, one-part polemical essay collection. It is a personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and elsewhere.

Using stories from his own life, Tim Wise demonstrates the ways in which racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits, in relative terms, those who are “white like him.” He discusses how racial privilege can harm whites in the long run and make progressive social change less likely. He explores the ways in which whites can challenge their unjust privileges, and explains in clear and convincing language why it is in the best interest of whites themselves to do so. Using anecdotes instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and yet scholarly, analytical and yet accessible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593764258
Publisher:	Soft Skull Press, Inc.
Publication date:	09/13/2011
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	44,843
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition     v
Preface to the First Edition     vii
Born to Belonging     1
Privilege     17
Denial     61
Resistance     89
Collaboration     127
Loss     147
Redemption     173
Epilogue: An Open Letter to White America about White Privilege and Hurricane Katrina     179

Editorial Reviews

Activist, lecturer and director of the new Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE), Wise works from anecdote rather than academic argument to recount his path to greater cultural awareness in a colloquial, matter-of-fact quasi-memoir that urges white people to fight racism "for our own sake." Sparing neither family nor self, Wise recalls a racist rant his antiracist mother once delivered, racial epithets uttered by his Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother and the "conditioning" that leads him to wonder, for a split-second, if people of color are truly qualified for their jobs. He considers how the deck has always been stacked in his and other white people's favor: his grandmother's house, which served as collateral for a loan he needed for college, for instance, was in a neighborhood that had formerly barred blacks. Resistance to racism, Wise declares, requires support (it's better for a group to speak out against racial tracking than for one "crazy radical" to do it), and that's presumably part of what this volume means to provide. And while Wise sometimes falls victim to sweeping judgments-the act of debating racial profiling, he declares, is "white-identified," because only whites have the luxury to look at life or death issues as a battle of wits-his candor is invigorating. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly