Saturday, January 10, 2009
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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Customer Reviews
White Like Me
This is one of the most important pieces I've read in the last few years. Very thought provoking and challenging. Be ready to shake your world to help in beginning to establish a better place for all.
understand white folks
As a white dude, I can say that Tim Wise understands white folks in the states, probably as well as anyone can. He knows all about how we think and how we insulate ourselves from reality and how we have the uncanny ability to simultaneously tell others to be responsible while we blame them for our problems. And he's even anticipated your unwitting and latently racist attack / defense in expressing your outrage that there is such a thing as white privelege (which you will put scare quotes around, "privelege", to say that it doesn't exist.) He knows your tricks, and he is an extremely engaging and humorous author on top of it.
This is one of the single best books I have ever read and is definite must-read material for anyone living amidst a lot of racism, especially the kind that doesn't see itself as such.
Arrogant cook
This book was given to me and I did not finish it.
What I read offended me - as a Caucasian.
This Tim Un-Wise knows he is preaching to the choir of self loathing rich white folks who are left wing cooks full of guilt from what some of their ancestors did.
However it also seems to make the assumption all white people should feel that way, well speak for yourself, pal.
I am and I know a lot of decent caucasians with decency and courtesy who are further from racism that most black folk. Write that, pandering lyar.
Making excuses like that is not helpful to the black community either as most of their problems can hardly be blamed on the folks who make welfare possible - the taxpayers.
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Posted by Horde at 5:00 AM
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