White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son / Edition 2

by Tim Wise

Overview

White Like Me is a personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the lives of white Americans in every realm of daily life: 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." Wise also discusses the ways in which racial privilege can harm whites in the long run and make progressive social change less likely. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and yet scholarly; analytical and yet accessible. Now newly revised and updated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933368993
Publisher:	Soft Skull Press, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2007
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(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