White Like Me. Tim Wise
what I realized as I read back over the volume was that in some ways I hadn’t stayed true to the purpose of the book, or the initial impetus for it. I had written White Like Me thanks to an admonition from people of color I knew in New Orleans to “take inventory” of my life, to get clear on why I cared so much about racism, to understand my own motivation for challenging it. Until I did this, they insisted, my work would be unfocused, my contributions minimal, my willingness to stay in the struggle transitory at best. Get clear on your motivation, they told me, beyond the politics and the ideological stuff that’s in your head. Figure out what it is about your heart and even soul that compels you.
So I began to explore that question and had spent nearly twelve years on it before sitting down to write this book the first time. By then, the answer was as clear as the sound of our youngest girl, a year old at the time, crying in the night over the baby monitor in her room. When I had sat down and begun to take inventory, it had become impossible to miss how race had been implicated year in and year out, all throughout the course of my existence. Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn’t just race that was a social construct. So was I.
And as much as we all like to believe we’re special (and God knows, white men are encouraged in this conceit well enough), I simply failed to accept that this story was mine alone. Although others will have experienced whiteness differently to various extents, I felt certain there were aspects of my past that dovetailed with those of others, and that if we could begin to excavate some of that, perhaps we could break the seemingly intractable impasse between white folks and folks of color; perhaps we could move the dialogue forward by coming to see ourselves in the center of the problem, rather than seeing racism as some abstract sociological concept about which the black and brown must worry, but about which whites shouldn’t lose much sleep. Only by coming to realize how thoroughly racialized our white lives are can we begin to see the problem as ours, and begin to take action to help solve it. By remaining oblivious to our racialization we remain oblivious to the injustice that stems from it, and we remain paralyzed when it comes to responding to it in a constructive manner.
This time, I’ve opted to tell these stories—many from the previous volumes and several that had been left out—more or less chronologically, in an attempt to highlight the way that race flows throughout a life from the beginning. All the themes discussed in the first two editions will still find exploration here, but they will do so within a narrative that is much more of a story than a mere collection of relatively disjointed reflections. I don’t know if this will be a better or worse approach than the last two. But I know that, for now, it is the way I must tell the story. It is the voice in which I need to speak. Life is lived chronologically, after all. So perhaps its recounting should be chronological too.
Thank you, all who have made the book a success thus far, and all those who are reading it now for the first time. If you are among the latter, you are reading a much better book than your predecessors did. I hope you’ll find that it was worth the wait.
Nashville, March 2011
PREFACE
“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?”
IT’S A QUESTION no one likes to hear, seeing as how it typically signifies an assumption on the part of the questioner that something is terribly wrong, something that defies logic and begs for an explanation.
It’s the kind of query one might get from former classmates on the occasion of one’s twenty-year high school reunion: “Dear God, what the hell happened to you?” As a general rule, people don’t ask this question of those whom they consider to have dramatically improved themselves physically, emotionally, or professionally. Instead, it is more often asked of those considered to be seriously damaged, as if the only possible answer to the question would be, “Well, I was dropped on my head as a baby,” to which the questioner would then reply, “Aha, I see.”
So whenever I’m asked this, I naturally recoil for a moment, assuming that those inquiring about the matter likely want to know what happened to me, only so that they may, having obtained the answer, carefully avoid at whatever cost having it (whatever it may be) happen to them. In my case, however, the cynicism with which I greet the question usually turns out to be unwarranted. Most of the persons who ask me “what happened” seem to be asking less for reasons of passing judgment than for reasons of genuine confusion.
As a white man, born and reared in a society that has always bestowed upon me advantages that it has generally withheld from people of color, I am not expected to think the way I do. I am not supposed to speak against and agitate in opposition to racism and institutionalized white supremacy. Indeed, for people of color, it is often shocking to see white people even thinking about race, let alone challenging racism. After all, we don’t have to spend much time contemplating the subject if we’d rather not, and white folks have made something of a pastime out of ignoring racism, or at least refusing to call it out as a major social problem to be remedied.
But for me, ignoring race and racism has never been an option. Even when it would have been easier to turn away, there were too many forces and circumstances pulling me back, compelling me to look at the matter square in the face—in my face. Although white Americans often think we’ve had few first-hand experiences with race, because most of us are so isolated from people of color in our day-to-day lives, the reality is that this isolation is our experience with race. We are all experiencing race, because from the beginning of our lives we have been living in a racialized society, in which the color of our skin means something socially, even while it remains largely a matter of biological and genetic irrelevance. Race may be a scientific fiction—and given the almost complete genetic overlap between persons of the various so-called races, it appears to be just that—but it is a social fact that none of us can escape no matter how much or how little we may speak of it. Just as there were no actual witches in Salem in 1692, and yet anti-witch persecution was frighteningly real, so too race can be a falsehood, even as racism continues to destroy lives and, on the flipside, to advantage those who are rarely its targets.
A few words about terminology: When I speak of “whites” or “white folks,” I am referring to those persons, typically of European descent, who by virtue of skin color or perhaps national origin and culture are able to be perceived as “white,” as members of the dominant racial group in the Western world. I do not consider the white race to be a real thing, biologically, as modern science pretty well establishes that there are no truly distinct races, genetically speaking, within the human species. But the white race certainly has meaning in social terms, and it is in that sense that I use the concept here.
As it turns out, this last point is more important than you might think. Almost immediately upon publication, this book’s first edition came under fire from various white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who launched a fairly concerted effort to discredit it, and me as the author. They sought to do this by jamming the review boards at Amazon.com with harsh critiques, none of which discussed the content—in all likelihood none of them had read the book—but which amounted to ad hominem attacks against me as a Jew. As several explained, being Jewish disqualifies me from being white, or writing about my experiences as a white person, since Jews are, to their way of thinking, a distinct race of evildoers that seeks to eradicate Aryan stock from the face of the earth.
Of course, on the one hand (and ignoring for a second the Hitlerian undertones), it is absurd to think that uniquely “Jewish genes” render Jews separate from “real” whites, despite our common and recent European ancestry. And it’s even more ridiculous to think that such genes from one-fourth of one’s family, as with mine, can cancel out the three-quarters Anglo-Celtic contribution made by the rest of my ancestors. But in truth, the argument is irrelevant, given how I am using the concept of whiteness here. Even if there were something biologically distinct about Jews, this would hardly alter the fact that