Between Barack and a Hard Place: Challenging Racism, Privilege, and Denial

Tim Wise opens his discussion talking about how we use the line "Some of my best friends are black" to make it seem as though we can't be racist. He compares that to having no true validity because that's the equivalent of saying that all heterosexual men aren't sexist because they're married, or they're attracted to women. As we all know, sexism and racism are still very much so happening in our society every day, and it certainly isn't only homosexual men who are sexist. This really struck me, because I've absolutely heard people say that line at different times, "I'm not racist, my best friend is black." or "I'm not racist, I dated a black guy." and hearing it in the terms of comparing it to sexism really made a lot of sense to me. He later talks about a time in his life when he got on to an airplane and saw that two black men were flying the plane. He says that he thought to himself, "oh dear god, can these men fly this plane?" and he says that he instantly was able to defeat the thought and once he sat down in his seat and could think about it, that he realized that it wasn't a logical thought, and more likely than not these men flying the plane had to go through a lot more in order to be qualified to do so than white men would have had to. His point in this however, is that even though he was able to defeat the thought it still popped in to his head. He makes a comparison here between programmed thought and counter conditioning. He says that we operate on a lot of subconscious things that we are programmed to think, but it's how we think of them after that and how we condition ourselves. Later in his presentation, he talks about privilege and how white people could benefit from better equity. He says, "Privilege softens you to a point where you can't deal with set back." He also says that privilege is dangerous in this sense. I could really connect with that because I know that there have been a lot of times in my life when I've looked at people around me and really not understood how they overcome something tragic that happened to them. I can't imagine how I would handle certain situations that I've seen friends of mine go through, or how I would be able to find the strength in myself to get through them. I think a large part of that is because I'm softened to the point of not necessarily knowing how to handle certain situations. He compares this to The Great Depression when the rich people were killing themselves meanwhile, poor people were standing in line to get soup from the soup kitchen. He talks about how rich people couldn't cope with being poor, but poor people knew how to handle the stock market crash. I took a lot away from his speech and I feel like he really hit the nail on the head in his discussion.