White people, of course, having never experienced the business end of institutionalized racism, can only achieve an approximate understanding of it. Fortunately, Tim Wise is on the scene to help. Here's Wise on how racism is driving the opposition to health care.
"You know full well that no one is talking about wanting to go back to the days of segregation."
Well, no, I don't know it. I don't know that at all, seeing as how so many of the tea-bag set and anti-health care folks make "taking their country back" one of the most prominent lines of their vocalized outrage. What does that mean, coming from people in their 60s and 70s, for whom the America of their youth was indeed a white supremacist place? A place where white hegemony could be taken as a given, something that could be presumed in perpetuity? What does it mean when someone says that they want to go back to the country the way the founders envisioned it, as many have also explained at these rallies? After all, they envisioned a white republic. They envisioned and sought out the extirpation of indigenous peoples, most believed in the enslavement of African peoples, and none truly believed that blacks should be treated as equals.
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Comments
Not Racism
You'd like it to be racism. Then your argument would be easier to make. But knocking down straw men isn't going to help you.
What's really going on is libertarianism vs. communitarianism, which explains why folks show up to demos carrying guns.
Nothing you do will work if you don't understand your situation. Flailing against supposed racists (and invoking the anti-white rage of Tim Wise) is not going to help your cause.
The country just elected a black president. No one's interested in hearing rants about racism any more.
not racism...really?!
he really isn't jesus, you know. one election of a black man doesn't absolve this country of all it's past and current sins. it's not like you just get to rape, pillage and enslave as long as you elect one negro before you die.
seriously though, this comment is exactly represents the fear that many of us in the black community have been talking about since obama'a election...that white people will think it means that suddenly racism doesn't exist in this country anymore.
nevermind that racial profiling is still rampant (we get to share this honor with our middle-eastern brothers and sisters), people of color still recieve harsher sentences for comparable crimes in the justice system, the schools in our neighborhoods often recieve less funding than in "white" neighborhoods, etc.
by the way, how many black people are there in senate or the house, how many hispanics, etc? is it even close to representing the populations? isn't this where the real policy-making happens in our government?
that's the thing about institutionalized racism--racists have figured out that hanging people from trees tends to upset folks, but you can get the same result of keeping groups of people from having equal access to opportunities in more subtle ways and people like you get to feel better about themselves and the status quo remains just that.
oh my...was that another rant about racism!?! i guess someone was interested!
ps.-i find it really ironic that you equate anti-racist with anti-white. what's that say about your world view?
racism
...one election of a black man doesn't absolve this country of all it's past and current sins. it's not like you just get to rape, pillage and enslave as long as you elect one negro before you die.
Wow. You're clearly full of hatred. Slavery was a bad thing. Hundreds of thousands of good people of various races - but especially white - died to stop it. It no longer exists except in some Asian countries, and in those nations which have adopted a communal form of slavery called collectivism, which you seem to prefer. Wherever you have government force you have slavery in some form and extent, which is why America was formed on the basis of limited constitutional government.