Black and brown poor folks are doing self-help all the time, contrary to the common media imagery. They have to; after all, they have enough experience with white institutions to know that such institutions have never done much to improve their situation, and nothing at all unless it was demanded and unless they were mobilized collectively to make it happen. But I see very little self-help or even self-reflection in the white community. Rarely do we spend time dealing with our own internalized racial biases and fears, or the discrimination that continues to plague people of color, and which only we have any control over, since the folks doing the discriminating are white like us.
Black and brown poor folks are doing self-help all the time, contrary to the common media imagery. Th…
Tim Wise (born October 4, 1968) is a prominent anti-racist writer and educator. He has spent the past 25 years speaking to audiences in all 50 states, on over 1500 college and high school campuses, at hundreds of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the country. Wise has also trained corporate, government, entertainment, media, law enforcement, military, and medical industry professionals on methods for dismantling racial inequity in their institutions, and has provided anti-racism training to educators and administrators nationwide and internationally, in Canada and Bermuda. Wise is the author of nine books and numerous essays and has been featured in multiple documentaries, including “Vocabulary of Change” (2011) alongside Angela Davis. From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, in Nashville, and in the early ’90s he was Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political candidate, David Duke. He graduated from Tulane University in 1990 and received antiracism training from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, in New Orleans. He is also the host of the podcast, Speak Out with Tim Wise.