To define yourself, ultimately, by what you’re not, is a pathetic and heartbreaking thing. It is to stand denuded before a culture (whiteness) that has stolen your birthright, or rather, convinced you to give it up. And the costs are formidable, beginning with the emptiness whites so often feel when confronted by multiculturalism and the connectedness of people of color to their various heritages. That emptiness then gets filled up by privileges and ultimately forces us to become dependent on them. We are not ourselves anymore, but the overpaid, overfed, overstuffed slaves to a self-imposed, self-chosen system of cultural genocide….I can’t help but think that at the end of the day, we, too, got played.
To define yourself, ultimately, by what you’re not, is a pathetic and heartbreaking thing. It is to s…
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.