A Quote by Tim Wise
Precisely because white denial has long trumped claims of racism, people of color tend to underreport their experiences with racial bias rather than exaggerate them.
Related Quotes
While everyone has racial bias, I reserve the word 'racist' to describe the bias that white people have - our collective bias is backed by institutional power.
In aversive racism, the concept of racism is abhorrent to that person. But they're filled with racist conditioning and bias, as we all are. Because that conflicts with their identity as good people, they suppress it and are even more in denial about it. They are even more likely to erupt in defensiveness if it gets called out.
…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.
Incidents of racial bias and implicit bias happen to African-Americans of every social class daily in America. White people seldom notice or dwell on these as they encounter the quotidian events of their day.
In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.
So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.
The international community cannot accept that whole communities are marginalized because of the color of their skin. People of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education. Such fundamental wrongs have a long and terrible history.
The problem is there are people in this country - maybe 10%, I don't know what the number, maybe 20% on a bad day - who want this President to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn't President....They can't stand the idea that he is President, and a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn't like somebody in another racial group. So what? It is the sense that the white race must rule. That's what racism is. And they can't stand the idea that a man who is not white is President.
While having friends of color is better than not having them, it doesn't change the overall system or prevent racism from surfacing in our relationships. The societal default is white superiority, and we are fed a steady diet of it 24/7. To not actively seek to interrupt racism is to internalize and accept it.
The lessons of the past suggest that racism and resentment against people of color will continue to flourish in America as long as the history that is taught transposes the heroes and the villains. That is the unspoken truth at the heart of the nation's racial divide.
To solve the new century's mounting social and environmental problems, people of color activist and white activists need to be able to join forces. But all too often, the unconscious racism of white activists stands in the way of any effective, worthwhile collaboration. The Challenging White Supremacy Workshop is the most powerful tool that I have seen for removing the barriers to true partnerships between people of color and white folks. If the CWS trainings were mandatory for all white activists, the progressive movement in the United States would be unstoppable.
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.
Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
Racial problems can't be easily reconciled with a pat account about racism and discrimination that lets us sort of relax into saying when we finally get this right, when we get rid of racism, when we reach the post-racial society, everything is going to be okay. Well, no, because along the way here, as we've not yet been in this racial nirvana, facts on the ground have been created.
'Color-blind' comes up - people say 'Oh, I'm color-blind and therefore can't be accused of racism,' but I think that if we are going to have an honest dialogue about racism, we have to admit that people of color are having a different experience.
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