PRAISE FOR TIM WISE
“Tim Wise is one of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous critics of white privilege in the nation. His considerable rhetorical skills, his fluid literary gifts and his relentless search for the truth make him a critical ally in the fight against racism and a true soldier in the war for social justice. His writing and thinking constitute a bulwark of common sense, and uncommon wisdom, on the subject of race, politics and culture. He is a national treasure.”
—Michael Eric Dyson, University Professor, Georgetown University, and best-selling author of more than a dozen books on race.
“Tim Wise is one of those rare ‘public intellectuals’ that numerous authors have suggested are becoming extinct in this society. He is evidence that this is not the case … in my judgment, he is the very best of the white anti-racism writers and commentators working in the U.S. media today. …”
—Joe Feagin, Graduate Research Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M, and author of more than twenty books on race issues.
“(Wise’s) work is revolutionary, and those who react negatively are simply afraid of hearing the truth. …”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of History, University of Southern California, author of Race Rebels, and Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!
“One of the brilliant voices of our time.”
—Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies, Temple University, creator of the first doctoral program in African American Studies in the United States.
“Wise is the nation’s leading antiracist author/activist. …”
—David Naguib Pellow, professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Minnesota.
“(His) is the clearest thinking on race I’ve seen in a long while written by a white writer … right up there with the likes of historians Howard Zinn and Herb Aptheker as far as I’m concerned.”
—Dr. Joyce King, Associate Provost, Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, NY.
BETWEEN BARACK AND A HARD PLACE
Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama
Tim Wise
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS / OPEN MEDIA SERIES
San Francisco
Copyright © 2009 by Tim Wise
All Rights Reserved.
The Open Media Series is edited by Greg Ruggiero and archived by the Tamiment Library, New York University.
Cover design: Pollen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wise, Tim J.
Between Barack and a hard place : racism and white denial in the age of Obama / by Tim Wise.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-87286-500-6
1. Whites—Race identity—United States. 2. Whites—United States— Attitudes. 3. Racism—United States. 4. United States—Race relations. 5. Obama, Barack. I. Title.
E184.A1.W57 2009
305.800973—dc22
2008048296
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
Contents
Barack Obama, White Denial and the Reality of Racism
The Audacity of Truth: A Call for White Responsibility
Preface
On November 4, 2008, at a little after 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, television networks began announcing the big news: Senator Barack Obama had been elected 44th president of the United States, thereby becoming the first person of color to win the office in the nation’s history. Immediately, discussion turned to the historicity of the moment, and with good reason. For a nation built on a foundation of slavery, disenfranchisement, and white domination, the election of a man of color (and a man who, according to the racial taxonomy that has long existed in the United States, is indeed black) to the highest office in the land, is of no small import.
Millions of new voters, especially voters of color, had turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots for Barack Obama. In the days that followed, African American men and women who thought this moment might never happen, spoke of the pride they felt, having come so far in the past four decades, from a time when merely registering black people to vote could and did result in death. That Obama’s victory says something about the United States, and about race and racism in this nation, is hard to deny.
But what it says, and what it doesn’t say, is ultimately not determined by the feelings of voters, however joyful they may be about Obama’s victory. What Obama’s political rise says about racism in America is to be determined by an honest appraisal of the real conditions on the ground in this place, not for Barack Obama, but for approximately 90 million persons of color in all: black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, indigenous persons, and Middle Easterners. When that appraisal is conducted, the racial and ethnic reality of the United States is sure to be seen as far more complex than some might like to think. For while the individual success of persons of color, as with Obama, is meaningful (and at this level was unthinkable merely a generation ago), the larger systemic and institutional realities of life in America suggest the ongoing salience of a deep-seated cultural malady—racism—which has been neither eradicated nor even substantially diminished by Obama’s victory.
Herein I will explore what the political ascent of Barack Obama might mean, and more importantly what it doesn’t mean, about race, about the power of whiteness in early twenty-first-century America, and about America itself. This I will do in the form of two essays, the first of which argues that contrary to the beliefs of many, the evidence is clear: systemic racial discrimination and profound inequity of opportunity continue to mark the lives of persons of color, Obama’s own successes notwithstanding. Furthermore, not only does the success of Barack Obama not signify the death of white racism as a personal or institutional phenomenon, if anything, it may well signal the emergence of an altogether new kind of racism. Consider this, for lack of a better term, Racism 2.0, or enlightened exceptionalism, a form that allows for and even celebrates the achievements of individual persons of color, but only because those individuals generally are seen as different from a less appealing, even pathological black or brown rule. If whites come to like, respect, and even vote for persons of color like Barack Obama, but only because they view them as having “transcended” their blackness in some way, to claim that the success of such candidates proves the demise of racism makes no sense at all. If anything, success on these terms confirms the salience of race and the machinations of white hegemony. That 43 percent of whites voted for Obama—more than voted for any white Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964—is impressive, to be sure, but perhaps less so than many would like to think.
In