Summary:

In White Like Me, Tim Wise offers a highly personal examination of the ways in which racial privilege shapes the lives of most white Americans, overtly racist or not, to the detriment of people of color, themselves, and society. The book shows the breadth and depth of the phenomenon within institutions such as education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and healthcare. By critically assessing the magnitude of racial privilege and its enormous costs, Wise provides a rich memoir that will inspire activists, educators, or anyone interested in understanding the way that race continues to shape the experiences of people in the U.S. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and scholarly, analytical and accessible.

 
Two discussion sessions open to everyone in the IU Northwest community will be held in the Library Conference Center Room 110 on two dates:

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 from 10:00 - 11:30 a.m.  
and
Thursday, November 19, 2009 from 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Refreshments will be provided.

Thank you to the members of the selection committee:
Tim Sutherland, Pat Buckler,
Cynthia O'Dell, Ana Osan, Anne Balay, Latrice Booker, Richard Hug, M. Thandabantu Iverson, Karl Nelson, and Susan Zinner.


Have a great read!

Please direct questions to or 980-6946.

Sponsored by
the Office of Academic Affairs,
the IU Northwest Library,
and
the English Department.

Editorial Review:

Publishers Weekly
Activist, lecturer and director of the new Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE), Wise works from anecdote rather than academic argument to recount his path to greater cultural awareness in a colloquial, matter-of-fact quasi-memoir that urges white people to fight racism "for our own sake." Sparing neither family nor self, Wise recalls a racist rant his antiracist mother once delivered, racial epithets uttered by his Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother and the "conditioning" that leads him to wonder, for a split-second, if people of color are truly qualified for their jobs. He considers how the deck has always been stacked in his and other white people's favor: his grandmother's house, which served as collateral for a loan he needed for college, for instance, was in a neighborhood that had formerly barred blacks. Resistance to racism, Wise declares, requires support (it's better for a group to speak out against racial tracking than for one "crazy radical" to do it), and that's presumably part of what this volume means to provide. And while Wise sometimes falls victim to sweeping judgments—the act of debating racial profiling, he declares, is "white-identified," because only whites have the luxury to look at life or death issues as a battle of wits—his candor is invigorating. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Related Readings:

• Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Maleby Tim Wise (Author)
• Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White by Tim J. Wise (Author)
• Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race by Frances E. Kendall (Author)
• Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege by Shannon Sullivan (Author)
• The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public by Sarah E. Igo (Author)
• What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question by George Yancy (Author)
• Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (Author), Richard Philcox (Translator)
• "Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum (Author, Epilogue)
• Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of SchoolResegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum (Author)
• A Credible Witness: Reflections on Power, Evangelism and Race by Brenda Salter Mcneil (Author), Tony Campolo (Foreword)
• Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America by Paul Street (Author)
• More than Just Race by William Julius Wilson (Author)
• Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life by Mario Luis Small (Author)
• The Great Wells Of Democracy: The Meaning Of Race In American Life by Manning Marable (Author)
• Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege by Shannon Sullivan (Author)