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23 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Over-arching messages |
- White supremacy within U.S. culture - White privilege - Who you are is defined by what you're born into - Wise's own personal insight into the affect of white privilege in his own life - Racism from a white male's perspective |
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Born to Belonging |
- Wise believe's that he was born during a difficult year, and that the events of that year affected his birth - MLK Jr. & Robert Kennedy Assassination - President Johnson not seeking re-election during the disaster of the Vietnam War - The 1968 Democratic convention that fell apart due to Vietnam protestors - Describing his own lineage and how far it traces back |
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Linking Concepts |
In class, we learned about residential segregation, which is the physical separation of two groups into different neighborhoods, for fear of property value decreasing, "ruining the neighborhood", and to keep the non minority groups to keep buying property there. Wise says he experiences race on his third day of life when him and his parents moved into an apartment complex in the Greenhill Community, which was a white and affluent area where the fear of blacks moving into it was prevalent. Wise states that even after having been completed four years ago, the complex had never seen a black tenant. Why? Because this is a prime example of racial segregation. Wise states, "... I was officially experiencing what it meant to be white". |
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Notable Quotes from Born to Belonging |
"What does it mean to be white in a nation created created for the benefit of people like you?" "We are, unlike people of color, born to belonging, and have rarely had to prove ourselves deserving of our presence to be here." "Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our lands has not been our lot." |
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Awakenings |
- Wise discusses his first encounter with a black person, and his mothers explanation of why they are called what they are called. - 1971, Wise's mother decides to enroll him into an early childhood program at a historically black land-grant college, Tennessee State University. -Integrated environment for Wise and find himself in a space where he might not be the taken for granted norm - Wise suspected his mother also did it to tweak her family and take a stance on her independence from a much more provincial life that she had led during her childhood and adolescence - 1 of only 3 non black students out of 20 |
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Awakenings cont. |
- Early 1977 learned one of his earliest lessons about race. -Bobby Orr and Vincent Perry, two of his friends, were playing catch with a football with Wise in the middle. He caught every single throw. Every time Wise intercepted the ball, they would shout "My ni**** Tim!". After that day, Tim contented himself with thinking that that meant some sort of praise, and he was "part of the club". It was 20 years late that Wise realized that they flipped the script and made him their ni***. |
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Notable Quotes form Awakenings |
"Today Tim, you are the ni***. Today, you will be the one who gets to jump and run, and huff and puff. Today we laugh, and not with you, at you. We like you and all, but you belong to us." |
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Middle Passage |
- Exactly 8 weeks left before the start of Junior High School, on July 6, Wise found out that his black friend, his best friend, Bobby Bell, since his days at TSU was shot and killed during a robbery. - His killer, Cecil Johnson, was a practitioner of racial self hatred. Johnson was given the death sentence by the state in his murder of Bell. - Studies have found that more death sentences are given when whites are killed vs. blacks, therefore this sentence was a very rare occurrence. |
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Linking concepts |
In class, we discussed the concept of tracking, placing students into different levels of academic groups based on "intelligence". This occurs during Wise's life, yet he points out that, "The school was so divided racially -- with whites, regardless of intelligence, being placed overwhelmingly in advanced classes, and folks of color, regardless of theirs, being placed in the standard classes -- that it's only a slight exaggeration to say that most days, we white kids would hardly see any black students.". |
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Middle Passage Cont. |
Wise felt lost, he wasn't sure how to "be white", but he figured he could fake it. - Wise states he never hated his time at Moore than he did on the day when Young Life, a Christian group, came to give testimonials to students on why they should join, Wise was one out of 7 or 8 Jews in the school and was being required to attend this. After listening for 10 minutes, Wise stood up and left the auditorium. When confronted by his principal and asked why he left, he said it was to call his lawyer because it was illegal to make them listen to what was going on in there. Wise accredits his courage to his upbringing and to his white privilege. |
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Notable Quotes from Middle Passage |
"In a very real sense, white racial privilege had empowered me to stand up for myself and for social injustice more broadly." "To be American and to be white is to be told in a million different ways that the world is your oyster; it is to believe ... that you can do anything your heart desires." |
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Linking concepts |
Wise began a fake ID business, he sold to his friends and classmates, even showed the crude ID's to cops a time or two, and was never charged or arrested. His friend even used an ID that didn't belong to him, with none of the physical features matching, and still got away with it. This is an example of the effect of the prison boom, or rather the lack of it, the prison boom started in the early 1970's and continued well into the 2000's, and while the police had every opportunity to punish Wise, they didn't. His race and color of his skin afforded him reprieve. |
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Higher Learning |
With Wise's low SAT and overall GPA, he thought attending Emory wouldn't be an option, but he was accepted into Tulane. His mother received a loan to pay for his tuition, using her mothers house as collateral. The house was in a "good" neighborhood, meaning it was a white neighborhood, and Wise states that, "So in a very real sense, my grandmother's house, without which I could not have gone to Tulane ... was there to be used as collateral because we were white". |
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Linking concepts |
Wise's grandmother's house was just another example of racial segregation that Wise experienced over the course of his life, but of course in a favorable way. |
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Linking concepts |
Wise gets into an argument with his mother, the topic being welfare and welfare recipients. Wise states that it is known that the majority of welfare recipients are black individuals. His mother starts a bombardment of statements about "lazy black women and their illegitimate children", etc. This is an example of stigma's black individuals have because as a result of their lower education that they receive than their white counterparts (see tracking above), they have more difficulties with job and having a decent socioeconomic status. His mother is assuming that they are all poor based on what she hears and is just lumping them all together to take her frustrations out on. |
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Notable Quotes from Higher Learning |
"Racism, even if it is not your own but merely circulates in the air, changes you; it allows you to think and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be." |
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Linking concepts |
During Wise's first month or so at Tulane, an announcement was made that the sheriff of the neighboring parish had instructed his deputies to stop any and all black males driving in the parish in "rinkydink automobiles" after dark, on suspicion of being up to no good. This is an example of driving while black as discussed in the class, or just plain old discrimination. Not only was this a problem when Wise went to school in the 80's, but it's STILL a problem today in 2017. |
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Professional Development |
Four officers charged with beating Rodney king were acquitted, as a result South Central LA had exploded. This was the boiling point for many black and latino communities who felt targeted by the police, and the riots went on for days. Wise states that most of white America couldn't understand their anger because their privilege afforded them to not have an understanding of that. Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled from his truck and beaten by four black men -- a cinder block smashed to his head. This gave the white public ammunition to attack the black community, with this being an example of their "barbarity and criminality". |
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Linking concepts |
Jimmy Jackson, despite his career as a football player and fantastic coach for the NFL, he was not being selected for a coaching gig with the league due to his skin color. This is an example of institutional racism, as no black coach had been selected before, and as a result Jackson was suing the WFLA and NFL |
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Notable Quotes from Professional Development |
"That's what it means to be white: the murderous actions of one white person do not cause every other white person to be viewed in the same light..." |
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Notable quotes from Home and Away |
"Yet racism isn't the only thing that takes practice -- so too does antiracism." "But to be black or brown is to know there is reasons to feel less than giddy about about the United States; it is to have a love-hate relationship with the nation." "The ability of whites to deny nonwhite reality, to not even comprehend that there is a nonwhite reality, indicates how pervasive white privilege is in this society." |
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Opinion |
I thought Wise did a really good job explaining things. He saw things from multiple angles and afforded his readers to see those as well. While I thought that maybe some things were too long winded or maybe didn't have total relevance to racial issues (since this is a reflection on race), I thought he did a really good job on chronologizing his life and current events at that time. White privilege is very real, I am assumed to be white by how light my skin is, and while I do identify by that, my mother is Puerto Rican which makes me mixed. But I don't even truly see myself that way because of what is afforded to me identifying as white. |
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Importance |
To me this book is a very good summation of everything we've learned put into action. It allows us to put terms and concepts to actuality and to second hand experience all that is wrong with racism in one sitting. To internalize Wise's words and what it means for society validates everything we've learned in this class. Being white I don't experience a lot of racism, and also due to how I act as a person. But this book showed how many parallels between what Wise describes in the 70's or 80's and making those connections to present day just highlights what we still have to fix as a nation. |
