Prejudice In Tim Wise's White Like Me

When I was nine or so, my cousin from Baltimore came to visit. A sophomore enrolled in a 6A high school was trying to inform little ole me from rinky-dink Tongue River who has less than a hundred kids on what high school was really like. She talked about sports, student council, and the minority groups. I asked her why there was no “white” club, and I remember feeling slightly resentful that there was a “Native American” club, and a “Japanese” club, yet not a “White” club. Can you believe that? The audacity of these people! Why do we celebrate their heritage but not ours? I don’t think I thought about race again until my best friend and I were in Safeway with her four year old black cousin and a 97 year old man walked up to us and exclaimed that we were “nigger lovers” in the frozen aisle section. I figured he had to have been a strange, horrible creature, a complete alien to our open minded generation. These monumental moments ultimately fell between the cracks of my life and I never really thought about race. I heard arguments about race, I saw movies with tense social situations surrounding race, but I could never …show more content…
Everything is clear cut, black and white and as simple as right or wrong. Tim Wise’s book, “White Like Me,” describes a naive, childish (white) mindset of perfectly. “If you work hard, you’ll get ahead. If you don’t get ahead, it’s because you’ve made poor decisions. If you get arrested, it’s because you broke the law, and people who break the law are just more likely to be black” (47). I knew this because on every third Monday of January, we learned how cruel America had been to the blacks and because of Martin Luther King Jr. it had been resolved. Because it had been resolved, we are all equals to each other. If you didn’t keep up in today’s world, it’s only because you were not putting forth the effort. This all rang true, I mean this is the lesson I’ve been taught since