White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son by Tim Wise

Author:Tim Wise
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Politics, Sociology, Memoir, Race, History
ISBN: 1593764251
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2004-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

YOU MIGHT EXPECT that organizing a campaign against a neo-Nazi would be easy, especially in the sense of settling on the proper strategy for doing so. You might think that since Nazis are pretty well reviled, pointing out Duke’s ongoing affiliations with Hitlerian types would be an easy call and a winning plan about which all could agree. And if you did think that, you would be terribly wrong, as I would learn.

Within the Coalition ranks, there was an ongoing battle about how to respond to Duke and how to combat his candidacy. On one side were those of us who came from a more progressive tradition—and in this group one could include Larry and Lance—and on the other were several of the Board members from more conservative and Republican backgrounds, who were nervous about challenging Duke on the matter of racism at all. As one would put it, “we need racists to vote against Duke too,” so, presumably, we shouldn’t make a big deal out of the fact that he didn’t like black people much. They preferred that we talk about Duke having “dodged the draft” during Vietnam, or failing to pay taxes on time, or the fact that he once wrote a sex manual under a female pseudonym.

For the most part, Lance, as Director, was able to sidestep these unprincipled positions coming from board members, aided in that process by Beth Rickey, who despite being a relatively conservative Republican, was motivated by an intense dislike for racism and a recognition that indeed that was the issue. Lance would placate the more conservative board members as best he could, but from his perspective—and all of us on staff agreed—the only ethically acceptable approach was to focus on Duke’s ties to racial hatred and neo-Nazi extremism. Yes, we might need people who were far from enlightened to vote against Duke in order to beat him, but that didn’t mean we had to ignore racism, or pretend that draft-dodging or late tax payments were equivalent to calling for the creation of a master race or separating people into their own sub-nations based on color.

There were, of course, those who thought even this approach was too conservative. I had several friends, for instance, who believed we shouldn’t call Duke a Nazi, not because he wasn’t one, but because to do so was no better, ostensibly, than for right-wingers to call those of us on the left “communists.” It was, to their way of thinking, no better than red-baiting. They preferred that we simply rebut Duke on the issues: explain why his claims about welfare recipients were wrong, why his stance on affirmative action was mistaken, why his perspective on immigration flawed. One friend and colleague even said that the answer was to just go into the union halls and tell working class white guys that black workers were their brothers and sisters, and they should recognize that all of them were being manipulated by the ruling class. Sure. Simple. Just like that.

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