Between Barack and a Hard Place

Between Barack and a Hard Place: Challenging Racism, Privilege and Denial in the Age of Obama (quotes/idea)

By Tim Wise

            There were three main ideas that I thought were really important and interesting in this video. One was the idea that 142 million white people believe that they have 4 or more black friends which is 3/4 of the white people of America. However there is only 35 million African Americans in the US and half of them said they have a white friend. He said that it was absolutely impossible that all of them were telling the truth! They weren't necessarily lying but they might not be as close as they think. I thought that this was very interesting. In my high school there weren't many African Americans, and the ones that were there were mostly in lower level classes so I never really interacted with them. There were two though that were very bright throughout high school and ended up being some of my close friends that I did see and have over my house. Going back to the video though, he talks about how most schools do put African American kids in lower leveled classes because they believed they were low leveled learners due to their race. This idea connects with An Indian Fathers Plea by Lake. In this reading the same thing occurs. The child is Indian and is seen as a slow learner basically due to his race. It is still a problem in our society today but most people don't see it. 

         Another idea that I thought was very important that was said by Wise, "Job applicants with white sounding names, they just think you are white. They don't know you yet, if they think you might be based on your name you have a 50 percent chance for getting called back for an interview than with black sounding names even when all the qualifications are the same. Same years of experience, same education, same everything except the difference in the name. In other words merely being suspected of blackness gives you a leg down and being suspected of whiteness gives you a leg up." Basically what he is saying if that if your are black you are going to have less opportunities then people who are white. This is called white privilege. The article called White Privilege by McIntosh describes all of this and she talks about how white people have more opportunities in getting jobs, in education and many more. 

            Finally the last idea I thought was important was the study done on 625 college students over 6 weeks. The students wrote down every time they saw a racist act happening. All together they came up with 7500 racist acts in just 6 weeks! I thought that this was so crazy! I didn't realize that it happens this often and it really opened my eyes to how much of a problem it still is today. 

Here is a video about what people on the street think about White Privilege: