Tim Wise: Profile
By Jacob Laksin
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
June 2005

 

 

 


In the summer of 2005, Tim Wise held the post of an adjunct faculty member of the School of Social Work at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Omitting all mention of Wise’s background as a radical activist whose shrill invocations against “white America” frequently border on the racist, a Smith news release euphemistically described the hire as “provocative.”

 

A habitué on the university lecture circuit, where the services of the self-professed “anti-racism activist and scholar” fetch upward of $4,000 per speech, Wise boasts of having appeared at over 350 college campuses. His lecture topics run the gamut from tendentious endorsements of affirmative action, to diatribes against Israel and its Jewish supporters in America, to his favorite theme: empirically untenable sermons against “White America.”

 

Par for the course was a commencement speech that Wise delivered in May of 2003 at Grinnell College in Iowa. Feigning surprise that he had been asked to address the students—“it is not everyday that radical activists are asked to these kinds of things”—Wise wasted no time striking his main theme, namely, that “unity” cannot be achieved in an American society that, as he saw it, is deeply discriminatory. To this end, Wise decried American society as grossly unjust “for people of color,” Arabs and Muslims (“So long as my Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters are being profiled as likely terrorists, in ways that no white men were in the wake of Oklahoma City, we are anything but united.”), women, and “my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.” Noting that “we may not be responsible for the creation of a system of racism -- among other forms of injustice,” Wise nonetheless called upon white students to transform America’s allegedly unjust “system.” Short on specifics, facts and generally convincing arguments, Wise’s speech did not scant on anti-white invective. Any white American who failed to heed Wise’s message by working toward the radical transformation of American society was indistinguishable from a slave-owner, Wise averred. “To do less,” he informed students, “is to collaborate with the original sin, to make us no better than those who indeed did set things up this way.” Not above rebarbative moral equivalency in his campaign to discredit American society, Wise also urged his student audience to “remember that we have our own weapons of mass destruction—and I'm not talking about our bulging stockpiles of war material. Rather I refer to other kinds of weapons, weapons which kill and maim more Americans than Osama bin Laden ever has: they are indifference, apathy, fatalism, and resignation to the way things are.”

 

Upon assuming his temporary faculty post at Smith College in 2005, Wise immediately reprised his stock in trade: a sophistic condemnation of “White America.” In June of 2005, he delivered a lecture at Smith, where he had previously given a commencement address at the School of Social Work in August of 2004, entitled “Trapped in a History They Do Not Understand: The Consequences of Racial Privilege for White Americans.” According to a Smith news release, the 2005 lecture addressed the “ways in which racism and racial privilege damage the emotional, psychological, political, cultural, and economic well being of most whites, even as they provide whites with benefits (in relative terms) vis-à-vis people of color.” True to form, Wise then went on the warpath against whites, claiming that “if whites are to be brought into a larger anti-racism movement as allies to people of color,” they must first recognize that the “dysfunctionality” of American society, which, according to Wise, is beset by “institutional racism” and therefore amounts to little more than a “system that bestows unearned advantages upon whites.” (To the observation that Wise himself is a member of the “white America” he so unscrupulously lambastes, the activist has coined what he believes to be a knockdown defense. Stumping for affirmative action during a 2003 speech at Boston University, Wise announced, “Who better than a white man [to speak about affirmative action] because who better has benefited from racial preference?”)

 

To gauge the effect of Wise’s broadsides against “white America” on impressionable students, one need only consider the remarks of a freshman psychology major from Boise who attended an April 2004 speech by Wise at the University of Idaho: “It’s very important for people to experience the learning process of white privilege,” she explained afterwards, “It’s not something that’s going to be erased easily until we acknowledge that there is a problem.” A virtually identical line of reasoning can be found in Wise’s books, such as White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (2001), a mainstay on “multicultural” curricula in colleges across the country.

 

Wise has also found an enthusiastic audience among leftwing educators. Desperate for rhetorical cover for the increasingly unpopular “diversity”-minded policies they embrace, they turn to Wise. Wise, for his part, brings his distinctly radical understanding of American society and race issues to the “diversity workshops” he conducts with educators—work that he disingenuously describes as “anti-racism training.”

 

Far from atypical were two workshops Wise presided over in April of 2005, for professors at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania. One, called “Trapped in a History they do not Understand: Developing White Allies in the Face of Racial Privilege,” was designed specifically to help academic defenders of affirmative action programs “counter the statistical arguments” of its opponents, according to one news release. Wise’s task was to assist “participants in finding data to rebut these arguments and in understanding how to use these data effectively” to maintain affirmative action and other “diversity” initiatives flattering their proponents’ sense that they are affirming “equity and inclusion in higher education.”

 

The second workshop, called “Understanding Institutional Racism in an Age of "Colored-Blindness,” rehashed a classic Wiseian trope—that any attempt to root out racial preferences in favor of “color-blind” policies was fundamentally discriminatory, because it failed to account for the supposedly omnipresent racism of whites. Thus, the workshop purported to “examine how color-blindness not only fails to describe the current racial reality, but how attempting to be color blind can actually reinforce institutional racism by making it hard to see the consequences of color, both for people of color and for whites, who in terms receive privileges from this process.”

 

Wise, who holds a B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University, has also been a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he taught journalists his prescribed methods for eliminating racial bias from their reporting.