| | |  | Identity & Access Management | Home » » Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama | | | | | | | Description: | | Race is, and always has been, an explosive issue in the United States. In this timely new book, Tim Wise explores how Barack Obama’s emergence as a political force is taking the race debate to new levels. According to Wise, for many white people, Obama’s rise signifies the end of racism as a pervasive social force; they point to Obama not only as a validation of the American ideology that anyone can make it if they work hard, but also as an example of how institutional barriers against people of color have all but vanished. But is this true? And does a reinforced white belief in color-blind meritocracy potentially make it harder to address ongoing institutional racism? After all, in housing, employment, the justice system, and education, the evidence is clear: white privilege and discrimination against people of color are still operative and actively thwarting opportunities, despite the success of individuals like Obama. Is black success making it harder for whites to see the problem of racism, thereby further straining race relations, or will it challenge anti-black stereotypes to such an extent that racism will diminish and race relations improve? Will blacks in power continue to be seen as an “exception” in white eyes? Is Obama “acceptable” because he seems “different from most blacks,” who are still viewed too often as the dangerous and inferior “other”? Tim Wise is among the most prominent antiracist writers and activists in the US and has appeared on ABC's 20/20 and MSNBC Live. His previous books include Speaking Treason Fluently and White Like Me.
| | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780872865006
• Condition: New
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Tim Wise | | Paperback:
| 120 pages | | Publisher:
| City Lights Publishers | | Publication Date:
| 2009-01 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0872865002 | | Package Length:
| 6.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 15 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
impact of texts on black and white relationsMay 28, 2010
this book details some of the problems existing in the relations of whites and blacks in America. Much as individuals may wish to think or accept that there has been improvement in these relations, the text pinpoints the problems still present. it is a worthwhile read and an eye opener....
2 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Between Barrack and a Hard Place...May 26, 2010
An excellent read about racism which still exists in the US today. Tim Wise has throughly researched this topic and has presented it in a way that most everyone can undersatnd the topic and its ramifications to society. We are living it through all people the President of the United States, Barrack Obama.
8 of 25 found the following review helpful:
 Reverse racistMay 04, 2010
Mr. Wise has no problem assigning characteristics to white folks based purely on their skin color yet bitterly decries any who would or who have ever done the same to so-called "people of color". This type of thinking on the part of people like Mr. Wise leaves them hopelessly lost in a perceptual trap of their own making. Mr. Wise is a whole-hearted racist but I guess since he's doing it from a "good place" it's okay. Wise talks about the history of slavery as if it's endemic to people with light skin, ignoring wholesale the history of man for the last 4 thousand years. I guess Mr. Wise missed out on that chapter in "1984" about "doublethink", little realizing his own wrong-headed mastery of the concept, not to mention disingenuousness.
Mr. Wise's writing is permeated with his own obsession with race which he subsequently projects onto other white folks as their raison d'être, thus providing him with a one-in-all "debate" with any who disagree with him on immigration, Obama's policies, etc. His thesis that "avoidance of race issues that has now made it more difficult than ever to address ongoing racial bias" is a perhaps unconscious excuse for his viewing so much through a lens of race and so taking it for granted that others not only do so but must do so. A more naive and glib writer would be hard to come by. Also, as Jim Crow and white baseball leagues fade ever further into the past, a new paradigm of white racism must be made to come to the fore to account for lack of achievement by black Americans. Racism is a language and not a position of power, and in this regard, Mr. Wise is altogether fluent, being perceptually adrift of the dangers of the double edged racist sword he wields.
Mr. Wise seems incapable of making the simple connection that if a white person is responsible for what other white people do just because of the color of their skin then, similarly, any black person is responsible for gang violence. The whole concept is sickeningly racist and the reason why viewing people according to skin color so disgusting and an example of how it can go so wrong regardless of intent; one gets into discussions embarrassingly reminiscent of apartheid definitions of race in that such nonsense cuts both ways. Anyone who sets out to defend a bitter racist like Jeremiah Wright as Mr. Wise has done in a delightfully disingenuous essay from beginning to end must academically corrupt himself to do so as Bill Moyers did with the good reverend and a man who apparently buys into the "enlightened" view that people with money are spiritually bankrupt while taxi drivers are moral as a type of default setting is a child. One could read better work from a 10 year old because someone that age has not yet had their ability to reason literally overwhelmed by their biased agenda. No hopeless and helpless viewer of the wayang kulit of Plato's Cave was ever more ensorceled as is Mr. Wise by his own prose. Mr. Wise is the Ilan Pappe of American race relations in that the end apparently justifies the academically debauched, agenda driven and bigoted means. Parceling out morality and ethics according to skin color and in one direction only is bigotry piled on top of bigotry. The fact that Mr. Wise conducts anti-racism speeches and seminars around the country is Orwellian in a way that is entirely beyond Mr. Wise to grasp and in this sense he has become a master of "doublethink"; my beloved Left of the late 1960's has degenerated into the "Ministry of Truth".
In the intro to his book "Colorblind", Mr. Wise writes of a colleague, "In Bonilla-Silva's work, the term colorblind racism refers to the dominant white racial ideology of the modern era, in which whites, under the guise of being colorblind, refuse to acknowledge the reality of racism and reject any consideration of how their own racial identity provides them with privileges vis-à-vis people of color. ... many whites evade race as a topic, thereby allowing them to cast as racist anyone who broaches the subject." I am not casting Mr. Wise as a racist for broaching the subject but for his approach to it as this quote's tone of approval demonstrates. How one can buy into such a wholesale denunciation of a race by skin color and give anti-racism seminars is astounding. In fact there is no white racial ideology or question of privilege for whites; Mr. Wise would have you believe that white folks wake up and shake a money tree. In Mr. Wise's world it is too cool to celebrate black culture, a celebration of skin color as it were, but to do the same for white culture is pure bigotry and only a celebration of all whites have unfairly stolen. I am wholeheartedly sickened by Mr. Wise's use of language and it's semantic subversion and circumvention in the name of what I imagine he thinks is fair play but which in fact is pure and academically hypocritical bigotry disguised as social justice. No person is anything according to the color of their skin. It is one's individual, familial and cultural value system that determines one's course in life and not some distorted depiction of America as an Imperialist, colonialist, institutionally racist and monolithic oppressor of kitty cats, unicorns and dolphins. The idea that white people in America operate from an endemic racist default mode which they are too stupid to detect but which Mr. Wise can ferret out like Sherlock Holmes from those masses of white people he doesn't even know is an Orwellian hoot and a rather sad one. The sheer arrogance it takes to imagine one can pluck out the innermost thoughts of over 200 million white Americans and assign to them Wise's rather bizarre racism 2.0 is hard to fathom.
In an aside, it would be amusing for Mr. Wise to do the lecture circuit in Mauritania, Nigeria and Ghana among other African locales and lecture them on their innermost thoughts of why they continue to enslave hundreds of thousands of their own people; racism 2.0 or 101? I think he'll have to come up with some other reason than racism whatever he learns. Wise should sub-title his book: "Parochialism 101".
19 of 39 found the following review helpful:
 Now I know the meaning of the word "screed"...Jan 19, 2010
Wise reminds me of myself as a young fool. He shows what it means to put one's intellect at the service of advocacy instead of learning, and to love an idea so much you begin to hate any evidence that stands in its way.
He is the exact opposite of a scholar. He has no interest in asking questions, and no concern at all with the methodology used to collect answers. Wise starts with his conclusion, and whatever else happens in the pages of his text, he entertains no path that might sever him from that conclusion. For him, the gathering of evidence is not something you do before making up your mind, it's something you do afterwards, for the sake of convincing others.
Fellow readers will easily spot the symptoms of this mentality. Wise never concedes a point, and never leaves a position open to future amendment. He never says things like "the data on this point is troubling, and it remains very possible that evidence will later show..." If he doesn't like the conclusion commonly drawn from an uncomfortable fact (e.g., racial differences in IQ test results), he will deny the conclusion, deny the fact itself, and for good measure toss in a little ad hominen against anyone who doesn't deny it.
Like all meta-narrative fallacies, his method is nearly foolproof. If Obama had lost the election, he could have published this book with just a few modifications. As it happened, Obama won, but that didn't stop Wise from using this historic election as proof of racism's persistence. Think about that!
What makes a theory interesting is that it says something that might later be shown wrong. Wise, however, cannot be wrong - because whatever happens, he will use his admittedly considerable gifts to show how events confirm what he has been saying all along.
Worth reading only as a cautionary tale for the young intellectual who sincerely wants to avoid becoming a psuedo-intellectual.
1 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Tim Wise, you are definitely wise!Sep 03, 2009
This book helped come to realization of how little I knew about group dominance and suppression within the context of racism and sexism, two principles upon which our entire planet is governed!
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