Tim Wise: On White Privilege

I am REALLY starting to like this guy. Here he speaks not only of the origins of the elite fabricating non-existent barriers between the races, he implores us to rise above the facade. "The people united, will never be defeated"!! "The people united, will never be defeated"!!

From the DVD:The Pathology of Privilege Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality

For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on the college lecture circuit with his deeply personal take on whiteness and white privilege. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues, Wise provides a non-confrontational explanation of white privilege and the damage it does not only to people of color, but to white people as well. This is an invaluable classroom resource: an ideal introduction to the social construction of racial identities, and a critical new tool for exploring the often invoked - but seldom explained - concept of white privilege.


You may view this and related videos at this YouTube link: WHITE PRIVILEGE

West Virginia's Greatest Athletes

Mainly this post is a memorial for a fallen friend, Michael Wayne Tyson whose body was found at home March 19, 2008. Here his athletic exploits are chronicled in a 1999 article appearing in the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail - juxtaposed with those of Randy Moss and others from Kanawha County, WV. Within the next week or so, a special edition of the internet radio program I host, will allow his friends to remember him in our own way!

Randy Moss is known today across the country for his football feats, but he was a pretty good basketball player, too. He won the state Player of the Year award in hoops twice.

Moss, Walker spur sports debate

Tyson, Alexander also mentioned as all-time greats

July 7, 1999

By Tom Aluise

Daily Mail sportswriter

RANDY Moss' status as the greatest prep athlete ever produced in these parts is seldom challenged. But when it is, Dunbar High School's Melvin Walker is usually the guy thrown into the ring for debate.

"Melvin was as good as there's ever been in the county,'' said Delmar Good, who coached Walker in football at Dunbar from 1963-65. "Melvin could do it all.'' "That guy could do everything,'' said former Winfield football coach Leon McCoy. "He was just a natural.''

So, just who is Kanawha County's best high school athlete of the century? Could it be anyone other than DuPont's Moss? And what about South Charleston's Robert Alexander and Charleston High's Mike Tyson? Those guys could chew gum and walk at the same time with the best of them.

Of National Lies and Racial America: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth

This article was sent to me by a friend (and co-author of Red, White, Black and Blue) to buttress our mutual assertions that our White compatriots also understand that Rev. Jeremiah Wright's warning "principalities" of impending doom is both theological and patriotic!!



Of National Lies and Racial America:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By TIM WISE

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.