Contra: Tim Wise's Tiresome Racism

What is the difference between grouping individuals into races and other comparatively homogeneous groups and disliking individuals based on their supposed group affiliation?

Generally speaking, Americans, regardless of race, creed or color, tend to view ascription of racial characteristics to any individuals as racist, although this is usually not the case when members of a given race make proclamations of the properties of their race.

When I heard Tim Wise on NPR today talking about how white people were 'really' still racist and that racism hadn't gone away, my first thought, after "No shit", was that this was the kind of view that only someone immersed in an all white community, or academia (the two would tend to coincide) would hold.

People like Tim Wise don't reflect on the difference between ill treatment of individuals based on group membership ascribed to them and characterizing individuals based on their supposed group affiliation.

For instance, Tim Wise maintains that white folks want to deny their racism. This, of course, is a negative statement about a race of people.

In another article, Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth: Of National Lies and Racial America, whose title promises a rant written by one who lacks confidence in anyone listening to him, we are told that indignation does not suit white folks.

Although it is just a device to delve into his main article, this is also a characterization, if not a stereotype, of a race.

I, who am on the lighter side of whiteness, am quite suited towards indignation, not to mention outrage and bitchy sniping.

What I have noticed about many Americans, is that we are extra ordinarily focused on race, and are also all part of the same culture.

The children and grandchildren of immigrants here become irreversibly Americanized. My Vietnamese cousins, who came here as teenagers or younger, do not very much resemble contemporary Vietnamese, in anything but facial features and skin tone. The Koreans, Indians, Chicanos and Chinese kids I grew up with never confused people born here with recent immigrants. The recent immigrants were often mocked and made the subject of many funny stories. In high school, they were called fobs, which stood for Fresh Off the Boat.

White Americans, like me and Tim Wise, have all sorts of things in common. Like, we both probably need sunblock more often than black people.

But me and any given person of any given shade, from albinos to the darkest Africans, might have all kinds of things in common.

One thing all humans, regardless of race have in common, is a lazy tendency, due to brain limitations probably, to fail to distinguish between groups and individuals, large scale commonalities and specific instances.

For academics like Tim Wise, the important things is getting up a convenient group label with which to display their aggression, rather than using objective analysis to get things done.

Selections From The Epiphalaries of D. Mckenzie Taylor

How can a man sit down to rewrite, without a steady source of drink ready, be it honey-ginger tea, milk tea, coffee, chrysanthemum tea, or even green tea, which gives me a tummy ache?

To have a good morning crap, while friends or guests dwell about, requires more inner comfort than standing up to a gang of angry men.

When a thing is made an enemy, it thereby acquires allies.

A million things together form a mirror, when you want to reveal someone, throw them a thousand different cues.

expanding to higher realms