“White Like Me” is a film featuring activist and writer, Tim Wise, as he recounts his personal experience with white privilege and his conception of racism in America. When I first heard about the film, I was certainly skeptical. I’ve spent the last four or five years intentionally consuming less voices of white men and more voices of BIPOC women. I’ve specially made this choice to begin to unlearn biases and deconstruct the micro aggressions in my own life. Therefore, I truthfully wasn’t thrilled at the notion that I’d be learning about race from a white man.
However, I was captivated pretty early on when Wise described how some people still believe we live in a color blind, post-racial society – even though racism is still extremely prevalent in our society today. Racial biases still largely impact the way we view and interact with others. Sad as it is, I actually did spend much of my life believing the overt forms of racism were in the past.
It really wasn’t until my sophomore year at Baylor in 2016, during the Trump v Clinton presidential election, that I began to realize how severely out of touch this thinking is. I was TWENTY years old before I started to really learn about present-day racial injustices. Why? Because of my white privilege. I never had to think about race. I never received harsh treatment from a teacher because of my race. I was never pulled over because of my race. I was never scared for my life because of my race. I have white privilege. During the presidential campaign as racist allegations came out against Trump I was appalled. I thought to myself, “How could someone say these things?” Though, what was even worse were hearing all the people who supported Trump making these comments. I felt sickened, and that’s when I began to learn about racism and started the work to dismantle it in myself.
While Wise grew up in a predominately black neighborhood and I grew up in a predominately white neighborhood, he described his experience recognizing and combatting his white privilege. In the beginning of the film, Wise describes what it was like to witness the apartheid and engage in protests in college that fought for racial equity. He then says, “But even then, as I was becoming radicalized to struggles for equality and justice, I was largely blind to the privileges I was receiving in my own town.” I resonated with this statement deeply. While I began to learn about present-day racial injustices, and even started speaking out against them when I was twenty years old, I was largely blind to my own privilege until the last year or two.
As our country has grown more and more divided due to the racism still extremely present in our society, I’ve become more aware of the ways my own privilege has contributed to systemic racism. At one point in the film, Wise described how six out of ten people were willing to vote for a political candidate who was a proud nazi. He talks about how that’s when he realized he had to use his privilege to try and educate and change the [white] people in his own community. Moreover, I feel like I’m at a similar place in my life. Just as Wise had a political scenario that brought racism to light, we are also faced with politicians who are furthering a message of racism right now, today. We [white people] will either choose to use our privilege to combat the oppression and racism before us – acting as advocates like Wise – or we will be complicit in the problem. Personally, I’d like to be on the right side of history and choose advocacy over complicity.