For this blog on the video, Between Barack and
a Hard Place: Challenging Racism, Privilege and Denial with Tim Wise; I
chose to reflect on quotes within the video.
The first quote I picked was at the beginning of the speech; “today we live in a world where people are ignoring the
issues at hand." I find this to be very true. There are so many
issues occurring in this world at this very second that nobody cares to mention
or try to fix. Problems aren’t just going to go away and I think that is many
people’s problems. Most people think, ‘well maybe if I don’t acknowledge the
problem, I wont have to think about it or see it as a problem.’ Once one-person
thinks in that way, everyone starts too. Then who is going to fix the problems
at hand? No one will.
It only takes one person to start a chain reaction, so be
that person to try and fix the problems in this world, not only Barack Obama
can fix things, the average person can too.
The second quote that stood out to me was, “if people did not want to
have the conversation about racism, they (white people) would say I’m not
racist, most of my friends are black.” This stood out to me because sad to
say but I have seen a lot of this in my life. In the town I grew up they would
throw around the ‘N’ word and other foul language, but the instant someone
would call them out on it, they would say it is okay because I am friends with
the only black kid in school. People I know would have these quick remarks to
make others believe that it is okay then. This happened way too often
throughout high school and I still see it now as these “sheltered” kids are off
at college. It is sad.
The last quote I have chosen is, “the only way would benefit from
greater equity, is that we would be forced to face the realities, that we will
eventually have to confront anyways.” I think this is important because it is
the sad truth. As individuals we like to think we are in complete control and
know our lives better than anyone else. The truth is we don’t have full control
and we don’t always know the best for ourselves. Sometimes we need that extra
help from an authority figure or someone with greater knowledge than us to come
in and teach us right from wrong. The example Wise gave about privileged kids
who have relative advantage over under privileged kids; yet they are big on
substance abuse, parent alienation etc. These are the times in one’s life that
require higher guidance to help these people face reality.
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