Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority

Description

The old notion that 'being white means never having to think about it' is being challenged on all fronts, as whites are increasingly having to wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. In Dear White America Tim Wise directly addresses white people's growing concerns about the demographic, political, and cultural shifts displacing their power and privilege.

Constantly on tour, Tim Wise is one of the most prominent anti-racist essayists, educators and activists in the US. He is regularly interviewed by CNN, Tavis Smiley, Tom Joyner and Michael Eric Dyson. His essays are published on Alternet, Counterpunch, Z-net, Black Commentator, the Black Agenda Report and the Daily Kos. His blog is widely followed at www.timwise.org

"Wise, an educator and racial justice advocate, presents an analysis of race relations and ideology in the contemporary US, as a letter addressed to its 200 million white citizens. As demographic trends portend a more colorful United States, and as its first black president begins a second term, Wise confronts the white fear of losing cultural hegemony, on the one hand, and the politics of resentment that has been both a real and contrived source of right-wing power in national politics. The book is aimed at a reasonable audience who may describe themselves as 'not a racist,' but whose assumptions about race and social power make them underestimate or misrecognize racism's persistence in the US. There are notes and citations in the end, but no index."--Book News "The leading white anti-racist commentator in the United States, Wise has long been renowned in academic and activist circles for his nuanced yet pointed indictments of white supremacy's grip on our nation. In this pithy, almost-pocket-sized book, the popular notion that Barack Obama's election as president is evidence of a 'post-racial' United States is dissected and disrupted. In fact--as Wise points out many months in advance of the November election--an increasingly multiracial country that may have led many whites to have 'discovered our inner libertarian, and decided that government intervention was bad' was evidence of both a diversifying electorate and one in which race is still a critical indicator."--Fellowship Magazine "In his latest, he cuts to the core of white fears, using his white authority and white privilege to tell other whites that yes, it's time for you to deal with yourselves and the new American reality you now inhabit."--Drums in the Global Village