With the dawning of the allegedly”post-racial” Obama era, I am posting this 2006 interview with anti-racist activist Tim Wise, author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2004). www.timwise.org

G&R: One of the interesting things you refer to is what you call “white blindness”, and you talk about sort of the obliviousness to white culture, white American culture, and you also talk about how being a white American means setting this sort of Year Zero for your culture and you’re not attached even to your European roots. I’ve always found it interesting—and I’ve met Irish people who’ve noticed this, too—this compulsion white Americans have to declare that somehow they’re Irish, like, to find this root thing.

And also this other phenomenon—recently there were some artifacts that were discovered that seemed to suggest that some of the earliest humans who came to the Americas may have come from Europe, and people jumped on it, like it was really important, and what was never addressed was, for one thing, these “Europeans” would have about as much to do with Europe today as the American Indians have to do with Asia today. But there’s this need to assert some sort of identity. Can you talk a little about that?

TW: I think that there’s a lot of things going on there. I mean, one, I think there’s this desire on the part of white people who—frankly, we don’t call ourselves Europeans, I mean, we may know we’re from various European places, but, for the most part, we mainly call ourselves white or we call ourselves Americans.

Or we may claim, you know, Irish ancestry, again, not knowing anything about that, 99 times out of 100, not knowing anything about the history of Ireland beyond Catholicism and beer and potato famine, and that’s the things that most Irish-Americans can tell you about Ireland—pretty pathetic.

Same thing with Italians. Ask most Italian-Americans when Italy became a country, and they can’t even tell you that it’s been within the last 130 years that it’s been recognized as an independent nation-state. Because, again, these things aren’t talked about. They’re not taught. The ethnicity and culture are lost. And so once it’s lost, two things happen:

One is that there is an attempt to justify the loss, like it’s no big deal. And usually, several generations out from the loss of culture, the loss of heritage, whatever the cause of that loss may be. And of course, I argue that in part it’s whiteness that is the cause of that loss. A couple of generations out, then the third, the forth, the fifth generation starts to sort of long for that solid history, narrative, and understanding of who they are, particularly in a culture like that in the US where there is such an emphasis on individualism and such an emphasis on standing on your own two feet. Read the rest of this entry »