 Red Room Writer Profile
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Tim Wise's Blog
May 31, 2009
- The murder today of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas confirms what many of us have long known. Among those who call themselves pro-life, there are plenty who are anything but. They are terrorists, plain and simple, who seek to subordinate women to the religiously fanatical, patriarchal dystopia of their theocratic fantasies. At best, they are pro-fetal life. They love the pre-born but could care less ...
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May 31, 2009
- For a group that regularly decries what they view as "minority" whining, and the politics of victimization, white conservatives are demonstrating a penchant for the unhinged histrionics of victimhood, virtually unparalleled in modern times. Facing a nation led by a black man, with a black wife and black children, sullying the hallowed halls of a house they long considered white in more ...
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May 11, 2009
- Envision the following, if you can.Imagine that a group of black youth were to descend upon a college town, take to an open field and proceed to smoke pot--lots of it--just as they had announced they would, at the very time they had promised to be there. Thousands of them, lighting up, virtually daring police to enforce the law and arrest them.Now, in such a scenario as this, how long do you ...
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May 4, 2009
- In ancient times, when plagues or widespread epidemics would descend upon a community, it was somewhat common for those in the vicinity of the crisis to offer up a sacrifice, presumably to the gods, in order that the problem might dissipate. Often, the sacrifice would be a lamb (thus, the phrase sacrificial lamb), or a goat, from which practice we derive the concept of "scapegoating." ...
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April 24, 2009
- As a general rule, one should regard with a mountain of salt anything to be found on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Committed to the promotion of right-wing economics and social policy, and unburdened by such mundane requirements as fact checking, the writers of the Journal's daily screeds have long taken liberty with supposedly sacrosanct journalistic principles like truth. To ...
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March 18, 2009
- As someone who writes regularly on the subject of white privilege, I am often electronically attacked by those who insist that the very notion of such a thing is a mere figment of my imagination: well, mine, and that of all the other "race hustlers" out there. "Don't you know that millions of white people are poor?" they typically ask, suggesting by virtue of the question that ...
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February 25, 2009
- It was all too predictable that Attorney General Eric Holder would be attacked for his recent remarks about race in America. To suggest that the nation is still haunted by the specter of racism is unacceptable it seems, especially since, with the election of President Obama, we have ostensibly entered the "post-racial" era.But in truth, the nation's chief law enforcement officer ...
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February 16, 2009
- Imagine if you will a 40 year old black male, coming through security at Boston's Logan airport. He's looking a bit younger than his middle-aged self, due in large measure to the clothes he's wearing: a black hoodie, jeans and sneakers. These seem, at least in his mind, to balance out the creases and crevices that occasionally appear on his face, hidden though most of them are beneath his beard. ...
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January 18, 2009
- Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, is now available! According to The Wall Street Journal, Barack Obama's presidential victory means we "can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country."According to columnist Richard Cohen, Obama as President signifies that America is a "post-racial" nation, and ...
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November 28, 2008
- Recently, after a presentation to teachers about racial bias in high school curricula, I got into a tiny spat with an instructor who objected to my using the word "holocaust" to describe the process by which nearly 99% of indigenous Americans perished from the 1400s to the present day. He also objected to the use of the term to describe the experience of Africans, forcibly kidnapped and ...
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November 25, 2008
- I have to admit, I was disappointed. After all, to hear lots of folks tell it we are now living in "post-racial America," all because Barack Obama is to become the nation's 44th president in a couple of months. So, imagine my surprise when I contacted the labor department, in search of evidence to sustain the post-racial America thesis, only to discover that blacks, Latinos, and ...
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November 12, 2008
- Maybe it's my fault. I think I write pretty clearly, but perhaps I don't. In the last few days, ever since I counseled both excitement at the post-election possibilities for progressive activism, and caution at the risk of over-exuberance, it seems as though some on the left with a heavy investment in their self-righteous sense of radicalism have allowed their personal hatred of all things ...
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November 10, 2008
- My political entry into the left (and by this I mean the real left, beyond the Democratic Party) came a little more than twenty years ago in New Orleans, when, as a college student I became involved in the fight against U.S. intervention in Central America. In particular, the groups of which I was a part sought to end military aid to the death squad governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, and ...
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November 5, 2008
- Hey everyone, I thought I should share this with you. Seeing as how I earlier penned an elegy to hope in the wake of this historic moment, ("Good, and Now Back to Work"), I thought I would take you back, a mere seven years, to see the words I penned on September 12, 2001. The contrast between that day--and the fear and dread that surrounded my every thought, and which I expressed via ...
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November 5, 2008
- Tonight, after Barack Obama was confirmed as the nation's president-elect, I looked in on my children, as they lay sleeping. Though they are about as politically astute as kids can be, having reached only the ages of 7 and 5, there is no way they will be able to truly appreciate what has just happened in the land they call home. They do not possess the sense of history, or indeed, even a clear ...
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