Aggie Almanac; 157; Big Read and Racism in the U.S.

Coming up on Aggie Almanac, NMSU gets behind a nationwide project to encourage people to read. I wrote in tears, came to my eyes, I yearned for my mother, and at the same time I understood that she had sent me to this place. And he came to campus with a message about racism. Privilege says you don't have to think about race, you don't have to think about anything, you don't have to see yourself through the eyes of others, you don't have to view yourself in an accurate light, but that can be dangerous. Hi, I'm Gary Worth, and thanks for watching Aggie Almanac. There's nothing quite like a good book, right? Well, actually, getting people to read these days, especially young people, isn't always so easy, and that's why NMSU took part in a nationwide initiative to encourage and celebrate reading, and they did it by focusing on the work of a well-known New Mexico author.

I sneaked around the back of the school building and standing against the wall, I tried to eat, but I couldn't, a huge lump seemed to form and my throat and tears came to my eyes. On a late afternoon, on the second floor of the NMSU library, three people gathered to read. I had tried hard to learn, and they had laughed at me. I had opened my lunch to eat, and again, they had laughed and pointed at me. The pain and sadness seemed to spread to my soul, and I felt for the first time what the grown-up scholar, Teresa de la Rida. It's just one of a number of small groups across the region, all doing the same thing. We're taking part in what's called the nationwide big read, a month-long effort designed to celebrate and revitalize reading, and to bring community members together to discuss one particular novel. In our case, a very new Mexican novel, Bless Me Ultima, my author Rudolfo Anaya. I wanted to run away, to hide, to run, and never come back, never see anyone again, but

I knew that if I did, I would shame my family name, that my mother's dream would crumble. I knew I had to grow up and be a man. It's a coming-of-age story about Antonio, a young boy growing up in post-World War II, New Mexico, and his loss of innocence as he approaches maturity. What's he excited about? That, like, you finally, feels beneath, like, there's freedom. Freedom, he doesn't experience it at his home. But the novel is also a story about tradition, education, faith, and doubt, good, and evil. Issues that are colored by the presence of an old woman who comes to live in Antonio's home, a traditional healer they call La Grande, or Ultima. And I'd be like, I was in desperate straits for anything to pull me out of my despair. A long comes a book called Bless Me Ultima. It's a book that changed the life of Jimmy Santiago Baca, an inmate turned poet, who helped

kick off the local big read effort at a ceremony in Los Cruces. And when I began to read that book in prison, the world, the universe, the galaxies all opened up, I no longer felt myself a victim, I felt myself, I had a beautiful culture. Baca said reading in prison changed him. But it was Anaya's novel that inspired him to write, because it was the first book he could actually relate to. I'm somebody, Antonio has eyes like me. He's kind of past like me. He lives in a jungle like me. My will eat that's like his albulee, but where's even the culote, there's an owl in his book. So when he got out of prison, the first thing he did was visit Anaya in Albuquerque to thank him. This is a book that will touch generations after generation after generation because it's about a little boy trying to find his way in the world, trying to find his role

in the community, trying to find his voice. And that's something that everybody in this room has been doing since we were born. We've all been trying to find our voice that can show the world the best of who we are. And this book get it for me when I'm most needed. Which is the whole idea behind the month-long reading event, to get people interested in books that could change their lives. The whole reason that the NEA cooked up the big read is because, well, we came out with a study a few years ago that nobody, at least of all us, would have wanted to publish called Reading at Risk, which said that basically there is no segment of the American public that isn't reading less than it used to, and among some segments of the public, teenage guys, in fact, it's even worse than that, it's just terrifying. The NMSU Library received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to

spearhead the big read effort in Los Cruces. With their partners, they sponsored not only book discussion groups and talks, but also readings, contests, music, and films, we'll be right back. Privilege says, you don't have to think about race, you don't have to think about anything, you don't have to see yourself through the eyes of others, you don't have to view yourself in an accurate light, but that can be dangerous. You only raise it, you're best able to do it, you're best able to do it. Welcome back. New Mexico prides itself on its diversity, but diversity can bring with it challenges, not the least of which is racism, and racism is something Tim Wise writes and speaks about all the time. This nationally known anti-racist writer and activist came to NMSU to take part in the Diversity Speaker Series, sponsored by Black Programs. If you listen to a lot of people tell it in this country, you might think that the issues that I'm here to talk about this evening weren't really issues.

Wherever Tim Wise goes, controversy often follows. You can be white and mangle the language, it's no big deal, but you can't be a person of color and do that. Because this anti-racist writer and activist talks about things that can make people uncomfortable. When people say, well, it's not that we're against immigrants, we just want them to follow the rules and plants nonsense. It's not about illegality because we could solve the illegality problem like that. As you see, he doesn't mince words. He has his detractors who accuse him of reverse racism. There are those in his audiences who listen quietly, seemingly unconvinced, and others who seem to click with every word he says. But love him or hate him. Most everyone would admit he's articulate and courageous when he gets up in front of audiences like this one at NMSU and talks about what he calls institutionalized white privilege

in the U.S. and denial in this country about racism. I think most people are good, but I also think that good people don't often see things that we're not asked to see and not required to see. White people don't have to know people of color's reality. I don't have to know what people of color are experiencing because I'm not going to be tested on it. White folks have always been able to live in that bubble of unreality as relates to other people's experiences. That denial isn't just a recent phenomenon after all it's an intergenerational problem. Wise is no stranger to college campuses. He's given talks at more than 400 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia. He also provides anti-racism training for school teachers, physicians, corporate leaders, law enforcement officials, and government offices on how to dismantle racism in their institutions. And he's written two books.

One is called White Like Me, Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, the other Affirmative Action, Racial Preference in Black and White. He came to NMSU as the third and final speaker in the Black Programs Diversity Speakers series, where he provided this audience with examples of how Americans continue to avoid issues that deal with racism. According to research throughout the decade of the 1990s, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2004, looking back at that 10-year period from 1991 through 2000, according to that research, there were nearly one million Black folks in this country. In that decade, who died, who would not have died, had their access to high-quality health care been the same on average as the typical White American. How is it not an issue that according to a Justice Department report from just three years ago, which received also almost no media attention? Black and Latino males are three times more likely than white males to have their cars

stopped and searched for illegal narcotics, even though white males, according to the same study, are four times more likely to have illegal narcotics in our car. These presidents talk about the job market, but they don't talk about the study from three years ago from the economics departments at MIT and the University of Chicago, which found that persons with white sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called back for a job interview than people with black sounding names, even when all the qualifications are the same. Now is it not an issue as we talk about immigration that only 45 percent of the persons undocumented in this country, and that is at the highest possible level, that only 45 percent of the undocumented are Mexican, but 75 to 80 percent of those who get deported are, that's not random, that's not coincidence, that didn't just happen by osmosis or by the lunar tides or something, there's a reason for that. And one reason, as wise, is that most Americans are in denial about racism, why sites numerous

surveys which show that while most black and Hispanic Americans believe racism is a serious problem in the US, the majority of whites do not, and throughout our history, never have. Only 6 out of 100, 6 percent believe that it was still a significant national problem, just to give you an idea of how bad that is, I'd have you compare it to a survey taken three years before that one, in which it was found that about 12 percent of white people believe that Elvis Presley might still be alive. That means that white folks are twice as likely to believe that Elvis might actually still be alive. Then we are to believe what people of color tell us they experience on a regular basis. That is denial of a most profound nature. A kind of unconscious denial, he says, that is the result of privilege that many people don't know they enjoy. It's privilege. We're assumed to belong, no matter where we find ourselves.

Those of us who are white, we can bet that if we're on a college campus, nobody's looking at us like we didn't really belong there. Somehow the special preferences might have been made, strings might have been pulled for us, but people of color regularly having to prove that they belong because so oftentimes no matter how brilliant they may be, their view is only being on the campus because of affirmative action because of some special preference given. That privilege, he says, is a dangerous name for everyone in society, which is why everyone wise says, should become aware of racism and fight it. The other problem about privilege is that it creates this bubble of unreality around people who have it. What I mean is that when we don't have to think about race, which is like the biggest privilege of all, I'm not having to think about this regularly, the problem is we don't then get a very good and clear view of ourselves the way other people see us. We don't have to look at us the way other people do, we get sort of distorted lens. So privilege says, you don't have to think about race, you don't have to think about anything, you don't have to see yourself through the eyes of others, you don't have to view yourself in an accurate light, but that can be dangerous.

In addition to his other work, Tim Wise makes lots of radio and TV appearances, he's been on programs like Polazons now on CNN, ABC's 2020 and MSNBC Live and he joins us now here on CARE WG's Aggie Almanac, so it's a real privilege to have you here on our program. I hope you feel that way when we're done because I got to tell you most of the shows that I've been on have ended up being canceled 2020 is about the only ones, I'm going to try not to get you, I'm sure it wasn't my fault, but I'm going to try to make sure you stay on the air, I'll write whatever letter I have to to make sure, all right, let's make that a goal. Let's do that, let's do that. Let's do that. I guess my first question for you is a little bit about your background and how someone like you, I guess, born and bred white in Tennessee, ended up with a career lecturing about racism. Right, well I think actually for those of us who are white and grew up in the South, the issue of race is something that, especially if you're 35 or older and I'm 39 as a last month, very rarely will you find someone that age in the South even if they're white who doesn't know that racism is an issue.

So you sort of grow up, it's a language that you speak, you understand the history and you understand the contemporary reality, and that doesn't mean that we're all on the same page if we come from the South goodness, we're definitely not, but we know that it's an issue, we know it's been an issue. So I grew up in a family where the Civil Rights Movement was very much a prominent part of that household, my parents weren't activists, but they were actively supportive of the movement. And you know when you're raised in that environment and you go to integrated schools, actually the very first school I went to was a preschool, a historically black college, most of my peer group, most of the early teachers that I had were black women. So you just have a very different peer context and I think it also gives you a different insight into going to let's say a black preschool where I was in the distinct minority. You get a sense of what it means to be the other and you realize that it's obviously extremely important to figure out how to negotiate the tensions that exist between folks of color and folks who are white. Well this was obviously important enough to you growing up to make a career out of it. Well it wasn't necessarily intended, I mean when I went away to college I don't think this was my intention, in fact I know it wasn't, didn't know exactly what I was going

to do like a lot of folks but I went to school in New Orleans, I went to Tulane University and New Orleans as a city both before and certainly after Katrina was and is an apartheid city in so many ways. The racial division there was far worse than anything I had experienced or seen in Tennessee and Tulane of course was this sort of white plantation in the midst of what was once a black city. Now it's not so much a black city since Katrina but going to school there and seeing the level of racial disparity sort of pushed me in that direction. But even then as I got out of college I figured I'd go to law school, maybe go to grad school but that was 1990, 1991, early 90s and at that time it was sort of propitious timing for me because David Duke, lifelong Nazi, white supremacist organizer, former clan leader was running for U.S. Senate at that time in Louisiana then running for governor. I had good friends, won a history professor, another grad student friend of mine who started the organization to combat David Duke and I got on with that organization was the associate director. He began to realize as I did, you know, Duke almost won the elections. I mean he got 60 percent, got 60 percent of the white vote and when I as a white person

saw 6 out of 10 white people voting for somebody who they knew was an overt racist, this was not a secret, it was well known. It sort of triggered something in me, you know you realize that 6 out of 10 people who marked that census form the way you do were willing to vote for a Nazi and then you have to ask yourself what really distinguishes you from them. The fact is I'm not a better person, I'm not any more moral, I'm not any more of a decent human being, I just happen to have some experiences growing up that they didn't and they had some that I didn't and it led them in their direction, led me in mind, it's not something I could be smug about but it's something that I had to take responsibility for was dealing with racism in my white community. And now you go around the country really sharing this experience and experiencing more of when it comes to racism and this country and what are you finding as you go around the country, where are we today with racism? It's very hard to tell, I mean I've been in 48 states, actually I guess 49 now and everywhere you go you see racism play out a little differently, it plays out differently in New Mexico than it does in Tennessee which is different than the way it plays out

in New York but what you see in all of those areas is in my opinion the biggest problem is really white denial and what I speak about is that sort of white denial, it's not just the racism as we think of it as sort of overt hostility, I think really the most pernicious form of racism today is the way in which the vast majority of us who are white just refuse to talk about the issue, we dismiss the issue, recent survey found that the distinct minority of whites believe that discrimination against people of color is still a prevalent issue whereas the vast majority of people of color believe that it is when you have that level of division and when you have white folks in effect saying no we know your life better than you do so you folks of color who think that your experience in racism you're basically crazy, I mean that's what large numbers of white folks are saying to me that's a form of racism, it's not the same as calling someone a slur, it's not the same as hanging in news which we've also seen in recent months but it is essentially saying that we are more capable of interpreting reality than you are, that we who are white know the way the world works and you guys who think there's racism you're exaggerating, you're playing

the race card, you're hypersensitive to me that level of dismissiveness is the biggest problem and I see that everywhere I go. It seems as if we've come to the conclusion or many of us in this country that we've solved the race problem, then they're done that, fixed, we're moving on, you're saying we haven't. Well you know what's disturbing is white folks have always thought the problem was less than it was. You know in retrospect if you were to ask any white person in America, I don't care how conservative, whether or not let's say black folks had equal opportunity in 1962. Nowadays everyone would say no, oh my goodness 45 years ago no it was terrible but what's interesting is if you go back and look at the Gallup polls from 1962, you find that the vast majority of white folks then said there was no problem. Nowadays we can say there was because it's no sweat off our back to admit it but at the time white America did not see a problem. What that says to me is that we've never been very perceptive and I don't think it's because we're stupid, it's not because we're mean and nasty people but I think when you're the majority, when you're the dominant group, you don't have to know other people's reality. They have to know yours, they have to study it in school, they have to know it in the

political system but the dominant group can pretty much ignore everybody else and get away with it. I think that's what allows the division to remain because we who are white get to stay in a bubble where we don't really know how the world works and then we get shocked by something like Katrina. White folks all over the country, oh my god how could this happen? Well people have color have been moved around ever since this country began, since before the country began. Being abandoned, being left behind, being abrooted, that's the story of black folks, it's the story of Latino, it's the story of Native peoples, it's the stories of many Asian Americans who are brought here forcibly and made to work on the railroads, it's not new but to those of us in the majority that was shocking and unfortunately that's because we're very much removed from other people's reality. Black folks in New Orleans weren't shocked, they were shocked that the cameras were on but that was about the only thing different. So many things I want to ask you about, I don't know which way to go but affirmative action which I know you have talked about a lot and you've written about a lot and affirmative action is another one of those issues where we're saying let's undo a lot of that we don't need it anymore. You don't believe we're done, we should be done with affirmative action.

Well we hardly ever did it, I mean to be honest, affirmative action was only really being enforced in this country for about 12 years from the late 60s to the late 70s or maybe 80-81 and since that time the Supreme Court and the different circuit courts and various political administrations have backtracked or launched all out assaults on affirmative action so that today not only do most companies not have to do very much but the agency whose job it is to analyze whether or not companies even comply with affirmative action only have enough monitors to check up on those companies once every 46 years that's how small their budget is. So in effect there's no deterrent to discrimination. Affirmative action is essentially dead because it's been allowed to die there's still a lot of anger around it and a lot of animosity and white folks who believe that you know the reason they didn't get so and so a job reverse racism. But the reality you know is that if there was all this reverse discrimination we wouldn't see people of color with two times the unemployment rate of whites three times a poverty rate less pay less income even when they have the same qualifications.

We wouldn't see for example white students actually having a better chance of getting into their first-choice school than black students black students are the least likely to get into their first-choice college so all the rhetoric about reverse discrimination and all the preferences is really hollow it doesn't fit with the reality but there's been a 20-year effort on the part of the right to whip up hysteria about so-called reverse discrimination as there is now with the immigration issue and it's really about deflecting people's attention from the larger subjects which are that college education is becoming unaffordable for most everyone and job opportunity is diminishing and we're moving into an economy where we rely on low wage or moderate wage temporary labor. Instead of dealing with that you know we blame certain subgroups for the economic conditions or educational conditions that we find ourselves in. All right I want to back up just a little because your topic here at NMSU is called Beyond Diversity, Challenging Racism in an Age of Backlash. I would like to know what you mean first of all by Beyond Diversity. Well you know colleges have been doing diversity programs for years and they all do them there's

somewhat obligatory and a lot of times what those end up being even with the best of intentions of the organizers is they end up being you know about what Joy Leary who's anti-racism educator in Portland calls a food fabric and festival so we basically learn about the different cuisines of the world right we learn what clothing people wear and we learn how they celebrate their special holidays but we don't deal with the differences in power and so what I want us to talk about I mean the food fabric and festivals find for kids I got a six year old and a four year old and that's where you have to start them you can't start talking to a six year old about institutional racism I get it but but when you're 16 or when you're 23 or when you're 33 you're still doing the same thing you haven't progressed so I want us to talk about racism because really when we talk about celebrating our cultural differences which is great there's one difference we ought not celebrate and that's the difference in opportunity it's a difference in power the difference in privilege the difference in position so I want us to talk about that because those are the differences that actually kill those are the differences that reduce people's opportunities and and diminish their lives so I just want us to move beyond the simple easy stuff that makes us feel good and deal with the stuff

that actually seems to matter to us so what is the stuff we need to deal with in this institutional racism and how in cities is it and where do we find it would we find it here at New Mexico State University I'm sure you would I mean you know I've been here once and it was six years ago I didn't get to stick around a lot but I haven't found a college yet I haven't found an institution in this country that doesn't practice some form of institutional racism what I mean by that is not overt bigotry I mean the kind of racism that in the job market for example leads about eight out of ten jobs never to be filled by direct competition but filled by word of mouth by networking who you know not what you know that's true in the private sector it's true in the government state educational sector people get jobs based on connections who were the folks left out of the best networks usually they're disproportionately folks of color disproportionately women of all colors disproportionately working class people of all races so there's a racial impact they are whether it's intended or not in education we know that we place far too much emphasis on standardized testing to get into certain schools even though we know that our schools are not standardized K through 12 education highly unstandardized but then we use a standardized test to determine who's going to get in and

who's not how do you give a standardized test to unstandardized students where the resources have been so disparate and the disparities been based on economics and based on race or the combination so institutional racism is the kind that operates under the radar it's the kind that doesn't require deliberate bigotry one of the things that I talk about in the speech tonight we have all these people running for president and none of them either party are talking about racism and discrimination as an issue now last year according to federal statistics was the year that had the largest number of housing discrimination complaints based on race in recorded history how can you be running for president knowing that the year right before now was the year with the worst record for housing discrimination in recorded history and no one brings it up it seems to me like that something which a leader or a would be leader would want to discuss and yet I assume the reason they don't talk about it is because they realize that for a lot of voters the majority of white voters you can't talk about racism oh we can't talk about discrimination that that would you know that that brings us down it ruins the mood it doesn't make us proud of our country and

so everybody trying to appeal to patriotism and appeal to the greatness of the country when you're trying to do that you can't talk about the downside and so these leaders end up ignoring it we shouldn't when you talk to students at universities what's their reaction usually what kind of response do you get you know the couple different kinds I mean on the one hand there is a real sense of energy and a real sense of excitement at having learned some new stuff and having maybe been given a framework for understanding the society they live in on the other hand there is some frustration too because you know we live in a sort of instant gratification culture where if we have a problem we expect a solution to be given to us so if we have a headache we take a pill we want to lose 30 pounds we get liposuction or we take some medication ally or whatever that stuff is ever the counter stuff that makes you lose weight real fast and so if I tell you about racism or somebody gives you this information about a major social problem you're naturally going to say well what giving an answer you know but the reality is that's not how social change happens if you look at any social movement not just in our history but any country's

history it's usually not the case that the person who can give you the diagnosis of the problem is also the one to whom you should turn for the answer answers are found in community they're found in struggle they're found by people who get together and spend time and lose sleep and sweat it out and civil rights movement was young kids mostly getting together in basements of churches for eight and ten and twelve hours all through the night trying to figure out what they were going to do Dr. King wasn't telling them what to do Med Grevers wasn't telling them what to do Fred Shuttle's worth wasn't telling them what to do Rosa Parks wasn't telling them what to do these were just average everyday people and so when the so-called experts whether they're movement leaders academics educators or writers like myself come in we need to avoid the tendency to look for answers from that person we need to say wow here's a problem that's been identified here's our framework for looking at it let's us get together and figure out what to do that's the thing I see among young people is there's an impatience which is great but you have to learn how to sort of control that and focus that great note for us to end on I could go on with this

forever it's just been fascinating but Tim wise thank you so much and I guarantee you this is going to make it on the air well good good hopefully you'll stick around for a long time thank you but thank you well we're going to wrap things up with a look at something extra special going on at NMSU are amazing Aggie of the week for two decades NMSU civil engineering professor Ricardo Hacquez has served as a mentor and a role model for hundreds of students and as director of NMSU's Louis Stokes Alliance for minority participation he's helped students who are underrepresented in the fields of science technology engineering and math to succeed his efforts have been noted at the highest level Hacquez was one of just ten people in the nation honored at the White House with a presidential award for excellence in science math and engineering mentoring Hacquez says one-on-one mentoring is the only way to encourage underrepresented students to stay in the field and do in part to his efforts over the past fifteen years the percentage of bachelor's

degrees awarded to such students has increased from twenty four to forty two percent now if you'd like to nominate an amazing Aggie or have any comment about the show call us at six four six two eight one eight or send an email to Aggie Almanac at yahoo dot com and that's our show for this week I'm Gary Worth thanks for watching