Top Tim Wise Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Tim Wise Biography

Timothy Jacob "Tim" Wise (born October 4, 1968) is an American anti-racism activist and writer. Since 1995, he has given speeches at over 600 college campuses across the U.S. He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling racism in their institutions.

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Tim Wise Quotes

The denial of racism is a form of racism itself.

Denial, Form, Racism

And let's just be honest, there is no such place called 'justice,' if by that we envision a finish line, or a point at which the battle is won and the need to continue the struggle over with. After all, even when you succeed in obtaining a measure of justice, you're always forced to mobilize to defend that which you've won. There is no looming vacation. But there is redemption in struggle.

Defend, Justice, Looming, Obtaining, Struggle, Vacation

Precisely because white denial has long trumped claims of racism, people of color tend to underreport their experiences with racial bias rather than exaggerate them.

Bias, Color, Long, Precisely, White

What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.

Freedom, Justice, Routed, See, Struggle, Thinking

Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.

Culture, Embedded, Fabric, Long, Option

People of color have to do this work as a mater of everyday survival. And so long as they have to, who am I to act as if I have a choice in the matter? Especially when my future and that of my children in large part depends on the eradication of racism? There is no choice.

Children, Color, Long, Part, Work

You can't organize people if you don't love them. And however hard it can be to love the racist you come in contact with; doing so is the first obligation of a white antiracist.

Come, Contact, Justice, People, Racist, White

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

America, Ignorance, Race, Racially, White Privilege

Violating the 4th Amendment guarantees against illegal searches and seizures is not the way to solve crime problems.

Guarantees, Illegal, Problem, Violating, Way

Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

Oppression, Target, Targets, Turn, Turns

Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn’t just race that was a social construct. So was I.

Employment, Free, Identity, Race, Racism, Womb

The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet completed, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much up in the proverbial air.

Air, Change, Empower, Empowering, Growth

Antiracism is not "my" campaign. I have been doing antiracism organizing, activism, educating and writing for 20 years, in one form or another, but it's not a personal crusade. My work is part of a larger tradition, and larger effort, involving mostly people of color, and of course some white allies as well.

Antiracism, Color, White, Writing

As a writer, there are times when you have something to say, and yet no particular 'hook' upon which to hang the missive you are burning to release.

Burning, Hook, Release, Times

Stuff Happens. ’ That’s the G-rated version. That’s a bumper sticker that only a straight white upper middle class male could have made. Because anyone who isn’t straight, anyone who isn’t male, anyone who isn’t white, anyone who isn’t upper middle class knows that stuff doesn’t just happen. Stuff gets done by people to people. Nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is random. This isn’t osmosis. And so we act as if it’s this passive thing, but yet that’s not the case.

Class, Happen, Happens, Osmosis, Upper, White

If you want to know if racism is a problem in your country, you might not want to ask white people.

Country, Know, People, Racism, White

So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.

Africa, America, Children, Kids, Old, World

If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason you know that it was a trick, and it's worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then.

Prior, Race, Refer, Term, United States, White

There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them.

1950S, Good, Remember, Thinking, White

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.

Colonialism, Enslavement, Jesus, Reality, White

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