The single most intelligent approach to understand is this: while individual efforts and skills are terribly important, it is imperative for European Americans to endure as a group; and that for such continued existence, in-depth organization as a group will be necessary. Bigots like Tim Wise know this and fear it. That’s why they never stop their intellectual social and political push for white genocide.
“Dear White America, Letter to a New Minority” is the latest book by Tim Wise, a specialist on white privilege, and the emergence of white resentment as power becomes shared among all citizens of the United States. You can obtain it with a minimum contribution to Truthout. Just click here.
Truthout Talks With Tim Wise
Mark Karlin: Isn’t the white “tribal identity” that exists in America an extension of the white European colonization of most of the world at one time or another? The white patronizing notion of “civilizing the savages” is sort of in the historical white bloodline that we inherited from the nation we won our independence from, the once mighty British Empire.
Tim Wise: Yes, of course, although there is also a bit of a uniquely “American” twist. On the one hand, there is little doubt that an ethno-cultural supremacist mindset drove those early colonists, who saw nothing wrong with conquering the land and bodies of others so as to expand their own power. On the other hand, whiteness – as a specific, fixed, racialized and immutable identity – didn’t really exist in Europe to any real degree.
The term white was not, in fact, used in the European context to universalize the various European ethnic and national identities: