“Vanilla Brother” delivered some chocolate thunder to a packed gym of squirming, fidgeting students and staff. Tim Wise warned his audience that meaningful conversations about race can be uncomfortable.
Wise, a self-described “anti-racism” activist, writer and lecturer, shook up his Southwestern College crowd and encouraged people of all races to take an honest and clear-eyed look at our society.
“In the 25 years that I have been doing civil rights and anti-racism work, (I have noticed that) we have a hard time acknowledging truths when it comes to race,” he said.
Demagogues like Ben Carson and Donald Trump continue a tradition of bullying minority groups, he said. America’s Hispanic and LGBT communities have been in the cross hairs recently. Wise reminded the gathering that most Americans are immigrants and that our ancestors did not come here on a whim.
“If your people had been winning they would have stayed the hell put!” Wise said. “Winners don’t leave. You might not want to brag about your family coming over on the Mayflower.”
Although the audience roared with laughter, the seriousness of his message was not lost.
“Some of them were convicts and they could not make it where they were, so they left,” he said. “I’m not trying to say that to be mean, there’s no shame in that. In fact, not only is there no shame in it, there’s something beautiful about that, because that was an act of resistance, getting up and saying no more of this. On the same note, when Mexicans do it, there is no difference.”
Wise told students that now is the time for action.
“We can spend a lot of time convincing people there’s a problem or we can just get busy on the problem that we know exists,” he said. “The best way to really raise awareness is to get busy and work on it.”
Not all students were entirely in Wise’s corner. SWC student Hinsseenee Regassa said she respected Wise because he has done a great deal of work for Black Americans, but she said these were conversations people of color need to have with each other first.
“Why does it always have to be a white audience listening to a white speaker?” she said.
“Why can’t it be a white audience listening to a person of color who actually lived the experiences?”
SWC student Steve Whiting agreed.
“The problem of oppression is like a tree,” he said. “You can cut the branches and leaves, then think you have solved the problem, but the problem remains within the tree. You have to get rid of the deep-rooted tree in the first place to find out the causes of systematic oppression and go from there.”
Wise, whom Cornel West dubbed “Vanilla Brother,” has spoken in all 50 states and more than 1,000 universities and colleges. He is an author and frequent guest on television news and public affairs programs. He led an effort by Tulane University students in the 1980s to pressure the university into divesting in apartheid South Africa. He was also a leader in the campaign to defeat Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when the white supremacist ran for governor of Louisiana and the U.S. Senate.