White Like Them, Black Like Me

In the documentary "White Like Me," Tim Wise provides personal accounts examining white privilege and his conception of racism in American society through experiences with his family and in his community and is based on the book "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin.

He recounts how he learned to respect black authority figures when his parents opened him up to go to a predominantly black school and, even so, was still exposed to racial divide at a young age. He would march and protest along with his black counterparts and begin to realize how blind he was to the privileges he was receiving in his own town and was asked the question, "What had you done to address racism in his college town?" This shocked him and allowed him to open his eyes to what his purpose and motivation really was and caused him to check his own privilege.

This showed just one account of how whites can take their privilege for granted and the act of being blind to privilege is damaging and dangerous. In Griffin's novel, "Black Like Me," he renounced how he was treated not like a second class citizen, but like a tenth class citizen, when he painted himself black to fully engulf what it felt like to be black. Wise sparked the conversation that stated, "Instead of asking what it means to be black, instead ask what it means to be white." This shined light on the fact that being white was made easier than being non-white.

Agricultural workers and domestic workers in private homes were denied insurance because in order for FDR to pass the Social Security Act, he had to exclude African Americans. This was also a similar case in the establishment of the GI Bill, when African American veterans didn't gain access to even of the government assistance money and it only benefited white veterans. As time went on, in 2008 President Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States and touched the hearts of African Americans whos lives were threatened just a few years earlier when they tried to go vote. The broad amount of the United States assumed that because there was now a black president that racism was no longer an issue, predominantly whites, but failed to gain the understanding that even with a black president the median wealth of white families was still 20 times greater than the median wealth of black families, and until racism was fully confronted that the United States would never reach a post-racist state.