Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama
Race is, and always has been, an explosive issue in the United States. In this timely new book, Tim Wise explores how Barack Obama’s emergence as a political force is taking the race debate to new levels. According to Wise, for many white people, Obama’s rise signifies the end of racism as a pervasive social force; they point to Obama not only as a validation of the American ideology that anyone can make it if they work hard, but also as an example of how institutional barriers against people...
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How Barack Obama's rise is reshaping the meaning of race in the United States today.The Washington Post - Adam BradleyThe punning title of his book, Between Barack and a Hard Place, belies the sobering material within. Wise paints a stark picture of racial inequality in the United States today…Wise's short book reads like an old-school polemic: Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" for the 21st century.
Preface 7Barack Obama, White Denial and the Reality of Racism 17The Audacity of Truth: A Call for White Responsibility 111Endnotes 150About the Author 160
\ Adam BradleyThe punning title of his book, Between Barack and a Hard Place, belies the sobering material within. Wise paints a stark picture of racial inequality in the United States today…Wise's short book reads like an old-school polemic: Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" for the 21st century.\ —The Washington Post\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyWise, a white anti-racism activist and scholar (and author of White Like Me), pushes plenty of buttons in this methodical breakdown of racism's place in the wake of Barack Obama's victory. In the first of two essays, the author obliterates the canard of the US as a post-racial society; bigotry and insititutionalized discrimination, he contends, have simply morphed into "Racism 2.0," in which successful minorities are celebrated "as having 'transcended' their blackness in some way." While racial disparities in employment and income, housing, education and other areas persist, Obama has become an amiable sitcom dad like Bill Cosby, putting whites at ease by speaking, looking and acting "a certain way"-not to mention avoiding discussion of race. In his second, more incendiary essay, Wise concludes that whites must take responsibility for racism. What the majority of whites fail to grasp, he says, is that they continue to benefit from a system of "entrenched privileges" centuries in the making, and that racism remains a serious obstacle for millions of African Americans. There's no sugar coating here for whites, nor are there any news flashes for Americans of color, but Wise bravely enumerates the unpalatable truths of a nation still struggling to understand its legacy of racist oppression. \ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \
