Wise- Between Barack and a Hard Place

This week with watching the interview about Wise’s book “Between Barack and a Hard Place,” I was enlightened on Wise’s view of racism in our society. He argues that racism has not changed over the years and we keep repeating this vicious cycle that we somehow need to escape.  He talks about Obama getting elected. We all thought now that we have a black president things were going to change. Like we talked about in the last article; change doesn’t happen overnight. Wise talks about racism 1.0 and that is the blatant racism that anyone can point out. Then there is something Wise is calling racism 2.0. This is a bit harder to see. It the kind of racism that makes us feel comfortable. It is as Wise says “carving out suggestions,” of the people of black or brown color that we feel comfortable with. In this case he is talking about Obama. He talks about something we mentioned in class; Wise talks about breaking the glass. We need to break out of this cycle and look at Obama getting elected as steps forward in the right direction.

With the website of Brown vs. Board of education it talks about the history. It mentions moments in history that were honored for their drive forward for racial equality. He also talks about with comparison to the B VS. B link that a white person back then would have stated that a white child had the same education opportunities as a black child which the link and ourselves from history know are not true. White classrooms and black classrooms were run and set up very differently. We need to acknowledge that racism is around us and it hasn’t just gone away. We need to break the glass and make racial equality a reality.  This shows we still have some work to do, because there are annoying, stupid, close minded people like this fighting the system and going against equality.

In class I would like to talk more about the reasons for Obama becoming President and how many more acts will it take to wipe out racism once and for all. Also why people need to be racist in the first place.