Between Barack and a Hard Place

   After viewing “Between Barack and a Hard Place”, I couldn’t help but think about some of the things the speaker brought up and its relation to the readings.

    For example, Johnson’s article basically states that those who have white privilege are blinded to the fact that they have white privilege and they may never realize it. It took Tom Wise, the speaker, years after college to look back and realize that for the first 7 or 8 years of his schooling, he was treated differently than his friends and peers of other races.

   He goes on to tell an anecdote of a teacher who treated him differently because of his association with black children. This teacher disliked the two races mixing in terms of friendship and Wise was one of those kids that went against her beliefs. This connects to the Kozol reading and its main idea of the impact of institutions on individuals. The teacher was the older generation who had been teaching for a long time, back when segregation was still prominent in society. The institution of segregation left lasting impacts on society that still existed in 1979, when Wise was in fifth grade. Although segregation was long gone by this point legally, the institution still existed and affected not only children of color, but also those that were their friends. But at the same time, as Wise points out, once his teacher leaves, those institutions still exist, they just might not be as obvious. They still exist today, in which different institutions affect people differently.

    The last reading that I will point out in connection to Wise is Delpit’s ‘Silenced Dialogue’. Wise claims that if you have a white sounding last name on your job application, even if you aren’t white, you have a 50% better chance at getting called back for an interview than someone with a black sounding name, even if the qualifications are the same. As Wise points out, “Being suspected of blackness gives you a leg down while being suspected of whiteness gives you a leg up.” People of color are even quoted higher interest rates, even though their credit history is functionally the same. Larry Elder talks about race and its impact on finances in his article http://www.creators.com/opinion/larry-elder/blacks-banks-and-institutional-racism.html as well as CNN Money http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/09/real_estate/zillow-mortgage-white-black/index.html. This connects to Delpit because people of color are ultimately being silenced to a certain degree because of the color of their skin. The difference in your chance of getting a job interview should be based off of your qualifications, not your skin tone, and yet it happens. The same with interest rates, mortgages, loans etc. Even back when Wise was in school, he talks about how he wasn’t a very smart student, and yet he remained in the upper level classes and never moved down while the kids of other races, who were better students, always remained in the lower level classes and never moved up. The fact that race gets in the way of a person’s education and lively hood isn’t right, and yet it continues to happen because people are slow to change and are slow to realize what is really going on in our society today. Racism is like smoke and mirrors, we can easily be blinded from it and led to believe that it no longer exists.