Flowers For Socrates

Tim Wise

By Elaine Magliaro

In January of 2014, I posted a video of Tim White talking about the “concept of whiteness.” (The title on his YouTube video clip reads “Tim White: On White Privilege.”) Yesterday, I came across an article that Wise wrote recently for AlterNet titled White America’s Greatest Delusion: “They Do Not Know It and They Do Not Want to Know It.” Wise opens his article with the following James Baldwin quote—which Wise acknowledged may be “overused.” Nonetheless, Wise said that “there are few statements that so thoroughly burrow to the heart of the nation’s racial condition” as the words which Baldwin wrote more than fifty years ago:

James Baldwin:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime

Wise said that in the wake of the Baltimore uprising, which followed the death of Freddie Gray, Baldwin’s words are “worth remembering.”

Wise:

It is bad enough that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the proper response to police brutality, economic devastation and perpetual marginality, having ourselves rarely been the targets of any of these. It is bad enough that we deign to instruct black people whose lives we have not lived, whose terrors we have not faced, and whose gauntlets we have not run, about violence; this, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we currently claim possession solely as a result of violence. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation’s founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George’s palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others; here because of our insatiable and rapacious desire to take by force the land and labor of those others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Rather, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

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