I do not agree with these assertions. I don't think that racism helped white people at all. I believe that racism was a tool in an attempt for white people to help themselves, but I don't think that it worked. I think that if a white person is not a racist, than they can’t benefit from racism. The people who even come close to benefiting from it are the white people who are racist. Those who are not racist don’t gain anything by being around racist people or activities. They would want to stop racism and prevent one group of people from getting everything. In the article Tim Wise says “we teach history as an uninterrupted string of linear progress, where things were really bad, but slowly got better, and are always improving when it comes to race,…” (62). He’s saying that everything we learn in history about race is wrong. It did get better. Look at the 1800s than look at today and tell me it’s not better. We have a President who is not white, we don’t have slaves, and people who are black don’t have to sit in the back of the bus, if that’s not improvement than I don’t understand the meaning of the word. I really don’t think this article was all that convincing. Wise talks about how members of his family owned slaves in the 1800s (they lived in the South). He then says that they should have known that it was wrong and that he doesn’t like them for keeping slaves. The truth is, people back then, especially in the South, saw slavery as economic growth. To the South a life without slaves would kill the economy, no one would work as hard, and they wouldn’t have as many workers. I’m not saying that slavery was right or good in any way; I think it was disgusting and horrible, but I can’t say that the people back then should have known better. Wise says “Their acts are neither excused by the times in which they lived, nor the passage of time since.” (66).Their acts should be look at differently because of the times they lived in. You shouldn’t judge these people as if they are people living today, they had a different mindset. It’s the way they were raised, the place they grew up, and the time period they lived in. Slavery was more about economics and status in society than about anything else. People are selfish, doesn’t matter what race you are. It could have easily been the other way around in slavery. People will look out for number one before looking out for others. I know this from my own person experiences. People help out themselves first. It’s just the way the world works, if you don’t look out for yourself you get swallowed up. White American enslaved Native Americans long before they enslaved black Americans. We never helped out Native Americans, I haven’t heard of one white person helping out a Native American. I have heard of white people helping out black people. I just personally didn’t like this article and the way the guy just had to say how horrible white people were for having slavery and all of the other things they did to black people. I also don’t like how he said we made no progress in history and that it isn’t getting better, when the truth is that things are getting better for black people in America.
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