White Like Me (2015)

A few days before I watched this 68-minute documentary by Tim Wise on YouTube, Honda Motor Co. agreed to pay a $24 million fine for lending practices that charged minority people higher interest rates (July 2015).  Wise (b. 1968) is perhaps the leading anti-racism educator-activist in the country, having spoken on more than a thousand high school and college campuses, and conducted training for hundreds of schools, corporations, and law enforcement groups.  Instead of focusing only on discrimination against blacks, Wise flips the narrative to explore what it means to be white — that is, the many and systematic ways that white privilege has been institutionalized in our country.  This film is based on the 2011 book by Wise of the same title.  Our church used it in an adult education forum to talk about race.  For further material on this subject (books, films, poetry), see my 2014 essay for Black History Month, and especially the work of Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), Gwen Ifill (The Breakthrough; Politics and Race in the Age of Obama), and Eugene Robinson (Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America): http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20140120JJ.shtml.