17yr old black kid shot and killed for walking in white suburbia?

WHITE PRIVILEGE
By Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll “kick their fuckin' ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”


White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s--while if you're black and believe in reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), you're a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn't fit to safeguard American institutions.


White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.


White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto is “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.


White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college and the fact that she lives near Russia, you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.


White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a “second look.”


White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.


White privilege is when you can take nearly twenty-four hours to get to a hospital after beginning to leak amniotic fluid, and still be viewed as a great mom whose commitment to her children is unquestionable, and whose "next door neighbor" qualities make her ready to be VP, while if you're a black candidate for president and you let your children be interviewed for a few seconds on TV, you're irresponsibly exploiting them.

White privilege is being able to give a 36-minute speech in which you talk about lipstick and make fun of your opponent, while laying out no substantive policy positions on any issue at all, and still manage to be considered a legitimate candidate, while a black person who gives an hour speech the week before, in which he lays out specific policy proposals on several issues, is still criticized for being too vague about what he would do if elected.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.


White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.


White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and Harvard Business School (George W. Bush), and still be seen as an "average guy," while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then Harvard Law, makes you "uppity" and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks.

White privilege is being able to graduate near the bottom of your college class (McCain), or graduate with a C average from Yale (W.), and that's OK, and you're still cut out to be president, but if you're black and you graduate near the top of your class from Harvard Law, you can't be trusted to make good decisions in office.

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she's disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you then go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you're black and married for nearly 20 years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called "terrorist fist bumps."

White privilege is when you can develop a pain-killer addiction, having obtained your drug of choice illegally like Cindy McCain, go on to beat that addiction, and everyone praises you for being so strong, while being a black guy who smoked pot a few times in college and never became an addict means people will wonder if perhaps you still get high, and even ask whether or not you may have sold drugs at some point.

White privilege is being able to sing a song about bombing Iran and still be viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the U.S. should speak with other nations, even when we have disagreements with them, makes you dangerously naive and immature.

White privilege is being able to say that you hate "gooks" and "will always hate them," and yet, you aren't a racist because, ya know, you were a POW, so you're entitled to your hatred, while being black and noting that black anger about racism is understandable, given the history of your country, makes you a dangerous bigot.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism and an absent father is apparently among the "lesser adversities" faced by other politicians, as Sarah Palin explained in her convention speech.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain…


White privilege is, in short, the problem.



(Red Room Editor's Note: This online community of writers welcomes all the new members who have found us by way of Tim Wise's thought-provoking entries and who have taken the time to comment. We encourage you to read Tim's follow-up here, and to discover all the other great writing on other Red Room blogs and original articles.)


http://redroom.com/member/tim-wise/b...vilege-updated

On White Pride and Other Delusions:

Reflections on the Rage of the Uninformed

By Tim Wise


May 23, 2007

"The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white...This incredibly limited, not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own."

James Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket," 1985

It seems like every week I get an e-mail from someone demanding to know why there's no White History Month, or White Entertainment Television, or why whites aren't allowed to have organizations to defend "our" interests, the way people of color are, without being thought of as racists. One of these internet missives, which has been making the rounds lately on MySpace and other popular networking sites, implies that whites are somehow oppressed because we can't get away with calling people of color any number of racial slurs (a litany of which the author then proceeds to recite, almost gleefully), while persons of color presumably call us names like "cracker," "honky," or "hillbilly" all the time.

The e-mail goes on to express anger over, among other things, Martin Luther King Jr. day, and Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance day in Israel), as if these were holidays that discriminated against whites. It then laments that white pride is seen as racist, but for people of color to feel and show pride in their group is seen as normal, natural, and even healthy.

The Reverse Racism Ruse (Or How to Ignore Power, History and Logic)

That so many people find this kind of argumentation persuasive would be humorous were it not so dangerous, and so indicative of the way in which our nation has yet to come to grips with its racist history. Had we honestly confronted racism as an issue, past and present, it is unlikely that such positions would make sense to anyone. After all, every month has been white history month, even if they weren't called that. White history has been made the normative history, the default position, and when your narrative is taken as the norm--indeed, when it gets to be viewed as synonymous with American history--the need to racially designate its origins is obviously a less pressing concern. White folks' contributions have never been ignored, diminished or overlooked. As such, to now demand special time to teach about the people we've already learned about from the start seems a bit preposterous.

As for racial slurs, while it is certainly fair to point out that their use is always inappropriate, no matter whom they're directed against, to think that a term like hillbilly is truly equivalent to those used against people of color, like "nigger," "spic," "raghead," or "chink," requires one to exhibit a profound ignorance of history. These and other slurs against people of color not only sound more hateful, they have operated in a more hateful manner, by forming the linguistic cornerstone of systematic oppression and institutionalized racial supremacy. Hundreds of thousands were enslaved and millions have died at the hands of those who thought of their victims as "niggers," "spics," "ragheads" and "chinks," and used those terms as they went about their murderous ways. American history, in its historic treatment of persons of color has been an inter-generational hate crime, which didn't begin to end, even in theory, until the 1960s. On the other hand, anti-white terms are typically the end of the line when it comes to anti-white racism. People of color control no institutions that are capable of discriminating systematically against whites. They cannot keep whites from having jobs, or getting a loan. Nor can black cops get away with racially profiling whites, even when whites actually do lead the pack in one or another form of criminal behavior (serial killing, corporate fraud, or drunk driving, for example). So no, the terms are not the same, even as all are inappropriate and offensive.

And the idea that whites working for white empowerment or "white rights" is no different than people of color working for the empowerment of their group (through such mechanisms as the NAACP, or the Congressional Black Caucus, for instance), also makes sense, only if one takes a fundamentally dishonest glimpse at the nation's past.

After all, groups representing persons of color were created to address the unique disempowerment experienced by those groups' members. Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans have been systematically denied opportunities in the U.S. solely because of their group membership. Their "race" was the basis for housing discrimination, restrictions on educational opportunities, exclusion from jobs, and other forms of mistreatment. Whites have never been the targets of institutional oppression in the U.S., as whites, such that organizing as whites would have made sense. Sure, whites have been marginalized on the basis of ethnicity--the Irish, for example, or Italians, or Jews--and have long organized around ethnicity as a support system, for job networking, educational benefits, or other purposes. But as whites, persons of European descent have been the dominant group. So to organize on that basis, would be to come together for the purpose of providing collective support for one's existing domination and hegemony. It would be like corporate management forming a union to protect its interests from workers; or like the upper-caste in India, forming a Brahmin support group to protect itself from the Dalits, at the other end of the caste spectrum. Such a contingency would be redundant in the extreme.

To have a White Student Union, especially at a college where whites were in the clear majority, would be absurd, for this reason. To have a Congressional White Caucus, given the way in which white elites dominate the government would be even worse. To have a White Entertainment Television would ignore that whites already predominate on most all existing networks, and that shows pegged to people of color are few and far between, and usually limited to a handful of smaller networks and cable outlets.

Though many argue that affirmative action has made whites the victims of massive "reverse discrimination," and thus necessitated the rise of a white rights movement to secure white collective interests, the evidence simply doesn't support such a view. Although individual whites have likely experienced instances of discrimination--and anecdotal data suggests this is true, though far, far less often than the occasions when people of color experience it--there is nothing to indicate that such incidents are a widespread social phenomenon, against which whites now require organizations to protect them.

So, for instance, whites hold over ninety percent of all the management level jobs in this country (1), receive about ninety-four percent of government contract dollars (2), and hold ninety percent of tenured faculty positions on college campuses (3). Contrary to popular belief, and in spite of affirmative action programs, whites are more likely than members of any other racial group to be admitted to their college of first choice (4). Furthermore, white men with only a high school diploma are more likely to have a job than black and Latino men with college degrees (5), and even when they have a criminal record, white men are more likely than black men without one to receive a call back for a job interview, even when all their credentials are the same (6). Despite comparable rates of school rule infractions, white students are only half to one-third as likely as blacks and Latino youth to be suspended or expelled (7); and despite higher rates of drug use, white youth are far less likely to be arrested, prosecuted or incarcerated for a drug offense than are youth of color (:cool:.

So when it comes to jobs, education, housing, contracting, or anything else, people of color are the ones facing discrimination and restricted opportunities, while whites remain on top, making the idea of organizing for our collective interests little more than piling dominance on top of dominance. Not to ensure a place at the table, so to speak, but to secure the table itself, and to control who gets to be seated around it, for now and always.

It is for this reason that white pride is more objectionable than "black pride," or "Latino pride." In the case of the latter two, those exhibiting pride are not doing so as a celebration of their presumed superiority, nor dominance over others. If anything, they are celebrating the perseverance of their people against great obstacles, such as those placed in their way by discrimination, conquest and enslavement. In the case of white pride, whites as whites have not overcome obstacles in the same fashion, because we have always been the dominant group. Although Irish pride or Italian pride makes sense given the way in which persons of those ethnicities have faced real oppression in the past (and even today, in the case of Italians, who sometimes face negative stereotypes), white pride, given the historic meaning of whiteness, can mean little but pride in presumed superiority.

White Bonding as a Dangerous Distraction

But especially ironic is that by seeking to bond on the basis of whiteness, those pushing the concept end up ignoring the way in which white identity has actually harmed persons of European descent, by causing most of us to ignore our real interests, all for the sake of phony racial bonding. To understand why this is so, it might help to have some historical perspective on how the notion of whiteness came into being in the first place, and for what purpose.

Contrary to popular belief, the white race is a quite modern creation, which only emerged as a term and concept to describe Europeans in the late 1600s and after, specifically in the colonies of what would become the United States. Prior to that time, "whites" had been a collection of Europeans with little in common, and often long histories of conflict, bloodshed and conquest of one another's lands and peoples. The English, for example, did not consider themselves to be of the same group as the Irish, Germans, Italians, or French. While most Europeans by that time may have thought of themselves as Christians, there is no evidence that they conceived of themselves as a race of people, with a common heritage or destiny.

But the notion of the white race found traction in the North American colonies, not because it described a clear scientific concept, or some true historical bond between persons of European descent, but rather, because the elites of the colonies (who were small in number but controlled the vast majority of colonial wealth) needed a way to secure their power. At the time, the wealthy landowners feared rebellions, in which poor European peasants might join with African slaves to overthrow aristocratic governance; after all, these poor Europeans were barely above the level of slaves themselves, especially if they worked as indentured servants (9).

In 1676, for example, Bacon's Rebellion prompted a new round of colonial laws to extend rights and privileges to despised poor Europeans, so as to divide them from those slaves with whom they had much in common, economically speaking. By allowing the lowest of Europeans to be placed legally above all Africans, and by encouraging (or even requiring) them to serve on slave patrols, the elite gave poor "whites" a stake in the system that had harmed them. Giving poor Europeans the right to own land, ending indentured servitude in the early 1700s, and in some cases allowing them to vote, were all measures implemented so as to convince lower-caste Europeans that their interests were closer to those of the rich than to those of blacks. It was within this context that the term "white" to describe Europeans en masse was born, as an umbrella term to capture the new pan-Euro unity needed to defend the system of African slavery and Indian genocide going on in the Americas (10). And the trick worked marvelously, dampening down the push for rebellion by poor whites on the basis of class interest, and encouraging them to cast their lot with the elite, if only in aspirational terms.

This divide-and-conquer tactic would be extended and refined in future generations as well. Indeed, the very first law passed by the newly established Congress of the United States was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which extended citizenship to all "free white persons," and only free white persons, including newly arrived immigrants, so long as the latter would make their homes in the U.S. for a year. Despite longstanding animosities between persons of European descent, all blood feuds were put aside for the purpose of extending pan-Euro or white hegemony over the United States (11).

During the Civil War, the process of using "whiteness" to further divide working people from one another continued. So, for example, Southern elites made it quite clear that their reason for secession from the Union was the desire to maintain and extend the institution of slavery and white supremacy, which institutions they felt were threatened by the rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party. One might think that seceding and going to war to defend slavery would hardly meet with the approval of poor white folks, who didn't own slaves. After all, if slaves can be made to work for free, any working class white person who must charge for their labor will be undercut by slave labor, and find it harder to make ends meet. Yet by convincing poor whites that their interests were racial, rather than economic, and that whites in the South had to band together to defend "their way of life," the elites in the South conned these same lower-caste Europeans into joining a destructive war effort that cost hundreds of thousands of lives (12): their lives, in fact.

Then during the growth of the labor union movement, white union workers barred blacks from apprenticeship programs and unions because of racism, encouraged in this by owners and bosses who would use workers of color to break white labor strikes for better wages and working conditions. By bringing in blacks and others of color to break strikes, bosses counted on white workers turning on those replacing them, rather than turning on the bosses themselves. And indeed, this is what happened time and again, further elevating whiteness above class interest in the minds of European Americans (13).

The effectiveness of racist propaganda to unite whites around race, even if it meant overlooking economic interests was stunning. Nowhere was this phenomena better summed up than in the words of one white Texas fireman, who responded to the suggestion that the ranks of railroaders should be opened up to blacks by saying, "We would rather be absolute slaves of capital than to take the Negro into our lodges as an equal and brother (14)."

White Bonding and the Continued Conning of the Working Class

Today, whiteness continues to serve as a distraction to working class persons of European descent. So in the debate over immigration, it is often claimed that immigrants of color are driving down the wages of white workers, and that sealing the border is necessary to secure jobs and decent incomes for the working class. But such an argument presumes that the only thing keeping employers from giving white workers a raise (or black workers for that matter) is the presence of easily exploited foreign labor. As if closing the border would suddenly convince them to open up their wallets and give working people a better deal. In truth, however, were companies unable to exploit immigrant labor, they would simply move their entire operations to Mexico, or elsewhere, to take advantage of low-wage labor or non-existent regulations on their activities. And if they were the kind of companies that couldn't move their operations abroad (such as construction firms, for example), they would likely shift to more contingent, part-time and temp labor, which would mean that whoever ended up with those jobs would still have little or no benefits, and insecure wages. This is hardly the recipe for real improvement in the conditions of working people.

White workers would be far better off joining up with workers of color, including the undocumented, to push for higher wages and better working conditions; and they would surely be better off if those coming from Mexico were made legal and organized into unions. But thinking as whites has made this kind of cross-racial solidarity virtually unthinkable. Instead of focusing on the trade agreements that allow companies to move wherever they can get the best return on investment--agreements which have, even by the government's admission resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs--white workers are encouraged, by racism and white bonding to focus their ire on the workers themselves. After all, the workers are brown, while the owners are almost all white, which is to say that the latter are the ones with whom the white working class has been convinced to identify.

For an especially painful example of how destructive white racial thinking can be, consider St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, next door to New Orleans. In the aftermath of Katrina, St. Bernard was among the hardest hit communities. Next to the ninety-four percent black Lower 9th Ward, in New Orleans, ninety-four percent white St. Bernard was probably the most devastated part of the region. Though racially different, the communities are both predominantly working class and populated by families with moderate income; and when the federal government, via the Corps of Engineers failed to ensure the proper construction of the levees, or when the local levee board diverted levee repair funds to build interstate off-ramps for the area's casinos, both the Lower 9 and St. Bernard saw their communities utterly destroyed.

But despite the common interests of the two community's residents, if you had asked most any white person in St. Bernard about the folks who lived in the Lower 9th, prior to the storm (or for that matter today), you would have been treated (or still would be) to an uninterrupted string of racist invective. To whites in "da parish" as it's known, blacks from New Orleans are the source of all the region's problems. This is why, in 1991, more than seven in ten whites from St. Bernard voted for neo-Nazi, David Duke when he ran for Governor of Louisiana. This is why the very first thing that Parish government did upon returning home after the storm, and starting to rebuild, was to pass a blood relative law for renters: in other words, you couldn't rent in St. Bernard unless you were a blood relative of the person who was to be your landlord. It was a clear attempt to block people of color from moving in, and once legal action was threatened the Parish backed down, as they could offer no non-racist reason for passing such a law.

And yet, what has the racialized thinking of whites in St. Bernard gotten them? It didn't keep them safe from busted levees. Indeed, had they been less racist and less given to thinking with their color, they might have noticed how much they had in common with their 9th Ward neighbors. But instead of joining hands with blacks in New Orleans, and marching alongside them in Washington DC or Baton Rouge, and demanding that their joint concerns be addressed, whites in places like Chalmette have been content to sit around talking about the "niggahs," and how lucky they were not to have to live side-by-side with them.

In a final irony, when students from historically black Howard University went to the New Orleans area to do relief work earlier this year, they were assigned to work in St. Bernard, rebuilding homes: homes that were it up to Parish leaders, they wouldn't have been able to live in. When one busload of students arrived at the site to which they had been sent that day, locals promptly called police. Because after all, a bunch of black people in the neighborhood must be a sign of trouble. So much for solidarity.

Conclusion: White Solidarity Illogical and Hurtful for All

It is perhaps understandable that young whites, uninformed about the history of racism in America, might fall prey to the lure of "white rights" thinking. After all, without a full understanding of the way in which whites have been elevated above people of color, and continue to be favored in employment, housing, criminal justice and education, it would make sense for whites to wonder why things like affirmative action or Black History Month were necessary; or why groups that advocate for the interests of persons of color were still needed. If you start from the assumption that the U.S. is a level playing field, then these kinds of things might seem odd, even racially preferential. But given the historical context, not to mention the vital information regarding ongoing discrimination in the present, the importance and legitimacy of these initiatives and organizations becomes evident to all but the most unreasonable.

What is most important for white folks to understand is that our interests do not lie with the racial bonding we are being asked to embrace. Indeed, the very concept of the white race was invented by the wealthy so as to trick poor and working class European Americans into accepting an economic system that exploited them, even as it elevated them in relative terms over persons of color. As such, for whites to organize on the basis of whiteness is to codify as legitimate a category the meaning of which was always and forever about domination and privilege relative to those who couldn't qualify for membership in the club.

Finally, to organize as whites in a white-dominated society, where whites have eleven times the average net worth of blacks and eight times the average net worth of Latinos (15), have unemployment rates half that of blacks, poverty rates one-third as high as that for blacks and Latinos (16), and where whites run virtually every major institution in the nation, is by definition to organize for the continuation of that domination and supremacy. It is to seek to enshrine one's head start; to seek the perpetuation of hegemony established in a system of formal apartheid, as if to say that that system was perfectly legitimate and worthy of survival. It is fundamentally different than for a minority group to organize collectively so as to secure their interests, since minority interests and opportunities cannot be assumed or taken for granted, as a function of their lesser power, while those of the majority typically can.

And to organize on the basis of whiteness is to cast one's lot with the elite, who desperately wish for working class people to believe their enemies are each other, rather than the bosses who cut their wages, raid their pension funds, and limit their health care coverage. The more that white working people fight working people who are black and brown, the less they'll be likely to take aim at those who pick their pockets every day they show up for work: paying them only a fraction of the value of the products and services they provide, all in the name of profits which they have no intention of truly sharing with their employees. Whiteness is a trick, but sadly one that has worked for nearly three-and-a-half centuries. Only when white folks wise up, and realize that whiteness itself is our problem, will we ever stand a chance of true liberation. Until then, our whiteness will provide us privileges and advantages, but only in relation to those at the bottom of the racial caste structure. It will provide a psychological wage, as W.E.B. Dubois put it, as an alternative to real wages. Not a bad deal, until you're struggling to feed your family and keep a roof over their heads. For in times like that, real currency works a bit better.


NOTES:

(1) U.S Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, Good for Business: Making Full Use of the Nation's Human Capital. (Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, March 1995).

(2) Fred L. Pincus, Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 18.

(3) Roberta J. Hill, "Far More Than Frybread," in Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics, ed. Bonnie TuSmith and Maureen T. Reddy. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 169.

(4) Sylvia Hurtado and Christine Navia, "Reconciling College Access and the Affirmative Action Debate," in Affirmative Action's Testament of Hope, ed. Mildred Garcia (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 115.

(5) The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male. (NY: National Urban League 2007).

(6) Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology 108, 5 (March 2003): 937-75.

(7) Russell J. Skiba, et al., The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment (Indiana Education Policy Center, Policy Research Report SRS1, June 2000), 4.

(:cool: "Young White Offenders get lighter treatment," The Tennesseean. April 26, 2000: 8A; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Results from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Office of Applied Studies, Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, MD, 2004), also, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999. Summary of Findings from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse; United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 2001. (2002); Coramae Richey Mann, Unequal Justice: A Question of Color. (Indiana University Press, 1993), 224; Jim Sidanius, Shana Levin and Felicia Pratto, "Hierarchial Group Relations, Institutional Terror and the Dynamics of the Criminal Justice System," in Confronting Racism: The Problem and the Response. eds. Jennifer Eberhardt and Susan T. Fiske, (London: Sage Publications, 199:cool:, 142; SAMHSA, 2003 (see above): Table H.1. and calculations by the author. According to the SAMHSA report, as of 2003, there were 19.5 million current users of illegal narcotics. According to the data in the report, there were 165.4 million whites age 12 and over in the U.S., that year, and 8.5 percent of these were current users, which translates to 14 million white users. 14 million as a share of 19.5 million is 72 percent. According to the same report, there were 26.8 million blacks 12 and over in the U.S., of whom 9.7 percent were current drug users. This translates into 2.6 million current black drug users, which, as a share of 19.5 million is 13 percent. According to the report, there were 29 million Hispanics, of whom 7.2 percent, or 2 million, were current drug users. 2 million as a share of 19.5 million is 10 percent. Combined then, the black and Latino users come to 23 percent of all drug users; Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. (Washington, D.C. Volume 12, No. 2, May 2000); Michael K. Brown, et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. (University of California, 2003), 144.

(9) Rubio, Paul. 2000. A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000. University Press of Mississippi; Loewen, James, 1995. Lies My Teacher Told Me, New Press; Gutman, Herbert and the American Social History Project. 1989. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society. (Volumes 1 and 2) NY: Pantheon; Allen, Theodore. 1994. The Invention of the White Race, Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control. NY: Verso; Allen, Theodore, 1997. The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. NY; Verso.

(10) Rubio, 2000; Thandeka, 2000. Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America. NY: Continuum.

(11) Rubio, 2000; Ignatiev, Noel, 1994. How the Irish Became White. NY: Routledge; Guglielmo, Jennifer (ed), 2003. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. NY: Routledge.

(12) Manning, Chandra, 2007. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War. NY: Knopf.

(13) Loewen, 1995; Gutman, et.al. 1989.

(14) Brown, Michael K, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Schultz and David Wellman, 2003. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. University of California: 207.

(15) Shawna Orzechowski and Peter Sepielli, Net Worth and Asset Ownership of Households: 1998 and 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P70-88, May 2003), 2.

(16) The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male. (NY: National Urban League 2007)


This is a clip from The Pathology of Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality, the newly released video from the Media Education Foundation. The video is of a speech given by Tim Wise at Mt. Holyoke College, October 1, 2007.


The Pathology of Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc


http://www.redroom.com/video/tim-wis...whiteness-clip


more complete video but has relatedlinks/urls and related to more of his speakings/lectures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-VEW...eature=related


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UJlN...eature=related


Tim Wise-institutional racism, labor, prison education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-VEWJncnsk&NR=1


affirmative action /school bias
white people have affimative action to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0irqMXsiXx0

http://www.blackcommentator.com/64/6...on_flag_pf.gif


Attached Images:
http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/att...1&d=1239156913 http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/att...1&d=1239157070

TIM WISE speak at mostly all the universities all over the USA


he has been given assignments by the US government and has succeed in his endeavors

Tim Wise essays

This is a clip from The Pathology of Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality, the newly released video from the Media Education Foundation. The video is of a speech given by Tim Wise at Mt. Holyoke College, October 1, 2007.


The Pathology of Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc


http://www.redroom.com/video/tim-wis...whiteness-clip


more complete video but has relatedlinks/urls and related to more of his speakings/lectures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-VEW...eature=related


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UJlN...eature=related


Tim Wise-institutional racism, labor, prison education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-VEWJncnsk&NR=1


affirmative action /school bias
white people have affimative action to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0irqMXsiXx0


the most important items for you to here are Tim Wise on White Privilege (Teaser) m its only a few minutes and to help the school immediately at least the last 35 minutes of
Tim Wise on the "Dominant Historical Narrative"


http://www.redroom.com/media/tim-wise


Subject: Tim Wise Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, is now available! According to The Wall Street Journal, Barack Obama's presidential victory means we "can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement


New Book on Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama is now available!!!



January 18, 2009

Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, is now available! According to The Wall Street Journal, Barack Obama's presidential victory means we "can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country."According to columnist Richard Cohen, Obama as President signifies that America is a "post-racial" nation, and




http://www.redroom.com/video/tim-wis...whiteness-clip



http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/att...1&d=1242951506

The Underprivileged White Male - YouTube


so why is black history not taught as American history?

the reason being is cause we were told a lie.

that Europeans came hear looking for freedom and to worship as they pleased

but the way they acted when they got here paints a different picture.

they burned people for being witches,persecuted if you preyed or worshiped differently then they did.


the truth is THAT THEY WERE CRIMINALS AND COULD NOT MAKE IT IN THE LAND THAT THEY WERE BORN IN


THIS IS CALLED THE DOMINATE NARRATIVE

DISCUSSED BY TIM WISE IN HIS ESSAYS


http://www.redroom.com/video/tim-wis...ical-narrative




YouTube - Tim Wise on the "Dominant Narrative"

YouTube - Tim Wise on the "Dominant Narrative"

PEOPLE HAVE GROWN TIRED OF THIS!:" the BLACK MAN did it
‘Black man did it’ hoax sparks outrage

Pa. mother's abduction claim latest in string of false accusations


Bonnie Sweeten, left, claimed she and her daughter had been kidnapped by two black men but instead turned up at Walt Disney World. She is shown here at the Orange County, Fla. jail.


PHILADELPHIA - It's an old lie, claiming that The Black Man Did It.

But it was trotted out again last week when a white mother from suburban Philadelphia said two black men snatched her and her 9-year-old daughter from their SUV and abducted them in the trunk of a black Cadillac.

Blacks across the country were outraged after Bonnie Sweeten was found in a luxury hotel at Disney World. Authorities quickly unraveled the hoax, but not before an Amber Alert, frantic searches and national news coverage that played into images of marauding black men.

Racial boundaries are slowly dissolving in America, with President Barack Obama the most obvious example. Yet Sweeten's story, plus the killing of a black New York City cop by a white officer days later, was a reminder that old ideas remain burned into many minds both black and white.

Furious and disgusted
Sweeten's story has provoked an outpouring of discussion among blacks, everywhere from doctor's offices to blogs. Syndicated radio host Warren Ballentine said his listeners are "furious, and they're disgusted. ... On a scale of one to 10, it's a 15."

"Their hope was that by Obama becoming president, the rest of America would take a look at black Americans and look at us for who we are and not what a stereotype is," he said.

The Black Man Did It lie last made news as recently as October, when a John McCain volunteer claimed a 6-foot-4 black man carved a B into her cheek (For Barack, evidently). Charles Stuart told it in 1989 after he killed his wife in Boston. Susan Smith told it when she drowned her sons in 1994 in South Carolina. Unknown numbers of black men were hanged for it back when lynching was a common practice.

And those are the ones we heard about. Law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown documents 67 racial hoaxes in the period between 1987 and 1996 in her book "The Color of Crime."

So after Sweeten and her daughter were found in Florida, with local newspapers reporting an investigation of whether the 38-year-old woman embezzled large sums of money, many blacks felt not only angry, but resigned and frustrated.

"Here we go again," thought Add Seymour, an Atlanta resident who works in public relations for Morehouse College.

'Lynch mob mentality'
"Not only are people going to use us as the stereotypical crime problem of America, but the problem is people believe it so easily," he said. "It's a lynch mob mentality out there. ... The first thing you think of when it comes to crime is a black man. It's crazy, and it's unfair."

It's also rooted in a confusing mixture of psychology, statistics and sociology, amplified by the media's tendency to focus on crimes against white women.

Seymour's blood starts to boil whenever people lock their car doors as he walks by — yet even blacks sometimes hit that button when black men are in the vicinity. "It's not just white people who act that way," Seymour said.





‘Black man did it’ hoax sparks outrage


Common sense or racism?

Raqiyah Mays, a radio host on Kiss FM in New York City, drew a parallel between the Sweetney hoax and the killing of a black cop last week who was shot by a white policeman. The black officer was running after a suspect, his gun drawn.


"How many times have you seen a black man running down the street and thought something negative? As opposed to seeing a white guy running down the street and you think he's running late?" said Mays, who is black. "A lot of us are guilty of it because that's the way society has been set up."

One easy explanation is that black men are convicted of crimes at much higher rates than any other group. So was falling for Sweeten's lie racism, or common sense? And does Sweeten's blond hair have anything to do with the amount of media coverage her story received?

Media coverage questioned
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote about the difference in coverage between the killing of a white female college student in Connecticut and the approximately three dozen Chicago public school students, mostly black, who have been killed this school year. He recalled an incident from early in his career, at another newspaper, when he heard an editor pondering the story of a dead child ask, "What color is that baby?"

"Editors may not be asking, `What color is that victim?' But, on some level, they're still thinking it," Herbert wrote.

Even without race, Sweeten's story was both sensational and nonsensical. It began when she called police, allegedly from a trunk, and said men had rear-ended her Yukon Denali at a busy suburban intersection, then abducted her and her daughter in broad daylight.

No one had seen it happen, and Sweeten somehow still had her cell phone. Black men also are scarce in Bucks County, which is 92 percent white and 4 percent black.

Authorities discovered that Sweeten had made the call from miles away, in downtown Philadelphia. Their attention turned to the airport, and Sweeten was soon found. She is free on $1 million bail, facing misdemeanor charges of identity theft and false reporting.

During a news conference after the hoax was exposed, Bucks County District Attorney Michelle Henry explained the charge of filing a false police report.

"It's a terrifying thing," she said, "for a community to hear that two black men in a black Cadillac grabbed a woman and her daughter."


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31050599//

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31050599/page/2/


http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/MSNBC/C...0p.hmedium.jpg






http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/att...1&d=1244331085

White skin appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climes and lost much of their melanin pigment.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/20-things-skin


see there is no biological basis for the idea of a white or black or asian


Race is an old concept that should probably be discarded. It was

created by people who had a very limited knowledge of their world. If you

look at any genetic map (mitochondrial or Y chromosome DNA), you can

see there is no biological basis for the idea of a white or black or asian

race.

Here's a map

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

all land was once one big piece of land then it broke up into the different countries we have today.
there is more evidence of how the people became yellow ,whiter, straighter hair etc.:iagree::geek:

plus every time someones DNA IS CHECKED USING THE STATE OF THE ART TECHNOLOGY THERE DNA IS TRACED BACK TO THESE TWO ETHIOPIANS IN BORN AFRICAN

Spencer Wells - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Spencer Wells - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Spencer Wells - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spencer Wells - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Spencer Wells (born April 6, 1969 in Georgia, United States) is a geneticist and anthropologist, an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, and Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University. He leads The Genographic Project

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Wells_2007.jpg

Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Part 1 of 13) - YouTube

white person is more likely to shot up a school,kill his whole family, serial killer
TIM WISE
talks about white violence because of the coping factor
http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2008/10/suffer-from-privilege-induced-lack-of.html



Has Black Friday arrived in America? If so, are you prepared?

Actually, if you're a "white" American, there's a good chance that you're less prepared than other Americans. Emotionally that, is. And mentally. Maybe even physically.

As is so often the case, Tim Wise has explained well this common symptom of learning to be white:

Racism and white privilege/supremacy generates a mindset of entitlement among those in the dominant group. This entitlement mentality can prove dangerous, whenever the expectations of a member of the group are frustrated. Principally this is because such persons develop very weak coping skills as a result of never having to overcome the obstacles that oppressed folks deal with every day and MUST conquer in order to survive.

So, as a result, it is the privileged (the beneficiaries of racism, and also, it should be pointed out, the class system) who are ill-prepared for setback: the loss of a job, stocks taking a nose-dive (who were the folks jumping out the windows in the great depression–not poor folks and folks of color, but rich whites who couldn’t handle being broke!) Likewise, if you look at the various personal pathologies that tend to be disproportionate in the white community (and upper middle class for that matter), they are interesting in that they all are about control–controlling one’s anxiety, emotional pain, or controlling and dominating others–like suicide, substance abuse, eating disorders, self-injury/mutilation, serial killing and mass murder (as opposed to just regular one-on-one homicide), sexual sadism killings, etc.

Not knowing how the world works is dangerous. White privilege and racism allow the dominant group to live in a bubble of unreality. Most days that’s no big deal I suppose. But every now and then reality intrudes on you and if you haven’t been expecting it, the trauma is magnified. So, when 9/11 happened, millions of whites were running around saying “why do they hate us?” because whites have never had to see our nation the way others do–we’ve been able to live in la-la land.

But folks of color didn’t say this, because those without privilege HAVE to know what others think about them. Not to do so is to be in perpetual danger. So whites flipped out, and by virtue of being unprepared, pushed for a policy response (war) that folks of color were HIGHLY skeptical of from the beginning. But whites, enthralled by our sense of righteousness (itself a manifestation of privilege), pushed forward, convinced that the war in Iraq would go swimmingly. How’s that working out?
In other words, racism and privilege generate mentalities and policies that are dysfunctional, even deadly for whites as with folks of color. Folks of color are the first victims, to be sure, and the worst. But as someone else said, what goes around. . .
Privilege creates a false sense of security. Being the dominant group can set you up for a fall, can prevent you from building up the coping skills needed to deal with setback, because so often those skills are ones you just don't need.
Until you do, that is.


[This quotation is adapted from two sources: a comment Tim Wise wrote at Resist Racism, and one of his books, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Lyrics for Steely Dan's song "Black Friday"]

mtDNA: ‘Caucasian Eve’ Had Only Six Daughters

Over 90% of all Caucasoids – people native to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East – are descendants of the same 6 women who lived 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.
Their mtDNA (maternal line) haplogroups are H, J, K, T, V and U. All of them came from haplogroup R, which originated somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. That region is known as Caucasus, which is why white people are referred to as Caucasians.
East Asian haplogroups B and F, as well as the Pacific haplogroup P also derived from R, but due to the vast geographic separation from the above 6 haplogroups, they became vastly different.
There’re also some white people belonging to haplogroup X (and a small number of I and W), which is why BRYAN SYKES referred to Caucasoid mtDNA as having descended from the 7 daughters of Eve.
But as I explained, I don’t believe it to be accurate because X is a near-universal haplogroup that is found in small numbers throughout much of the world, including among Amerindians, Pakistanis and others. It is therefore more an international haplogroup than a Caucasian one.
X originated in Iran or Turkmenistan, and not in the Caucasus. It is part of the haplogroup IWX and is related to haplotype R only because both IWX and R descended from haplotype N 30,000 to 55,000 years ago.
There are similarly 9 women who are the ancestors of all Japanese people, and 4 women (haplogroups A2, B2, C1 and D1) are the ancestors of nearly all American Indians (and most of the remaining are descendants of haplogroup X).
This how mtDNA developed since the first humans left Africa. (You have to adjust your eyes because this map has Africa on top.)


http://ethnicgenome.wordpress.com/20...six-daughters/
http://ethnicgenome.wordpress.com/20...six-daughters/
http://ethnicgenome.wordpress.com/20...six-daughters/
http://ethnicgenome.wordpress.com/20...six-daughters/


proven with DNA EVIDENCE



CAUCASIAN people are part of the Haplogroups.



http://www.africandna.com/

http://www.africandna.com/history.aspx


Think of the Whitest person you know: someone with blond hair, blue eyes and almost translucent skin, not a drop of Black ancestry in them. Now think of the darkest person you know: someone richly endowed with traditional African features, not even a drop of White ancestry in their past. Well, guess what? Scientists now trace the origins of both of these people-and of all human beings who have ever walked the face of the earth-to Black Africa, to the region around what is now Ethiopia. As Spencer Wells, the director of National Geographic's massive Genographic Project, puts it: "Our species evolved in Africa, and a subset of Africans left that continent around 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world. Our earliest ancestors probably looked very much like modern Africans."
This would have been news to "Bull" Connor and Orval Faubus and countless other racists from our past. It is also news to most of our White brothers and sisters today. But it is an undeniable fact. We are all, in a very real sense, "Africans." The only question is how recently did our ancestors leave the Motherland? For the 35 million of us who are African- Americans-and for Black people in the Caribbean and Latin America-the answer is: very recently.


The first enslaved Africans arrived in the United States in the 17th century. So, in historical terms, our ancestors arrived here from Africa virtually "yesterday." This means that we are among the oldest Americans; but it also means that our relation to our African ancestors is recent.
This also means that we have many genetic "cousins" walking around the African continent today-a fact that has long obsessed me. Like 130 million other people, I watched every episode of Alex Haley's Roots when it first aired in 1977. And like many other African-Americans, I have yearned ever since to trace my own roots, to identify where in Africa my own ancestors came from, what tribe they were part of. Why is it important to do this? Two reasons. First, almost as soon as an African-American steps off a plane in Africa, he can't help but realize how "African" our people still are. Despite the horrors of the slave trade, African slaves brought their culture with them: their music, dances, religious beliefs, the way they cooked food, the way they walked, the way they lived--and loved--even the way they buried their dead. And many of these customs and traditions have been preserved, or subtly transformed, by our African- American ancestors. Indeed, if you go to a dance club in Africa, attend church, or eat a meal with an African family, you will be surprised at how much you can feel right at home, as if you have just met long lost relatives. The feeling is uncanny-and intensely pleasurable.

But there is another, perhaps more powerful, reason to trace one's African ancestry. For centuries, racists attempted to prevent us from connecting with our past. The entire system of slavery was dedicated to preventing us from preserving any memories of Africa, our ancestors' tribal identities, the languages we spoke there, the customs we practiced, the gods that we worshipped, even our African names. Slavery was a carefully conceived effort to rob our people of all family ties and the most basic sense of self-knowledge. Slave owners didn't want their slaves building family trees. They didn't want them to marry or maintain deep, abiding relations with their mothers and fathers, their grandparents or their siblings. They wanted them to feel no bonds of kinship, especially to Africa or to other Africans. Why? Because a family unit is a bond-and an extended family is a larger bond-and out of such bonds, loyalty and resistance are built. And the last thing in the world slave owners wanted was resistance from our ancestors who were slaves. Slave owners wanted our ancestors to think of themselves as nameless objects of property, plain and simple, like a chicken or a cow.
I am convinced that this still impacts our people today, crippling our ability to know ourselves by connecting with our family's past in the way that so many White Americans can. Ignorance and misunderstanding of our own history have served as a limitation on what we can achieve. We have internalized generations of doubt and fears about who we are as a people and what we can accomplish, just as White racists wanted us to do. And we continue to pay a terrible price for this.
Carter G. Woodson, the father of African-American history, famously wrote that a people cannot determine their future if they are ignorant of their past. This is why Malcolm Little took as his surname the letter "X"--which marked the hidden past of our people back through slavery to Africa, the past that racists sought to deny us. Malcolm wanted that "X" to serve as a constant reminder that it was our people's mission to fill in the blank slate that was the African-American collective past, the details of which, down to our family trees and our individual tribal origins, had been robbed or hidden from us. I believe that this is as true and necessary today as it has ever been, especially given our high school drop-out and teen-pregnancy rates.

Fortunately, something magical is happening in the African-American community today: Many of us are now using genealogy to trace our family trees on this side of the Atlantic, back deep into slavery. And then, when the paper trail ends and we have exhausted our sources, we are starting to look at something that our ancestors from Africa brought with them that not even the slave trade could take away: their distinctive strands of DNA. Because their DNA has been passed down to us-their direct descendants-it can serve as a key to unlocking our African past.
With cells collected from the insides of our mouths, geneticists can analyze small sections of our genetic material that form distinctive sequences known as "haplotypes," which can then be compared to DNA samples taken from people on the African continent. The process is a bit like matching fingerprints on CSI. A match between our DNA and the DNA from a person from Africa means that we have possibly found someone with whom we share a common ancestor, someone from our same "tribe"-be it Igbo or Yoruba, Fulani or Mende. Such a match can reveal an ethnic identity that has been lost for centuries, since the dreadful Middle Passage.
I would urge anyone who is interested to try and trace their family back to Africa, through genealogical research and DNA testing. There are several tests available, and each is surprisingly inexpensive, often less than a pair of designer sneakers. The test you choose to take depends on whether you are male or female, how much you can afford and what you want to find out. For example, to learn something about your father's line (if you are a male) or your mother's ancestral line (if you are male or female), you can take a lineage test. This test analyzes small portions of DNA that are passed down, virtually unchanged (like a genetic fingerprint), from father to son, and mother to child. Because these small sections of your DNA do not recombine from one generation to the next, they become "markers of descent," which scientists use to determine ancestry shared by a group, such as a tribe or an ethnic group. We have all heard of "paternity tests." Well, in a similar way, these single-marker tests can solve genealogical mysteries by verifying if two individuals are related. When tracing your African tribal ancestry, they can also suggest your ancestral origins back to Africa, telling you where your female ancestors or your male ancestors originated-long before they were captured as slaves.

Keep in mind that this process is still in its infancy. The available DNA data is not by any means complete, and these tests will not yield the names of any of the individuals on our distant family trees-just the general geographic areas in which our ancestors lived. Sometimes the tests yield multiple exact tribal matches, making it necessary for historians to interpret the most plausible result. AfricanDNA.com, which I co-founded with FamilyTreeDNA, offers this service. And sometimes you will discover that your DNA can be traced to a White ancestor, especially on your father's side, because some masters raped their female slaves. About 30 percent of us have White male ancestors.
Yet learning even these bare facts can be enormously satisfying. Receiving the results in the mail, and sharing them with your family and friends, is one of the most exciting experiences an African-American can have. I know it has been for me, and for my friends such as Oprah Winfrey and Chris Tucker, who appeared in my PBS program, African American Lives (part two in the series appears on PBS in February).
Of course, it can be painful. When one discovers the identity of an ancestor who lived as a slave, one necessarily is forced to relive the brutal details of the slave past, a past that our ancestors experienced not as we do through history books or films, but in their everyday lives. But I believe we must get past this pain. If we want to go forward as a people, we need to be able to understand where we came from. We need to get ourselves grounded, and the process starts by grounding ourselves in our own family's extended past, our own genealogical "invisible network," like that cell phone ad says. This process is so nourishing because it can enable a person to feel the inimitable sense of connection, of belonging that can only be found by unearthing the branches of your family tree, your very own roots, roots that extend back through the slave past directly into the verdant soil of Africa.

I highlighted the facts for you,there in bold:iagree::wiggle::dancing:


Think of the Whitest person you know: someone with blond hair, blue eyes and almost translucent skin,

not a drop of Black ancestry in them. Now think of the darkest person you know: someone richly endowed

with traditional African features, not even a drop of White ancestry in their past. Well, guess what?

Scientists now trace the origins of both of these people-and of all human beings who have ever

walked the face of the earth-to Black Africa, to the region around what is now Ethiopia. As

Spencer Wells, the director of National Geographic's massive Genographic Project, puts it: "Our

species evolved in Africa, and a subset of Africans left that continent around 50,000 years ago to

populate the rest of the world. Our earliest ancestors probably looked very much like modern

Africans."

This would have been news to "Bull" Connor and Orval Faubus and countless other racists from our past. It is

also news to most of our