White Like Me

In class today, we watched a documentary called White Like Me. The documentary was a narration of the novel "White Like Me" and life experiences of Tim Wise, an anti-racist educator and advocate. The main focus of the documentary, what can we do as the white many to achieve equality among race.

I think the most interesting part of the documentary is when Tim Wise tells the audience about the book Black Like Me. In this book, a white man decides to burn his skin with ultra violet rays in order to appear as an African American. The point of it, was to really get a full understanding of what it really feels like to be an African American. Wise said, you can hear stories and read news articles about the tragedies among African Americans and feel sympathy for them but the only real way to understand it, is if you were actually in their shoes. And thats exactly what happened. The white man experience multiple occasions where he was taunted for no reason at all. He tried explaining to another African American what it feels like, and the response was, that he had only been a black man for about 10 months... Could you imagine what its like for an entire lifetime?

Although most of the documentary is about how the white man can contribute to achieve maximum equality, there were some positive highlights throughout the film. It showed how a black man achieve the highest office in the nation in 2012. When you look back on our countries history, its been an ugly war regarding races. But after 150 years later after the slaves were free, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.