Free White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son by Tim Wise

I’d had some investment. Although the injury was far more profound to them—after all, the institutional racism at the heart of that unequal treatment wasn’t aimed in my direction, but theirs—I was nonetheless the collateral damage. My mother had never tried to push me into whiteness or put me into a socially-determined space. But what she would not do, the schools would strive for, from the very beginning.

    WHATEVER RACIAL SEPARATION the school system sought to reimpose, even in a post-segregation era, it was something against which I struggled for years. I had a few white friends, but very few. Albert Jones, who is still my best friend to this day, was among the only white classmates with whom I bonded at that time. Frankly, even that might have been a case of mistaken identity. Though white, his dad worked at TSU in the School of Education, so even he had a connection to the black community that made him different. But other than Albert, pretty much all of my friends at Burton were black.
    Yet, as I would discover, interpersonal connections to racial others say little about whether or not one is having experiences similar to those others. Even when a white person is closely tied to African Americans, that white person is often living in an entirely different world from that of their friends, though we rarely realize it.
    It would be early 1977, in third grade, that I received one of my earliest lessons about race, even if the meaning of that lesson wouldn’t sink in for several years. The persons who served as my instructors that day were not teachers, but two friends, Bobby Orr and Vincent Perry, whose understanding of the dynamics of race—their blackness and my whiteness—was so deep that they were able to afford me the lesson during something as meaningless as afternoon recess.
    It was a brisk winter day, and Bobby, Vince, and I were tossing a football back and forth. One of us would get between the other two, who stood at a distance of maybe ten yards from each other, and try to intercept the ball as it flew through the air from one passer to the next. Football had really never been my game. Though I was athletic and obsessed with sports, I was also pretty small as a kid; as such, I saw little point in a game that involved running into people and being tackled. I preferred baseball, but since baseball season was several months away, the only options that day during P.E. class were kickball or football. Normally, I would have chosen kickball, but when Bobby and Vince asked me to play with them I had said yes. Because we were so often separated in the classroom, I treasured whatever time I could carve out with my black friends.
    Our game began innocently enough, with Bobby in the middle, usually picking off passes between Vince and me. Next it was Vince’s turn, and he too picked off several of the passes between Bobby and me, though the zip with which Bobby delivered them often made the ball bounce off of Vince’s hands, too hot to handle.
    When it came time for me to be in the middle, I frankly had little expectation about how many passes I could intercept. My size alone virtually ensured that if Vince and Bobby wanted to, they could simply lob the ball over my head, and so long as they did it high enough and fast enough, there would be very little opportunity for me to pull the ball down. But strangely, I caught every one. Each time they would pass just a bit beyond my reach and I would jump to one side or the other, hauling their efforts into my breast, never dropping a single one or allowing even one pass in thirty to make it past me.
    At first, I reveled in what I assumed must be my newfound speed and agility. What’s more, I beamed with childish pride at the smiles on their faces, assuming that Bobby and Vince were impressed with my effort; and I continued to interpret this series of events as evidence of my own abilities, even as they both began to repeat the same refrain after every pass, beginning