“Forget Facts, I’ve Had Experiences!”

Racism and the limits of anecdote, bad data & dog breed analogies

Tim Wise
9 min readJun 19, 2019

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Humans are wired to generalize. Evolved to make snap judgments rooted in familiarity or the lack of it, and the comfort or fear that often accompany each. It’s how we survived in the early days of our species, by sizing up danger and protecting ourselves and our tribe from harm.

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Tim Wise

Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)