Tim Wise
1 min readSep 24, 2019

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No. It isn’t a claim that they are entirely powerless in the world, unable to affect their own lives or impact their own reality. THAT would be pretty racist to assume, and it’s not what I’m saying here. The claim is that they do not have institutional power/structural power over whites. That is a sociological claim, easily verifiable by simply examining who actually has institutional power in every significant setting. You are assuming the claim of not having institutional power = claiming POC lack agency. That is not the argument and only people being intentionally obtuse, or who have no interest in actually following the argument, would think otherwise.

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Tim Wise
Tim Wise

Written by Tim Wise

Senior Fellow, African American Policy Forum, critical race theorist, and author of 9 books on racism and racial inequity in the U.S.

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