Tim Wise
1 min readAug 26, 2022

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This is the most revealing part:

"Tyler Perry also mentioned he went to an all White school where he did not experience racism."

What he seems not to recognize is that in the absence of racism, structural and systemic and historically-derived, there would be no "all-white schools."

The fact that he attended such a place indicates he was experiencing racism, because he was embedded in an environment that could not have existed but for racism. The fact that, as you point out, his class status allowed him to live in such a space and attend school there doesn't mean he wasn't experiencing it.

His distance from other Black people who couldn't be there was a tax he had to pay -- to be isolated from his own community -- in order to access that education. Other Black folks should have had access to it as well and to the extent they didn't, not only they, but he, paid a price.

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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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