First of all, where has Tim Wise been all my life? I can't get enough of this man's speeches. Even when I am not 100% in agreement with his theorical framework, the lucidity and simplicity of his exposition is an amazing breath of fresh air over a rather complex and sometimes stale discussions around race, class, privilege and empire. What I most enjoy is the "materiality" of his arguments; how he immerses every observation in historical facts and not emotional or ideological fiction.
Am going to come back to this particular speech for what he says about "state rights" because it will serve me as a jump-off point in another post about abortion rights, state rights and health care reform:
Fast forward to the civil war era. You have rich white folks in the south, where I come from, standing up and admitting that the reason they are willing to seceded from the union, and the only reason they ever articulated publicly ever, was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy. Not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired, that is to say, stolen territories, from Mexico to the west. Read more
