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Internationally-known anti-racism author and speaker Tim Wise will be at Washburn University on Friday to hold a community conversation on race and justice.

Bruce Mactavish, assistant history professor and associate dean of Washburns college of arts and sciences, said he first met Wise nine years ago when Wise was honored in 2008 in Topeka as an Oliver L. Brown distinguished visiting scholar for diversity issues at Washburn.

He comes armed with a great deal of facts, Mactavish said of lectures regarding white privilege and racism he has heard Wise deliver. Hell engage an audience in a way you just cant ignore.

Wise is well-known for his speeches on what white people dont know or understand about racism. In many of his lectures, he cites a 1963 Gallup poll that found 60 percent of white people believed African-Americans were treated as equally as they were in their communities. The same poll, he said, showed that percentage increased to 75 percent in 1967, the year before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and before the Fair Housing Act was signed into law.

Even more tellingly, in 1962, fully 85 percent of whites told Gallup that black children had the same chance as white children to obtain a high quality education, Wise wrote in a national media opinion piece in 2015. Such beliefs might strike us as delusional in retrospect, of course, but thats the point: Unless we believe that white Americans have somehow become amazingly attuned to the experiences of persons of color in the last half-century (and more so than those people of color are, with regard to their own experiences) even as our parents and grandparents clearly failed to discern truth from fiction it seems that we should probably think twice before trusting white perceptions when it comes to the state of racial discrimination in this country.

Mactavish said he admires the way Wise can talk about the complexities of white privilege and racism.

These issues are hard to talk about, he said. Theyre hard to talk about in the classroom.

On Friday, Wise will speak from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. during the Washburn faculty luncheon at the Memorial Union. At 3:30 p.m., he will be the guest speaker for KTWUs Minds that Matter program at White Concert Hall. Wise will also have two book signings, one at Memorial Union at 1:3o p.m. and another at 6 p.m. in the vestibule at White Concert Hall.

Other sponsors of Wises visit include the Washburn University Foundation via the Ruth Garvey Cochener Fink Visiting Professors of Leadership and the Washburn University Office of University Diversity and Inclusion.

Contact reporter Angela Deines at (785) 295-1143 or @AngelaDeines on Twitter.

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Tim Wise, anti-racism author and speaker, will speak Friday at ... - Topeka Capital Journal