(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "A Slice of the Community" is made possible by the support of the First Horizon Foundation.

(audience applauds) - Hello, and welcome to another episode "A Slice of the Community."

I'll be your host, Jerome Moore.

And today we're live in studio, joined by an amazing, beautiful audience with anti-racist author and educator, Tim Wise.

Tim, glad to have you here.

- Good to be here.

Good to be here.

- Nashville's talking to each other.

- Yes, indeed, yes indeed.

- Nashville, we don't get this often.

- We're the only ones in the room possibly.

I don't know - Maybe.

about these other folks.

- Maybe we unicorns, they say.

- That's it, that's it.

- And so I want to get straight into it, especially talking about Nashville.

- We had some peculiar recent events that just happened in our beautiful downtown Broadway.

- Well, there's always peculiar events going on, on Broadway, but I know what you're talking about.

Yes, yes.

- Right.

- On this given weekend, a group of neo-Nazis decided, "Hey, this is going to be a great place and comfortable setting for us to put on display that we are here overtly, but also covertly."

Because some of them had on masks.

What was your take on that, being from Nashville, that happening right here in our own city.

And leading up to this, right?

- Right.

- Knowing we was going to dive into just the whole democracy of Tennessee.

How did you take that act of demonstration in 4K by those neo-Nazis?

- Well, I mean, it's terrifying on the... well, I've got a couple thoughts.

I mean, number one, as I joke with you, look, I think ridicule is a very important weapon against people that are fools.

And so if you have the head of a Nazi organization who dresses like the maître d' at the worst steakhouse in town, he had like a red jacket.

He thought he was really stylish and he just looks like a fool with his tattoo on the side of his head.

At some point, you do have to make fun of these fools, but at the same time understand what the threat that they represent.

- Right.

- Right?

- And the fact that they felt comfortable says a lot.

Think about where they didn't go.

We were talking about this in the back before the show.

- They didn't go to North of Nashville.

- They didn't go to Jefferson Street to do that.

- Right, they ain't going to Buchanan.

- They absolutely did not.

They didn't go to Midtown Atlanta.

They didn't go to New Orleans.

They came to a place that they thought, rightly or wrongly that their message would be acceptable.

And then we as Nashvillians have to ask, why is that?

Why is it that neo-Nazis, why is it that white supremacists would think that this was a town where they were welcome?

Because if we think that's not us, then that's our job to prove that that's not us.

- Exactly.

- It's not enough to say, this is not who we are.

Because look, I'm from here.

The idea this isn't who we are.

I told you in the back, the very first, and folks in the audience ought to go and look this up.

The first issue of the Nashville scene, which is our alternative weekly first issue, or at least one of the first, I think it was the first in 1989 cover story was about a neo-Nazi skinhead that was organizing white supremacist in this town.

In 1981, a group of neo-Nazis and Klansmen tried to blow up the temple that I attended for Hebrew school as a child.

Only reason they didn't succeed was because there was FBI informant that was embedded with them, and they foiled the plot.

In 1958, a neo-Nazi from Atlanta, JB Stoner was involved in the bombing of the Jewish Community Center on West End, 1957, Klansmen and neo-Nazis were involved in the bombing of Hattie Cotton Elementary.

So the idea that this is new, the idea that this is not Nashville because we like to pride ourselves on being a town, like Atlanta they used to call themselves the town that was too busy to hate or whatever.

And we used to call ourselves, and we still do this enlightened Mecca of we got a Parthenon for God's sake.

- The Athens of the South, right?

- Right, we got Athens of the South, we got a Parthenon man.

So we think that we are somehow above it because, oh, we're not Birmingham.

We didn't have bombs being set off every weekend during the Civil Rights movement, but we had stuff happening all along that was ugly.

And the idea that those guys on lower Broad or wherever it was that marching through downtown are new, it's not really new.

It is an escalation.

But it's not unique.

And we need to ask ourselves as Nashvillians what we are going to do to make sure that people realize they're not welcome here because nobody did that.

We're watching the videos and there's one guy yelling at him, and a bunch of tourists are just looking at him like, "Huh, it's fascinating.

Let me get another drink and listening some more music."

Nazis should be uncomfortable on the streets.

Our grandparents knew what to do with Nazis.

But apparently we only dealt with foreign Nazis.

Local Nazis were like, "It's different."

It's not - Well, that brings into I think the question when we talk about privilege.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- And the comfortability of it and giving that up, right?

I think some people may be seeing that and said, "Ah, I could say something, but let me just stay in my comfort zone."

What do you say?

Especially, I think in particular to white folks who your messages usually to when you talking about privilege?

And I want preface this too, as a person that lived abroad as an American, I knew I had privilege outside the United States.

So I know it's different levels of privilege, - Of course.

- But just specifically speaking when it comes to racial privilege, what strategies do you usually give folks to wrestle with that and figure out what does that mean to give that up?

What does that mean to jeopardize it?

What does that mean to be uncomfortable or give up that comfort of their own privilege?

- I mean, there's no silver bullet strategy that you can give anybody for that because we all have some kind of privilege.

You were talking about when you were abroad, right?

We all have, and it might be racial privilege, it might be gender privilege, it might be class privilege.

It might be able-bodied privilege.

And really all privilege, all we're saying when we say that, because people get very uncomfortable as you know.

- Precisely.

- And white folks in particular I've been white a long time, 55 years.

(audience laughs) I know my people very well.

- A lot of whiteness.

- That's a lot of whiteness.

- It's lot of whiteness.

- A lot of years of whiteness.

I know the handshake.

You might not know we have a handshake.

Show it to you after.

- You had to show me in the back.

- We got a handshake.

I guarantee you.

We got to look.

We do all that.

We don't nod at the airport.

But we do say things.

And so what we do is we get very uncomfortable because you say about privilege and everybody's well, but I was... Everybody's suddenly a coal miner's daughter when somebody mentions privilege.

We're all Sissy Spacek in that movie.

We're all raised in the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky.

No, we weren't.

- We all struggled.

- Yeah, and everybody struggles.

I don't know anybody...

I know very few people I should say that haven't struggled.

But the issue of privilege is relative, right?

- [Jerome] Right.

- And so you might not have economic privilege.

I certainly did not.

But you might have racial privilege, or you might have able-bodied privilege, or you may have privilege as a Christian in a mostly Christian community or environment, right?

Privilege is just about having the ability to not think about some stuff.

- Right.

- Right?

To be oblivious to other people's reality.

And if you have the luxury of being oblivious to other people's reality, that is a huge, that's one less thing you got to worry about.

When you're looking for a job, you're not worried about how you're going to be viewed as either capable or incapable, when you're interacting with law enforcement, you're not going to think about the way that you're being viewed as opposed to somebody else.

So it isn't meant as a critique of your character.

And I think for white folks standing up to people like that that were just demonstrating in our town, if you really want to say you're different than them, then you have to relinquish the privilege of your silence.

That's the biggest privilege.

The privilege of being silent.

The privilege of saying, well, I'm not like that.

I think about this town and we were talking in the green room about this.

Nashville is one of arguably, maybe inarguably one of the three most important cities in the Civil Rights struggle.

It is not credited with that.

We think about Birmingham, we think about Selma, we think about certain place but Nashville really as the... even though Greensboro sit-ins were first two weeks later they hit here.

And really the sit-in movement really begins in earnest.

And you have some of the most important civil rights leaders coming out of this town who were students at schools here being taught by James Lawson in nonviolent techniques and tactics.

And if you are thinking about the '60s, I remember thinking about my own family.

My grandmother, my mom's mom was never going to be one of those white folks that yelled at Black children going to a white school.

She would never have done that.

That would've been tacky.

That would've been trashy.

We don't do that.

But I know my grandmother.

God bless her and God rest her soul.

I know that she also just didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

That would've been her way of saying it.

She used to complain.

I remember hearing the story.

She couldn't go down to Harvey's or whatever it was to shop.

Because, oh, there might be violence.

Oh, those Black folks, Black folks weren't going to start anything.

The only people starting violence were the white folks that were dumping shakes on their heads and putting cigarettes out on the necks.

But she was just so convinced, like, "Oh, this has ruined my weekend."

So was she a racist?

Well, in the sense of that infamous photo from Little Rock where Elizabeth Eckford is getting yelled at by the white woman who's behind her white girl while she tries to go into school at Little Rock Central.

She wasn't that kind of racist, but she was the kind that took her privilege to just be oblivious and ran with it.

And by saying that, I'm not trying to disrespect her memory, what I'm saying is I think a lot of white folks in the '60s were like that.

They weren't going to be the, I'm going to throw a rock at your head.

I'm going to throw a brick through your window.

I'm going to bomb your school kind of racist.

But they were just the kind that were like, why can't we all just let it be?

- Well, I think what you're saying, and some of the things that I tend to echo is like, silence usually benefits the oppressor and not the oppressed.

- Always.

- Right?

- Always.

- And so you can't be neutral in these things, right?

- Yes.

- You can't be lukewarm in these things, right?

- Right.

- And I want to dig in because I know this little tad bit about you.

I don't know if everybody else does, but I want you to really share that story with us that how your mom really encouraged you or really made you embrace diversity here in Nashville and how that really played a role in who you are today.

- Right, well, I think my mom, who was raised by the mother that I just disrespected.

(all laughs) Again, God rest her soul.

Lovely woman in a million ways, but flawed like we all are.

My mom who passed almost a year ago, it'll be a year on the 12th of March, made some decisions for me.

I was born in 1968.

I was born here in Nashville.

And went to public school from 74 to 86 here.

But I went to preschool at TSU.

And my mom made the decision to put me in the preschool program, the Early Childhood Ed Program at Tennessee State for a couple of reasons.

Number one was because she knew I was going to be in fully desegregated schools, which she had never experienced when she went to school in Nashville.

We started busing in 71, but it didn't really filter down to all levels till about 74.

That's the year that I start.

So, in some ways, we were either one of the first or the first fully desegregated class.

And my mom wanted me to have some context for not being always the norm in the room.

- Right.

- Right?

- Wanted me to be in a place where I wasn't always the normal one, quote unquote, the majority.

So she put me at TSU where I was one of three kids that weren't Black.

And the program was run by Black women.

And it was in North Nashville.

That program is still in the same building, same floor, same part of the campus that it was in 1972/73.

I was at TSU at a glory days of, I mean, Ed Jones was playing football.

Joe Gilman just finished playing football there.

It was an amazing time to be on that campus, even if you're only four.

You knew that like, man, this team just won what they used to call the Black College Championship.

They just won it in 1973.

And my mom did it A, because she wanted me to have some experience, but also to be honest, to probably make her parents angry.

(audience laughs) Whatever.

There's a different way I would say that if we weren't on TV.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I got you, I got you.

- But she's trying to do something to them, make him feel some kind of way about what she was doing.

But whatever her motivations were, right?

The fact is, it was instrumental because what it meant was that two things were going to happen.

One is that my peer group was going to be mostly Black kids.

And I realized like all white people will say that we have Black friends and we're usually lying.

I didn't have anything but Black friends for the first couple of years.

That was just my peer group.

And so that was important because when I got to first grade and second grade, third grade, and that's who I'm hanging out with.

And I'm seeing that they're being treated differently.

They're being punished.

We're all acting fools because we're all six.

That's what six year olds do.

But if you're Black acting a fool, you're going to get sent to the office.

And if you're white acting a fool, you're not.

- Well, we still have that disparity - Still happens.

in the discipline today.

- Absolutely still happens.

Nothing has changed in that regard.

In fact, nationwide, Black students are two and a half times more likely to be suspended, three times more likely to be expelled.

Even in kindergarten, who expels a kindergartner.

A kindergartner is four.

A four-year-old acted up and you're shocked.

You need to learn how to deal with a four-year-old and five-year-old, not expel them.

But that's what they did then.

It's what they do now.

But because that was my peer group, I was able to see it and those were my friends.

So if you're taking my friends out of the room and you're punishing them, I'm going to notice it.

Meanwhile, the other white kids though who didn't go to TSU, who didn't have a context of Black friendships, were probably not even noticing at all.

Like, why would they?

Like, oh, the Black kids are over there learning different material.

We're over here.

Well, that's just how it is.

But for me it was like, that's not how it was last year.

In North Nashville, it wasn't how, what I'm not, what I'm used to.

And the second thing was that it meant that I was being subordinated to Black authority figures, mostly Black women.

So I was learning the first people that I learned to respect their authority after my own parents whose authority I often questioned, and legitimacy.

But the only people I learned to respect after them were Black women.

That's who ran the program.

So if I have Black women at the age of four, five-years-old telling me what's up?

You know what your parents send you to school, they're like, "Hey, mind your teachers, do it."

I'm learning to respect Black wisdom and Black women's wisdom in particular in 1973, which is I don't think most most white adults learned to respect Black women's wisdom in 2024.

Let alone five-year-olds, four-year-olds in 1972/73.

So it was a great gift because what that meant was 20 something years later when I was doing community organizing in New Orleans, I'd gone to college down there.

I continued to do activism down there.

And I was organizing, and the people that I worked with in the community were mostly women of color, mostly Black women telling me what's up?

And I'm not going to be the white guy who when they're telling me I'm going to be like are you sure?

(audience laughs) Like, you might be hallucinating, right?

Your reality can't really be that tough.

I'm sure you're exaggerating.

No, I'm going back to that four-year-old that's like, okay, you tell me that's the deal, that's the deal.

- How do you get white men that are in those situations, in those spaces where our people of color to learn how to take a backseat, learn how to be an active listener and not present their white male privilege, or just their whiteness so overtly where they're really causing more harm and they might have good intentions, but they just don't know how to take that step back?

- Right, it's hard because I think the gift for me was that it happened so early, right?

- Right.

- That I learned it early.

- I think it would've been a lot harder.

Like if I had never had that experience and I had gone to New Orleans for college, which is a Black city in every way.

It's Black demographically, culturally, historically, you can't appreciate that city unless you appreciate Blackness and the history of Black folks in this country.

But if I had not learned that early and had just...

I knew some kids that went to Tulane, which is where I went, who came from like the North shore of Chicago came from Long Island, came from like really affluent parts of New York City.

And their interaction with Black folks had been minimal.

Absolutely minimal.

And they got down there and they went crazy.

Like they didn't appreciate the city.

They didn't respect the city.

They didn't respect the people of the city.

And so I think it is harder, but for me, what I try to get people to think about is to move away from...

I don't want white men or white people generally to feel guilty about the stuff they don't know because if you don't know stuff, you just don't know stuff.

Like I don't know chemistry.

I don't know calculus, you know why?

Because the metro Nashville public schools and their infinite wisdom did not require me to learn that.

They were like, "You got to take three years of math."

I said, "Good, I'm going to take Algebra 1 over again because I don't think I got it right the first time.

And then I'm going to take geometry.

I'm going to take Algebra 2.

I'm not even going to do trig y'all, I'm out.

I'm going to do Algebra 2 and I'm done."

And they said, "Two years of science."

I'm like, "Good basic physical science and biology and I'm out."

- Biology.

And so my thing was, if you don't ask me to learn something, I'm not going to know how to do it.

I don't have to feel shame about it.

I don't feel any shame.

Now, if I was an engineer, y'all be wondering like, - How you not doing calculus.

- He does not know calculus.

- I do not need to drive on a bridge that he helped to figure out.

But when it comes to things like white or racism in America, I don't expect white people to know anything because why would we first off?

Even before all this recent nonsense about banning the teaching of accurate history, even before we start yanking books off the shelves, we weren't teaching this right before that.

We weren't teaching that.

I grew up, I went to school in these schools.

I graduated in 1986 and we never ever learned about the history of the Nashville movement.

We would take field trips to Andrew Jackson's house, right?

The War Memorial Building, the state capitol, and some tea house down across from TPAC called the Satsuma Tea Room.

Look it up, Google it.

And we went to the Satsuma Tea Room because two little old white ladies from Franklin were the first female business owners in downtown Nashville.

I mean, I guess that's cool, but 500 steps around the corner is where the sit-ins happen.

Maybe we could spend a minute talking about that, but we didn't.

So why in the world would I be shocked in this town or anywhere else that white folks don't know the history they weren't taught.

So the key is not to shame people for it, right?

The key is not to make them feel bad for not knowing it.

I want white folks to be angry about the truth that we were not told because you know what we weren't told.

It's not just that we weren't told the history of anti-Black racism or racism generally.

We were also weren't taught the history of white allyship and solidarity.

- What is that?

Allyship is a buzz word, right?

- Yeah.

- What does that mean?

What does it mean to be a ally from your perspective, from just your education?

- I think it means to follow the leadership of people of color, particularly Black folks when it comes to fighting institutionalized racism and inequality.

So if you look at the history of the Civil Rights struggle, there were always, look at the abolition struggle.

There were always white folks, but they always took their marching orders, so to speak, from Black and brown folks.

Always, John Brown didn't just do what he did on his own.

John Brown was in conversation with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas and all the people in that history.

Bob Zellner, Dottie Zellner, all the people in the Civil Rights struggle.

The people here in this town.

There were white folks who were instrumental not only in Nashville, but around the country in being involved always in SNCC and other organizations following the leadership of, and the direction of Black and brown peoples.

And so to me, to be a real ally, to be in real solidarity with an anti-racism cause is to be able to subordinate your own ego to the larger purpose.

And it's hard.

Because we live in a society, first of all, that does not encourage humility in general.

Particularly in this age when anybody can get their stuff noticed on social media with like, oh, I got something to say.

And I can get my stuff out there in 20 seconds.

And so my ego is telling me I want to be heard.

I want to be seen, I want to influence people.

- Get those likes.

- Right, I want to get those likes.

I want to get that dopamine hit.

So that makes it really easy for people not to follow.

It's like I got to be the first to say it.

Instead of saying like, actually I need to listen to what folks are saying and what they're asking me to do.

And I wouldn't have known any of that if I hadn't been trained by Black folks who were community organizers.

The ones that trained me in New Orleans who were like, that's what your role is and we want you to play your role.

You have a role to play.

But part of it is learning the history of white solidarity.

Because I knew some of the names, but I didn't know all the history because we don't talk about that.

All you learn in school about white folks that fought against racism.

So think about the white people you do learn about.

If you learn about any of them.

John Brown, all right, but they killed him.

You learn about Viola Liuzzo.

Someone in Montgomery march, well, they shot her.

You learn about Goodman and Schwerner who were killed along with James Cheney in Mississippi in 1964.

They murdered them.

James Reeb killed him.

So if the only white folks that you learn about are white people who stood up and then they killed them, you can imagine like, it's hard to inspire young white people.

And in fact, I would be worried about you if you were like, cool, I'm going to do that because then you want to be a martyr and then I don't really want to mess with you anyway.

So at some point you got to talk about the white folks that stood up and they didn't die for standing up.

Like they still are doing it.

Like Mickey Schwerner's widow Rita continued to do work in Seattle as a civil rights attorney, as an activist and advocate for...

I mean, I think she still is.

I don't know.

I haven't kept up with her, but I mean, she was doing it for 30 or 40 years after he was murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

So we need to learn those stories.

And I feel like if we would learn them, some of that guilt that comes when white folks learn the truth about the history could dissipate because we would realize, okay, we have a fork in the road.

We can choose one of two paths.

Silence, which is complicity.

- Right, benefits to oppressive for sure.

- Right, or resistance.

And even though the resistance will be messy and you'll make lots of mistakes, it's still a road that you can choose.

But I don't even know I can choose it if you don't teach it to me.

If you don't show me that path, all I see is the one road.

Well, I see two roads.

There's three roads, right?

One is active participation in evil.

But all the nice white liberals will never do that.

- Never, of course.

- Because they don't believe in that.

- Especially not here in Nashville.

- Because we're not Nazis.

We're a nice town.

- Yeah, right, exactly.

- It's Nashville nice.

- It eats, it's eat city.

- We're nice people.

We do nice things.

We care about people.

- Athens of the South.

- So right.

So we'll just forget that one path and we'll just say there's two paths.

One is silence and the other is active resistance.

And unfortunately, silence is easier.

And especially if you have not been taught the option of the other one.

- Easier and convenient.

When we think about Nashville or just Tennessee in general, the future, right?

Many people like to say, well, Nashville is a blue dot in a red state.

I don't know what that means, if that's the a good thing or compared to what?

Compared to what?

Regardless of the gender, regardless of ethnicity, race, how can we be active participants in being anti-racist, but also getting at the root of systemic racism, whether it's in education or whether in law enforcement and economic disparities too that coincides with the inequalities of marginalized folks?

- Right, well, I mean, we are, for what it's worth, I suppose that blue dot in a red ocean.

But again, are we just going to be happy about that?

Are we just going to sit around and be like, well, we're not Hohenwald.

- [Jerome] Right.

- Okay, we're not Franklin or whatever.

And even Franklin's changing.

I mean Franklin has probably more folks in it that are resisting now than there were 20 years ago.

So that's good to see I suppose.

But like what does it mean?

What does it mean to be that?

It's like I lived in New Orleans for 10 years.

What does it mean to be New Orleans when folks out in New Orleans still run your state?

Here in Tennessee, how is it that we can be?

Okay, so we're this big blue dot and we don't have a representative.

We don't have a rep.

The rep lives in, well, wherever he lives, whichever one y'all got, you got one of three.

One of them lives in Columbia, one of them lives in Cookeville.

And one of them lives in Clarksville or whatever.

They don't even have to come here.

So how is it that...

So we better get off that kick about being proud about how progressive we are when we don't have any power.

And so we better figure out the power that we do have.

- Exactly.

- Because it's not going to be, at least for now, it's not going to be at the policymaking level, but it's going to be at the hell raising level, right?

- Yeah.

- It's going to be at the level of refusing to bend to the whims of a state legislature that hates us.

That absolutely hates us.

And every white person in the city of Nashville who consider themselves progressive better understand why they hate us.

See, this is why it's important to have a racial analysis for this.

There's a reason Memphis and Nashville are hated.

And it isn't just because we're blue dots you see.

We know why Memphis is hated.

That doesn't even take a second of thought.

But Nashville is hated too because we're just too diverse.

We're too cosmopolitan.

And these folks that run the state don't believe in cosmopolitanism.

I think we need to be spreading a message that says that to everybody in this town if you care about economic justice, if you care about educational justice, healthcare justice, any of those things, you got to understand why these people are...

When they're coming for black folks and brown folks and immigrants and LGBTQ folks, they're coming for all of you, every last one.

They don't love any of y'all.

Until you move to their town.

They love their grain silos more than they love you.

- Well, look, hey y'all give it up for Tim.

This has been amazing, Tim.

(audience applauding) That was strong.

- Thank you.

- Hope y'all got y'all questions ready.

And people watching at home I just want to thank you for tuning in to this very first live in studio with an audience of "A Slice of the Community."

If you would like to continue this conversation with Tim and ask him questions, please go to our YouTube channel by searching Nashville Public Television in the YouTube search box.

And again, I thank y'all.

And appreciate y'all again.

Give it up one more time for Tim.

(audience applauds) (upbeat music)