Anti-racist activist Time Wise to speak

Timothy J. Wise, a prominent social-justice activist and commentator, presents a lecture titled Beyond Tolerance: Race and Power in an Age of Backlash at 4:15 p.m. Friday, March 28, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. The event is free and open to the public. The talk will touch on the role of race in the war with Iraq and in the anti-war movement.

Wise is a senior adviser to the Race Relations Institute of Fisk University and is the director of the newly formed Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE), both in Nashville, Tenn.

Wise focuses on the need to combat racism, gender bias and the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States. Whether speaking at Harvard or as a guest on Donahue, Wise has educated audiences about the nature and causes of institutional racism and how it can be dismantled. He has been called a “leftist extremist” by white supremacist David Duke, “deceptively Aryan-looking” by a member of the Ku Klux Klan and “the Uncle Tom of the white race,” by author Dinesh D’Souza.

Wise is the author of the books Great White Hoax: Responding to David Duke and the Politics of White Nationalism, Little White Lies: The Truth About Affirmative Action and Reverse Discrimination and the forthcoming Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male.

Wise graduated from Tulane University, where his anti-apartheid work received international attention and the personal thanks of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In the early 1990s Wise was associate director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a group widely credited with the political defeat of David Duke. Wise received the 2001 British Diversity Award for best feature essay on race and diversity issues and the National Youth Advocacy Coalition’s Social Justice Impact Award.

His lecture at Bates is sponsored by the affirmative action office and co-sponsored by the Multicultural Center, the offices of the dean of students and the chaplain, the Psychology Club, the Representative Assembly and the African-American and American cultural studies programs.