Letters to Authors 2.) Tim Wise, and the basic structure of Letter and Response

In the interest of developing a model for dealing with responses to these letters, I present an email which was sent to Tim Wise (author, radical race relations reframer, and general justice junkie) earlier this year. Below the sent email, I will include his response, uncensored, unedited and unabridged. I prefer to display the author's writing in its received form because it bears out the tone and immediacy of the reply. This particular set of emails is rather tame, but it inspired me to create this blog on the process of writing for justice. Coincidently, the book that he mentions is currently in print, and available at his website, www.timwise.org.

The Sent Letter:

Dear Tim Wise,

To the end of introduction, I am working on my M.A. in Social Justice at Marygrove College, a new program in an old Detroit school. Our campus worked in coordination with the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights last month to telecast President Obama's Inauguration across the campus. After the broadcast, the organization aired your DVD "On White Privilege." Upon further research, I have noticed that you have responded to racial profiling and police brutality, but you have not written about the influence of media attention upon pending court cases trying these offending officers. Previous examples of harmful media involvement abound, from Rodney King to Malice Green, but, to my knowledge, you have not written on the media's capacity to keep men guilty of homicide out of prison. More importantly, however, though your work on Sean Bell (and Guzman and Benefield) is striking, I see no mention of Oscar Grant, a California case as recent as the first of this year. I urge you to write and speak out for justice in the trial of former officer Johannes Mehserle.

Sincerely,

LOLS

Tim Wise responds:

thanks for getting in touch...indeed i haven't written about media framing of these issues, per se, and how that influences court cases typically in favor of killer cops, nor have i written an essay about Oscar Grant (though I did post several items about Grant and his killing on facebook, where it probably got more notice than an essay would have, in some ways).

Fact is, I haven't written any new essays since the first of the year, having just finished up a new book on racism and privilege in the "age of Obama," and white denial in the current period...I will no doubt start writing again soon, and one of the pieces I intend to write will address not only Grant but similar killings that took place in two other cities around the same time, which are prime exhibits of how the nation is anything but "post racial" (the term given to describe this period, now that Obama is president, by folks who would rather ignore reality...

thanks again for your suggestions!

tim