Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  * * *

  Tess had, to use her own word, “extracted” the daughter out of me that she wanted in an effort to replace or replicate the relationship she lost with her mother. It was an extraction that felt as if it had come directly from the marrow of my eleven-year-old bones. I had been unfamiliar to her, so she forced a familiarity, exploited my pliable youth, leveraged my trauma and desperation for her approval, to make a daughter who would function in the same capacity that she did and would have continued to do had her mother not abandoned her. And she’d done it all while dismissing, belittling, or co-opting my blackness.

  Tess erased my blackness and then lynched my spirit in an ongoing public spectacle of psychological and emotional violence that started at the Uptown disco club, through to the dean’s office at UNH and Elaine’s restaurant in New York. I didn’t need to kill myself; after reading the book, I felt like I was already dead.

  Fifty-Five

  “We’re very concerned about what’s happening in New York,” Mom said on the other end of the phone. It was just before nine a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, and I’d woken up to the sound of the phone ringing. Otherwise, I never would have been up that early.

  “What’s going on in New York?” I asked groggily.

  “Turn on the TV,” she said, with an alarming sense of urgency.

  I got out of bed, managing to wrap my comforter around my shoulders with one hand while I kept the phone to my ear with the other.

  “OK, hold on,” I said, cradling the phone in my shoulder while I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit the South Tower. I fell back onto the couch facing the TV in my living room, utterly shocked. “Oh my God, what is happening?”

  “Are you OK?” Mom asked, still borderline frantic.

  “Yes, Mom. I’m fine.”

  “Stay inside, but stay on the phone with me.”

  “What is happening?” That was all I could think to say. And then the phone line cut out. “Mom? Mom?!” I shouted into the receiver, but no one was there anymore.

  I sat on the couch all day rocking back and forth, glued to the screen, occasionally trying to call Mom back in New Hampshire, to no avail. By about six p.m., local calls were able to get through, and a friend from my last job at an online company organized a group meetup at a Brooklyn bar that night to process what had happened. I was glad to have a makeshift support system, but I realized, not for the first time, that I had no real community at a time of crisis other than Caryn, who was working for the NYC Department of Education on 9/11, on the ground downtown just blocks from the attacks. Besides Caryn, I didn’t really have a community at all.

  It wasn’t Mom’s fault that the phone lines went down during a terrorist attack, but that I was unable to get through to her after she’d called to check in on me was painfully symbolic of how I’d felt my parents had always been with me, especially Mom—intensely loving and present, and then just gone while the world was falling apart around me. I started to think about what I wanted my community to look like and realized that I would have to make it myself.

  While I hadn’t struggled with my right to choose the abortions I’d had in my early twenties, I often thought about those possible pregnancies as my body maybe trying to tell me what it wanted to do most of all: have a baby. In the weeks following 9/11, when the air was still thick with soot and ash, and everyone in the city ducked like a war vet at the sound of helicopters overhead, I decided that saving money and getting to a place where I could raise a child on my own would be my main priority moving forward. And that meant upping my hustle game, which was already pretty demanding.

  For the next three years, I worked a series of freelance writing and teaching jobs, hosted a show for WNET about the post–9/11 generation, and sold another book proposal, this one for a book that would be part interviews, part personal vignettes based on passages from The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois. I was endlessly sending out résumés for full-time work at online companies or magazines, applying for writing grants and residencies, and cycling through a series of roommates because I could no longer afford to live alone.

  While I forged headlong toward my goal to have a baby, I continued to manage the fallout from my break with Tess, who would not take no for an answer. I stopped working on the screenplay, blocked Tess’s email address and refused to take her calls; I either returned or burned her letters. At one point I thought it was entirely possible that she might jump out from behind a bush to confront me.

  One of the hardest things about breaking things off with Tess was the betrayal Mateo and Sebastian felt, which they let me know about through spates of unleashed vitriol. They told me I was being untrue to myself, that I was weak and pitiful, lacked essence and character. I belonged to the Bancroft family, they said; I was their sister, and Tess’s daughter. How could I live with myself for turning away from her after all the pain she’d endured after giving me up?

  Meanwhile, my relationships with Riana and Sean had also hit a wall. Riana had started calling me late at night, drunk and filled with bitter condemnation. “You think you’re so much better than me!” she’d repeat over and over. She was right. I did think I was better than her. Better in that I was making a life for myself that involved a world beyond Warner, where she’d moved back to when her sons, still struggling with their health issues, were about ten.

  I read books and magazines, wrote articles, and knew important people, and had conversations about politics and race. I’d confronted my trauma and moved on with my life, while she continued to wallow in her own trauma, and remain willfully ignorant about anything outside of her own small life. Sean had made a fine life for himself, with a successful carpentry business, but remained in Warner, and cultivated the mindset that came along with that choice.

  It wasn’t just that my siblings and parents didn’t see me; it was that they didn’t see race or think about blackness, mine or anyone else’s, and I felt like I deserved that, at the very least. To be adopted into a white family that did not see or care or think about my blackness or my experience navigating a racist country had always felt lonely and isolating, endlessly confusing, but now it just felt cruel.

  Fifty-Six

  I was on my way to a final interview for a job as editor in chief of a magazine focused on independent film when I dropped a piece of unchewed gum on the subway platform. It was midday on a Friday in late August, and I was not about bullshit that day, self-serious as hell, with my arms crossed over my chest. I’d snapped out a piece of Trident gum, and it fell on the ground. I ignored it, popped out another one, and put it in my mouth.

  I’d landed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with a roommate after a few years jumping between writing residencies and house-sitting stints, and was on the subway platform in Williamsburg, where you transfer from the G to the L train that takes you into Manhattan. The platform was nearly empty at noon before a long holiday weekend.

  “I’ll bet you a quarter that between now and the time the train comes, someone will step on that piece of gum you dropped.”

  Slender and handsome, with level eyes and an understated smile, this white guy who walked up to me on the subway platform felt familiar.

  “Um, OK,” I said, not entirely sure why I’d agreed to a bet over something so stupid. We stood side by side, his shoulders not too much taller than mine, staring down at the small, white tab of gum as a few people walked by, their feet just nearly missing it. After a few minutes, we heard the rumble of the train coming out of the dark tunnel from the left, and as it pulled up in front of us, someone stepped on the gum.

  We got on the train, and I paid him his due quarter. He was carrying an overnight bag as we stood holding the pole between us, and I asked him if he was going away for the weekend.

  “Actually,” he said plainly, “I’m headed up to Harvard for a conference on race and social policy.”

  I waited for him to go on about all the black friends he had, or indicate i
n some way that he deserved praise or a reward for being a white guy who went to conferences about race. But no, that was all, just a white guy going to a conference about race, as if he was on his way to the grocery store for a loaf of bread.

  “Do you live around here?” I asked, because now I was intrigued.

  “Yeah, I just got back from Berkeley, where I was doing a postdoc. I’m living in Greenpoint.”

  “Me, too! I’m living in Greenpoint, too, and actually I did a fellowship at Harvard—is your conference at the Du Bois Institute?”

  “No, but that’s cool. We should get a drink sometime.”

  “Sure, yeah. I’m Rebecca,” I said.

  “I’m Chris,” he responded, unselfconscious, though not especially laid back either. There was an ease about him that seemed transcendent but also grounded, genuinely curious but not nearly as self-serious as I was. I gave him my card, which he took, and as he got off the train first, he said, “I’ll give you a call.”

  Suddenly I didn’t trust him or the exchange, the serendipity or unlikelihood of it. What were the chances of meeting a handsome white guy on the subway platform who seems perfectly lovely, not weird or presumptuous, who cares enough about race to go to a whole conference on the subject but not make a big deal about it? This guy was never going to call me.

  “Yeah,” I said, back to the self-serious, ain’t-about-that-bullshit mode I’d been in when he first walked up and immediately disarmed me. “You do that.”

  He looked at me bewildered, but smiled anyway. The subway doors closed, and I went to my job interview. Chris called on Sunday night when he’d returned from the conference and invited me to dinner the following Thursday.

  * * *

  In a cozy restaurant on Houston Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, we’d just been seated and hadn’t even ordered drinks when I said, “Listen, I’m having a baby by the time I’m thirty-six, so what do you want out of this?” I was thirty-four years old.

  Chris smiled, unfazed, and said, “Maybe let’s have dinner first?”

  We had dinner first, then we got pregnant, and then we got married. I was seven months pregnant with our son at our wedding in April 2005, a month before I turned thirty-six.

  * * *

  In the seventeen years since Chris and I first got together, as we’ve seen the country become more racially divisive than it was during my childhood, it has become resolutely clear to me that I only could have married a white man who is also a scholar of race and American history (and a former DJ with dope taste in music). Someone willing to immerse himself in the structural and racial disparities that have existed for time immemorial, who understands, because he’s taken the time to read and research, that black history is American history, and that there are a million different black stories and histories that have never been told by design.

  For the average white person in America, even and perhaps especially the average white liberal person who thinks they are on the right side of racial issues, the privilege is too entrenched. The work and humility required to fully understand systemic racism in this country holds no realistic appeal. Most white people go straight to their own sense of guilt and then don’t know how to manage their feelings from there, as we’ve seen play out over and over again in the “woke” era of 2020.

  It’s as if the only way for white people to become conversant in issues of racism and racial injustice is to make it their full-time job, which is maybe not such a bad idea?

  * * *

  It has been critically important to me that Chris, as a white man, understands how dearly I hold onto my own blackness, but equally important that he understand how necessary it is that our son be encouraged to hold onto his blackness, too.

  Epilogue

  For years during my twenties, I tacitly memorialized the version of me from a fictionalized world created by the white gaze with photos of myself as a little girl on the walls of my various homes—clad in a purple-and-green bikini wearing sunglasses and sitting on a yellow banana-seat bike, emerging from the water with wet droplets falling from my afro, wearing a flowy scarf around my neck and a straw hat and striking a mysterious pose.

  I took most of them down as I got older, but there was one that I kept up after my son, Kofi, was born, of me when I was about four years old. In it, I’m holding a frog that I’d caught in the brook near our house on Pumpkin Hill, and I am grinning from ear to ear, my brown face alight, afro wild, eyes delighted.

  The photo was on the wall in the longish stretch of hallway opposite the kitchen in our second apartment as a family together. Kofi, who was born less than two years after Chris and I met on the subway platform in Brooklyn, learned to walk by pushing a little plastic cart up and down that hallway, passing the photo, which was too high up on the wall for him to see. One day, when he was about four years old himself, he looked up and saw the picture, and then turned to me and said, “Mommy, why I’m holding a frog?”

  In the sound of his small, sweet voice, I heard what I’d been waiting to hear my entire life: this boy, with his tiny brown fingers grasping the handle of his little cart, eyes deep brown and bright, loose curls reaching up and around his tender, curious face—this boy saw himself in me.

  Years later, when Kofi was about seven, he and I arrived for our annual summer visit to my parents in New Hampshire ahead of Chris, who would join us after he finished his summer advising work. We were out for breakfast with Mom and Dad at a busy local restaurant and were looking at our menus when Kofi leaned over to me and quietly whispered, genuinely mystified, “Mom, why is everyone here white?”

  When I was my son’s age, this wall-to-wall whiteness, which he looked at with discerning and culturally sophisticated, city-born eyes, was all I knew, and although I took some comfort in Kofi’s bafflement, I wanted Mom and Dad to account for their choice to raise me there, to my black son, directly. “Ask your grandparents,” I said.

  “Because many of the people who live here are descendants of the first settlers to the area—those who worked and farmed the land for their livelihood,” Dad responded. “And the first settlers were white.” Without needing a prompt to answer further, he said, “As a naturalist, I need to feel connected to whatever undeveloped land there is left.”

  It had only ever been about him and what he needed. I didn’t want to make a scene in the restaurant—already people were looking at me and Kofi, the only two black people there—but I felt enraged anew through the keen reflection of my son. A rage that has only continued to blaze years on.

  A few weeks after that visit with my parents, Michael Brown was fatally shot in the back by police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This time, Kofi asked me, while we sat at the kitchen table together in our apartment, “Are you gonna get shot, Mom? Am I gonna get shot? Because we’re black?”

  I explained that yes, there was a chance that some white people might want to shoot us because we are black, because American history has not been kind to us, and that we, black folks, and especially young black boys, are left with the burden of fear that we might be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “We were never supposed to be here. Or to survive. But we are here and we have survived, and you, Kofi, can look to that legacy of survival and resilience and beauty and strength as your own,” I said, echoing the same sentiments that inform what has become my life’s work—writing and talking about black culture in America, amplifying black voices, and holding up the narrative of black folks both collectively and as individuals.

  Kofi got out of his chair and came to sit on my lap, his nine-year-old self still small enough to curl into my body, though just barely, and we sat together for a little while without talking. I breathed in the smell of his hair and skin, absorbed the glorious weight of his need for my love, for the safety he found in my arms—for his need for me. It was bittersweet, not just because of the subject matter that had prompted this moment, but also because I thought of my birth father and felt a wave of sadness take o
ver me.

  The year before, a friend of Joe’s had found me online and called to tell me that Joe had died of complications from diabetes and kidney failure, among other things. Joe did not have health insurance or access to proper health care, and subsequently did not survive as a black man in America. I thought there would be more time, but now Kofi will never meet or know his black birth grandfather, and that will always be one of my deepest regrets.

  * * *

  My son is light-skinned black. In the summertime when he was little, his skin, like mine when I was a child, turned toasty brown. My parents, his white grandparents, thought he was beautiful, especially during the darker-skinned season, and said so often. But as he got older, when his inflection started to match his skin tone and he chose to wear his hair in a style modeled after his favorite black basketball players, I saw a shift in the way my parents viewed him. As his own sense of blackness began to take shape, Mom and Dad didn’t quite know how to interact with him.

  On one of our last Christmas visits to New Hampshire a few years ago, Dad tripped inelegantly over his understanding of Kwanzaa—“I mean, every day is Kwanzaa, right? Hey, it’s OK, it’s Kwanzaa! But you guys know that already!” It felt like he was mocking the holiday traditionally celebrated by black families, and thereby mocking us. On our drive home to Brooklyn, Kofi asked why there was seemingly no evidence in their house that they had raised a black child. No black art, books, or music, like there was in our home.

  “I mean, it’s all, like, turtles,” he said from the back seat. “Does that hurt your feelings, Mom?”

  “A little,” I said, looking over toward Chris in the driver’s seat, hoping he could help me out here in explaining white people to his son.