by Zadie Smith
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THE OFFICER HAD a sadistic version of the same face. Why are you bothering me with this bullshit? The bullshit in this case being a man explaining he couldn’t breathe under the pressure of the officer’s knee on his neck. A man called George. He was alerting the officer to the fact that he was about to die. You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck till he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. (Or you’d have to be pretty certain of immunity from the herd—not an unsafe bet for a white police officer, historically, in America.) But this was something darker—deadlier. It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation.
The immediate infection comes the moment the store in question calls the cops and the voice down the line asks after the race of this master criminal who has just tried to use a phony twenty-dollar bill with the ink still wet upon it. To have any real chance of catching the virus from the answer “white,” you’d have to add a qualifier like “homeless” or “on meth.” The lack of capital would have to be strikingly evident—visible. But the answer “black” immediately carries a heavy load, and a number of potentially violent actions—that would have been unlikely otherwise—suddenly become psychologically possible. You don’t just lecture or book this type of body or take it down to the station. It would have no respect for you if you did that—after all, it is more than used to rough treatment. Nor can it really be taken seriously when it complains of pain, as this particular type of American body is well known to be able to withstand all kinds of improbable discomforts. It lives in cramped spaces and drinks water with lead in it, and gets diabetes as a matter of course, and has all kinds of health issues that seem to be some mysterious part of its culture. It sits in jail cells without windows for years at a time. And even if it did complain—without money, without that well-dressed lawyer running to its aid—what recourse would it have?
Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave ship four hundred years ago, looked down at the sweating, bleeding, moaning mass below deck and reverse-engineered an emotion—contempt—from a situation that he, the patient himself, had created. He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. So unlike other people. Frighteningly unlike! Later, in his cotton fields, he had them whipped and then made them go back to work and thought, They can’t possibly feel as we do. You can whip them and they go back to work. And having thus placed them in a category similar to the one in which we place animals, he experienced the same fear and contempt we have for animals. Animals being both subject to man and a threat to him simultaneously.
They have no capital, not even their labor.
Anything can be done to them.
They have no recourse.
Three strands in the DNA of the virus. In theory, these principles of slavery were eradicated from the laws of the land—not to mention the hearts and minds of the people—long ago. In theory. In practice, they pass like a virus through churches and schools, adverts and movies, books and political parties, courtrooms and the prison-industrial complex and, of course, police departments. Like a virus, they work invisibly within your body until you grow sick with them. I truly believe that many people are unaware that they carry the virus at all until the very moment you find yourself phoning the cops to explain the race of the man you thought looked suspicious walking through his own neighborhood, or who spoke back to you in Central Park, or whatever the fuck it is. One of the quirks of the virus—as James Baldwin pointed out—is that it makes the sufferer think the symptom is the cause. Why else would the carriers of this virus work so hard—even now, even in the bluest states in America—to ensure their children do not go to school with the children of these people whose lives supposedly matter? Why would they still—even now, even in the bluest states in America—only consider a neighborhood worthy of their presence when its percentage of black residents falls low enough that they can feel confident of the impossibility of infection? This mentality looks over the fence and sees a plague people: plagued by poverty, first and foremost. If this child, formed by poverty, sits in a class with my child, who was formed by privilege, my child will suffer—my child will catch their virus. This not-so-secret terror is lodged as firmly in blue hearts as in red; it plays a central role in the spread of the contagion. (To fear the contagion of poverty is reasonable. To keep voting for policies that ensure the permanent existence of an underclass is what is meant by “structural racism.”) And it’s a naïve American who at this point thinks that integration—if it were ever to actually occur—would not create some initial losses on either side. A long-preserved privilege dies hard. A long-preserved isolation—even if it has been forced—is painful to emerge from. But I am talking in hypotheticals: the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to “blackout” their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and “educate” themselves about black issues—as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.
If the virus and the inequalities it creates were ever to leave us, America’s extremities would fade. They wouldn’t disappear—no country on Earth can claim that—but some things would no longer be considered normal. There would no longer be those who are taught Latin and those who are barely taught to read. There would no longer be too many people who count their wealth in the multimillions and too many who live hand to mouth. A space launch would not be hard followed by a riot. White college kids would not smoke weed in their dorms while their black peers caught mandatory sentences for selling it to them. America would no longer be that thrilling place of unbelievable oppositions and spectacular violence that makes more equitable countries appear so tame and uneventful in comparison. But the questions have become: Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America? Real change would involve a broad recognition that the fatalist, essentialist race discourse we often employ as a superficial cure for the symptoms of this virus manages, in practice, to smoothly obscure the fact that the DNA of this virus is economic at base. Therefore, it is most effectively attacked when many different members of the plague class—that is, all economically exploited people, whatever their race—act in solidarity with each other. It would involve the (painful) recognition that this virus infects not only individuals but entire power structures, as any black citizen who has been pinned to the ground by a black police officer can attest. If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it’s because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people. The time has long past when only one community’s work would be required to cure what ails us.
I used to think that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, protested it peacefully, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how so many Americans keep giving it to each other, irresponsibly and shamefully, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and to the body politic—I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore.
Intimations
Debts and Lessons
1. My Mother
Energy, vitality, charisma. The source: an undimmed childishness. Which I share.
2. My Father
A readiness to admit failure and weakness
. An acceptance of guilt.
3. Ben
Good humor. The family energy combined with a performer’s desire to waste nothing, to turn all gifts outwards.
4. Luke
A homemade spirituality. Love of nature and faith in all natural things—including death. An internal clock that pays no mind to the time of the world.
5. Mr. Rainbow
In his classroom, what was on your desk, in front of you, was yours to perfect. To do as well as you were able. Handwriting—even back then, a dead art—was to be taken as seriously as spelling, as math, as memorizing the events of 1066. Joy and rigor were the same thing: if the whole choir was to get the benefit of “Bali Ha’i” it would be by way of a martial attention to each part of the whole. There was nowhere to hide in that choir. And no pride to be taken in the fact that we, “the singers,” were removed from the school as a whole every Tuesday afternoon and presented with this task. There was nothing special about us to be found in that fact, not even when, months later, we sang “Bali Ha’i” perfectly, just as he had trained us to do. Yes, we sang it well; the song was beautiful. We owed it to the song.
6. Darren
That prejudice is most dangerous not when it resides in individual hearts and minds but when it is preserved in systems. For example: an educational system that proves unable to see a boy as a child, seeing him only as a potential threat. That any child who enters such a prejudiced system will be in grave danger. Be he ever so beautiful and talented, inspired and inspirational, loving and loved—he can still be broken.
7. Kibibi
How to dance. How to make yourself up from scraps—from whatever is available. How to be continually surprised by small things, like the spring of a jack-in-the-box, your most treasured toy. Here he comes! Here he comes! And therefore: how never to be cynical.
8. Kellas
To consider yourself lucky, even in situations which almost anybody else would consider extremely difficult and unfair. To think, reflexively, of whoever suffers. To forgive anyone who has wounded you, no matter how badly, especially if there is any sign whatsoever that a person has, in wounding you, also wounded themselves. To make no hierarchical distinction between people. To tell any story just as it happened, only exaggerating for humor, but never lying, and never trying to give yourself the flattering role.
9. Christine
That the diaspora included me. Sistahood.
10. Muhammad Ali
“No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Therefore: solidarity.
11. Pablo
A thirteen-year-old, avant-garde painter appeared in school, very unlike the other boys. Out. Unafraid. From Argentina. The most recent immigrant in a school of many immigrants. He needed a model for a nude, which, in the execution, turned out to be abstract: circles and triangles. You couldn’t tell it was me, but we recognized each other. The picture was marginal, he was marginal, I was marginal. How to delight in a margin.
12. Lorraine Hansberry
“When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right.” Therefore: compassion.
13. Jenny, Drama Teacher
A task is in front of you. It is not as glorious as you had imagined or hoped. (In this case, it is not the West End, it is not Broadway, it is a small black box stapled to an ugly comprehensive school.) But it is the task in front of you. Delight in it. The more absurd and tiny it is, the more care and dedication it deserves. Large, sensible projects require far less belief. People who dedicate themselves to unimportant things will sometimes be blind to the formal borders that are placed around the important world. They might see teenagers as people. They will make themselves absurd to the important world. Mistakes will be made. Appropriate measures will be pursued. The border between the important and the unimportant will be painfully reestablished. But the magic to be found in the black box will never be forgotten by any who entered it.
14. Zora Neale Hurston
Just: brass balls. Although that’s somebody else’s language. The importance of finding your own language. Brass titties?
15. Tracy Chapman
“All that you have is your soul.” Therefore: liberty.
16. Hannah
Everyday goodness, care, attention, in the form of friendship, daughtership, mothership, siblingship. When did Hannah ever make anyone feel bad?
17. Daisy
Practical morality. A calendar filled with every birthday, every anniversary. Nothing put off till tomorrow. No love abstracted, instead everything made concrete and demonstrated. Memory and memorialization as an act of love, completed on behalf of all the other people less organized, less able to remember, and therefore grateful for the prompt. The value of being that person who remembers the childhoods of others better than they themselves recall them, and takes it upon themselves to preserve said childhoods for safekeeping. Sending an old friend’s childhood back to them at the very moment they are most in need of it.
18. Zulfi
To have one layer of skin less than the others, and therefore to feel it all: the good and the bad, the beautiful and the abject. Not only to make art but in some sense to live it.
19. Virginia Woolf
To replace that missing layer of skin with language. For as long as that works.
20. Mags
Delirium, delight, youth, sunshine, love letters, love songs. “Love me,” sang the Cardigans, “fool me,” and we did both—it was all we had to do. It is possible to grow disdainful of love songs of this type. But never to entirely forget what it was to hear truth in banal pop lyrics.
21. Nick
How to love. How to give. How to grow up. Laughter as a peace offering. Courage. (All intimations still in progress.)
22. Devorah
To make use of your missing layer at all times in all things. To read every line of a book with the same sense of involvement and culpability as if you had written it yourself. And, conversely, to write your own sentences as if you had no more ownership over the lines than a stranger. To be never finished thinking, because everything is as infinite as God. To know there is a metaphysics of everything.
23. Darryl
History as the antidote to dogma. Identity as area of interest, as the form in which you’ve chosen to expend your love—and your commitment.
24. Dave
As improbable as it often seems, it is possible to act. To lead. To use your imagination to build practical structures that will in some form improve the lives of the people who enter them. Paranoia about action—and the motivations for action—is the sickly indulgence of intellectuals and philosophers. The truth is that some people have a gift for action. In some people this gift is outsized, disproportionate, extraordinary to witness.
25. Carol
When in the presence of a child, get on the floor. Or else bend down until your own and the child’s eyes meet. Mothering is an art. Housekeeping is an art. Gardening is an art. Baking is an art. Those of us who have no natural gifts in these areas—or perhaps no interest—too easily dismiss them. Making small talk is an art, and never to be despised just because you yourself dread making it. Knowing all your neighbors’ names is an art. Sending cards at holidays, to everybody you know—this, too, is an art. But above all these: playing. The tales of adult women who still know how to play with children—these should be honored. Collected in a history book, like Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Instead, their grandchildren remember.
26. Contingency
That I was born when I was born, where I was born—a case of relative historical luck. That I grew up in a moment of social, religious and national transition. That my school still sang the Anglican hymns, at least for a little while, so that the ancient diction of my country came to me while very young, and fruitfully mixed with the sounds of my heritage. That the tail end of one thing and the beginning of another were both visible and equally interesting to me. Milton and Monie Love. Hill a
nd gully rider, hill and gully! Keats and Monty Python. And did those feet in ancient time? Kafka and Prince. Yellow bird, up high in banana tree. Twelfth Night and Desmond’s. Malcolm X and Aneurin Bevan. Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin. “Pump Up the Jam.” Peter Cook and Tupac. Queen Latifah and Vita Sackville-West. That there were so many voices in the streets. That such complex convergences were my earliest knowledge of the world. That no one interfered with me, sexually, as a child. That my father was dull and steady and did not drink, due to a weak kidney. That my own love of alcohol and all forms of mood transformers and enhancers for some reason never became excessive. That my mother had no hatred for her own skin, hair, nose, backside, nor any part of her. That my family was essentially matriarchal. That I was considered “ugly” young and “beautiful” later. That by the time the external opinion changed it was too late to create any real change in me. That the kinds of women I admired in childhood were all from what Toni Cade Bambara called the championship tradition: Neneh, George Eliot, Madonna, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Jones, Salt, Pepa, Lil’ Kim, Joan Armatrading, Angela Davis, Elizabeth I. That my fear is stronger than my desire—including my desire to self-harm. That my grandfathers—one a violent alcoholic, the other a destroyer of women—were both unknown to me. That my brothers were a delight to me, from the first. That I was an oldest child, with all the shameful obliviousness that implies. That I met a human whose love has allowed me not to apply for love too often through my work—even when we’ve hurt each other desperately. That my children know the truth about me but still tolerate me, so far. That my physical and moral cowardice have never really been tested, until now.
