By the end of the nineteenth century, dozens of cities had “Blue Vein” societies, which barred Dark people “not white enough to show blue veins,” as Charles Chesnutt put it in an 1898 short story. Light people reproduced the paper-bag test, pencil test, door test, and comb test to bar Dark people from their churches, businesses, parties, organizations, schools, and HBCUs.
But these segregators were still segregated from Whiteness. In 1896, shoemaker Homer Plessy—of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which deemed constitutional “equal but separate accommodations”—hailed from a proud Light community in New Orleans. But Mississippi professor Charles Carroll considered the interracial intercourse of the White human and the Black “beast” the most diabolical of all sins. Naturally rebellious Light men were raping White women, leading to lynchings, Carroll warned in his 1900 book, The Negro a Beast. In 1901, North Carolina State University president George T. Winston disagreed, framing Dark people as committing “more horrible crimes.” Sociologist Edward Byron Reuter added to Winston’s position, declaring that biracial people were responsible for all Black achievements, in his 1918 book, The Mulatto in the United States. Reuter made Light people a sort of racial middle class, below White people and above Dark people.
Reuter defended Light people from the wrath of eugenicists demanding “racial purity” and from Dark people challenging their colorism. By the final days of 1920, the famous grandson of a biracial man had enough of Dark activists, especially Marcus Garvey and his fast-growing Universal Negro Improvement Association. “American Negroes recognize no color line in or out of the race, and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it,” W.E.B. Du Bois declared in The Crisis. This from a man who probably heard the Black children’s rhyme: “If you’re white, you’re right / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow / If you’re brown, stick around / If you’re black, get back.” This from a man who in his own “Talented Tenth” essay in 1903 listed twenty-one Black leaders, all but one of whom was biracial. This from a man who heard Light people say over and over again that the Dark masses needed “proper grooming,” as imparted by North Carolina educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who took pride in her English ancestry.
Du Bois’s avowal of a post-color Black America after the presidential election of Warren G. Harding in 1920 was as out of touch as John McWhorter’s avowal of a post-racial America after Barack Obama’s presidential election in 2008. Either racist policies or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today. Either racist policies or Dark inferiority explained why Light people were wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Dark people in 1920. Du Bois snubbed the existence of colorism, claiming it had been “absolutely repudiated by every thinking Negro.”
Du Bois had changed his thinking by the 1930s, moving closer to the deported Garvey. He replaced Garvey as the chief antiracist critic of the NAACP, which initially shied away from defending the Dark and poor Scottsboro Boys, who were falsely accused of raping two Alabama White women in 1931. Du Bois could not stand the NAACP’s new executive secretary, Walter White. The blue-eyed, blond-haired son of biracial parents had advocated assimilation and reportedly believed that “unmixed” Negroes were “inferior, infinitely inferior now.” In The Crisis in 1934, months before leaving the NAACP, Du Bois bristled: “Walter White is white.”
Entrepreneurs were hard at work figuring out a way for Black people, through changing their color and hair, to pass as Light or White, as Walter White had in his earlier investigations of lynchings. The post–World War I craze of the conk—short for the gel called congolene—made it as fashionable for Black men to straighten their hair as for Black women. “I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America” trying “to look ‘pretty’ by white standards,” Malcolm X recalled after receiving his first conk as a teenager. Skin-lightening products received a boost after the discovery in 1938 that monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone (HQ) lightened Dark skin.
By the early 1970s, Black power activists inspired by Malcolm X and Angela Davis—including my parents—were liberating their kinks. No more killa cuts for the Black men. No more straight hair for Black women. The higher the better was in. Not many men had a higher Afro than my father. Dark people like my father were saying it loud: “I’m Dark and I’m proud.”
* * *
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SOME DARK PEOPLE took too much pride in Darkness, inverting the color hierarchy as I did at FAMU, deploying the two-drop rule to disavow the Blackness of Light people even as they adored the Light Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and Kathleen Cleaver. And, eventually, the Light ideal came back with a vengeance, if it had ever left. In his 1988 film School Daze, Spike Lee satirized his experiences in the late 1970s at historically Black Morehouse College as a battle between the Dark-skinned “jigaboos” and the Light-skinned “wannabes.” My father slowly cut his Afro over the years, and my mother straightened her kinks by the time I arrived.
In the 1980s, Light children were adopted first, had higher incomes, and were less likely to be trapped in public housing and prisons. “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence” became a popular antiracist saying as the era of mass incarceration surged in the 1990s. In 2007, MSNBC’s Don Imus compared Rutgers’s Dark basketball players—“that’s some nappy-headed hos there”—to Tennessee’s Light players—“they all look cute”—after they played in the NCAA women’s championship. In a 2014 casting call for the movie Straight Outta Compton, the Sandi Alesse Agency ranked extras: “A GIRLS: …Must have real hair…B GIRLS: …You should be light-skinned…C GIRLS: These are African American girls, medium to light skinned with a weave…D GIRLS: These are African American girls…Medium to dark skin tone. Character types.”
By then, singer Michael Jackson had paved the skin-bleaching boulevard traveled by rapper Lil’ Kim, baseball player Sammy Sosa, and so many more. Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea.
Some White people have their own skin-care “addiction” to reach a post-racial ideal: tanning. In 2016, the United States elected the “orange man,” as NeNe Leakes calls Trump, who reportedly uses a tanning bed every morning. Paradoxically, some tanning White people look down on bleaching Black people, as if there’s a difference. Surveys show that people consider tanned skin—the replica color of Light people—more attractive than naturally pale skin and Dark skin.
* * *
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HALFTIME ARRIVED. LINES of musicians linked together and outlined the entire football field. The largest human-made rectangle I had ever seen. Colored orange and green. Not Dark and Light. My eyes widened in awe at the length of the FAMU Rattler. On the far side, seven tall and slender drum majors, five yards apart, slowly low-stepped to the center of the field as announcer Joe Bullard yelled their names over our screams. They stopped when they reached the center of the field, facing us. Slowly, they twirled. The drum line sounded. The drum majors sat and then stood, leading the band in a twerk, twerk, twerk, twerk, twerk. We went mad.
“Please welcome what has become known as America’s band,” Bullard said as the band played and high-stepped around the field, knees folding into their chests with the ease of folding chairs.
“The innnnn-credible, the maaaaagnificent, the number-one band innnnnnnn the woooorld. The faaaantastic Florida A&M University Marching Band!”
Band members stopped in straight lines and faced us. They kissed their instruments.
“First the souuund!”
Daaaa…da, da, daaaaaaaa—the trumpets blew Twentieth Century Fox’s thunderous movie introduction, blasting our ears off.
Then the show. High-stepping band members changed i
n and out of intricate formations and played choruses by Destiny’s Child, Carl Thomas, and Sisqó, as the tens of thousands of people sang backup as the world’s biggest choir. The R&B ballads warmed us up for the climax—the rap songs. Bucking and twerking and twisting and jumping and swaying all in unison, the band and the backup dancers were one as the crowd rapped. I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking they were deceiving me. I could not play an instrument and could barely dance. How could all these heavy-coated students play tough songs and dance sophisticated routines in harmony? Ludacris, Trick Daddy, Three 6 Mafia, Outkast—the band paraded these Southern rappers before high-stepping off the field to the theme song of Good Times, to our deafening applause. Utterly exhilarated, I don’t know if I ever clapped and stomped harder and louder.
Halftime over, the exodus out of the stands startled me. The people had come to see what the people had come to see.
* * *
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I HAD COME to see Clarence. I walked into our off-campus apartment, all giddy, like after watching the Marching 100 that first time. Quietness shrouded the afternoon. Dirty dishes sat in the open kitchen. Clarence had to be in his room, finishing homework.
The door was open; I knocked on it anyway, disturbing him at his desk. He looked up in wonder. We had roomed together for nearly two years. Clarence had gotten used to my midday interruptions. He braced himself for my latest epiphany.
WHITE
ANTI-WHITE RACIST: One who is classifying people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating the entire race of White people with racist power.
I STOOD IN THE doorframe, sometime in March 2002. Clarence probably sensed another argument coming. We were tailor-made to argue against each other. Intensely cynical, Clarence seemed to believe nothing. Intensely gullible, I was liable to believe anything, a believer more than a thinker. Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.
“So what you want to tell me?” Clarence asked.
“I think I figured White people out,” I said.
“What is it now?”
* * *
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I’D ARRIVED AT FAMU trying to figure Black people out. “I had never seen so many Black people together with positive motives,” I wrote in an English 101 essay in October 2000. The sentence seemed out of place, sandwiched nastily between “I had never heard the world famous ‘Marching 100’ perform” and “This was my first ever college football game.” The idea—even more out of place. How did I overlook all those Black people who came together with positive motives in all those places and spaces of my upbringing? How did I become the Black judge? Racist ideas suspend reality and retrofit history, including our individual histories.
Anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts when I first moved into Gibbs Hall at FAMU. When you entered the lobby, to the right you’d see a busy, tired-looking office. If you took a slight left, you’d find yourself walking down the hallway to my dorm room; a sharper left would take you to the television room, where our dorm’s cluster of basketball fans regularly lost bitter arguments to the army of football fans over television rights.
There were no arguments on, or games on, in the television room on the evening of November 7, 2000. We still had our game faces on, though. Rookie voters, we were watching the election results unfold, hoping that our votes would help keep the brother of Florida’s governor out of the White House. Black Floridians had not forgotten Jeb Bush’s termination of affirmative-action programs earlier in the year. We had voted to save the rest of America from the racist Bushes.
The election was coming down to the winner of Florida. The polls closed, and before long we saw Al Gore’s winning face flash on the screen. Game over. We rejoiced. I joined a joyful exodus out of the television room. We marched to our dorm rooms like fans streaming from the stadium when the Marching 100’s halftime show ended. The people had come to see what the people had come to see.
The next morning, I awoke to learn that George W. Bush somehow held a narrow lead in Florida of 1,784 votes. Too close to call, and Jeb Bush’s appointees were overseeing the recount.
The unfairness of it all crashed on me that November. My anti-Black racist ideas were no consolation. I walked out of my dorm room that morning into a world of anguish. In the weeks that followed, I heard and overheard, read and reread, angry, tearful, first- and secondhand stories of FAMU students and their families back home not being able to vote. Complaints from Black citizens who’d registered but never received their registration cards. Or their voting location had been changed. Or they were unlawfully denied a ballot without a registration card or ordered to leave the long line when polls closed. Or they were told that as convicted felons they could not vote. Earlier in the year, Florida purged fifty-eight thousand alleged felons from the voting rolls. Black people were only 11 percent of registered voters but comprised 44 percent of the purge list. And about twelve thousand of those people purged were not convicted felons.
Reporters and campaign officials seemed more focused on Floridians whose votes were not counted or counted the wrong way. Palm Beach County used confusing ballots that caused about nineteen thousand spoiled ballots and perhaps three thousand Gore voters to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan. Gadsden County, next to Tallahassee, had Florida’s highest percentage of Black voters and the highest spoilage rate. Blacks were ten times more likely than Whites to have their ballots rejected. The racial inequity could not be explained by income or educational levels or bad ballot design, according to a New York Times statistical analysis. That left one explanation, one that at first I could not readily admit: racism. A total of 179,855 ballots were invalidated by Florida election officials in a race ultimately won by 537 votes.
A twenty-nine-year-old Ted Cruz served on Bush’s legal team that resisted efforts at manual recounts in Democratic counties that could have netted Gore tens of thousands of votes while pushing for manual recounts in Republican counties that netted Bush 185 additional votes.
Watching this horror flick unfold, I recoiled in fear for days after the election. But not some of my peers at FAMU. They amassed the courage I did not have, that all antiracists must have. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the strength to do what is right in the face of it,” as the anonymous philosopher tells us. Some of us are restrained by fear of what could happen to us if we resist. In our naïveté, we are less fearful of what could happen to us—or is already happening to us—if we don’t resist.
On November 9, 2000, FAMU’s courageous student-government leaders directed a silent march of two thousand students from campus to Florida’s nearby capitol, where they conducted a sit-in. The sit-in lasted for about twenty-four hours, but the witch hunt we launched back at campus lasted for weeks, if not months. We hunted out those thousands of FAMU students who did not vote. We shamed those nonvoters with stories of people who marched so we could vote. I participated in this foolish hunt—one seems to recur every time an election is lost. The shaming ignores the real source of our loss and heartbreak. The fact was that Black people delivered enough voters to win, but those voters were sent home or their votes spoiled. Racist ideas often lead to this silly psychological inversion, where we blame the victimized race for their own victimization.
When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer saw the United States as a democracy. When Gore conceded the next day, when White Democrats stood aside and let Bush steal the presidency on the strength of destroyed Black votes, I was shot back into the binary thinking of Sunday school, where I was taught about good and evil, God and the Devil. As Bush’s team transitioned that winter, I transitioned into hating White people.
White people became devils to me, but I had to figure out how they came to be devils. I read “The Making of Devil,” a chapter in Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America, written in 1965. Muha
mmad led the unorthodox Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until his death in 1975. According to the theology he espoused, more than six thousand years ago, in an all-Black world, a wicked Black scientist named Yakub was exiled alongside his 59,999 followers to an island in the Aegean Sea. Yakub plotted his revenge against his enemies: “to create upon the earth a devil race.”
Yakub established a brutal island regime of selective breeding—eugenics meeting colorism. He killed all Dark babies and forced Light people to breed. When Yakub died, his followers carried on, creating the Brown race from the Black race, the Red race from the Brown race, the Yellow race from the Red race, and the White race from the Yellow race. After six hundred years, “on the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils—savages.”
White people invaded the mainland and turned “what had been a peaceful heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting.” Black authorities chained the White criminals and marched them to the prison caves of Europe. When the Bible says, “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” NOI theologians say the “serpent is symbolic of the devil white race Moses lifted up out of the caves of Europe, teaching them civilization” to rule for the next six thousand years.
Aside from the White rule for six thousand years, this history of White people sounded eerily similar to the history of Black people I’d learned piecemeal in White schools of racist thought. White racists cast Black people as living in the bushes of Africa, instead of in caves, until Moses, in the form of White enslavers and colonizers, arrived as a civilizer. Slavery and colonization ended before Black people—and Africa—became civilized in the ways of White people. Black people descended into criminality and ended up lynched, segregated, and mass-incarcerated by noble officers of the law in “developed” White nations. “Developing” Black nations became riddled with corruption, ethnic strife, and incompetence, keeping them poor and unstable, despite all sorts of “aid” from the former mother countries in Europe. The NOI’s history of White people was the racist history of Black people in Whiteface.
How to Be an Antiracist Page 13
