Beloved, white racial grief erupts when you fear losing your dominance. You get mighty angry at our demand that you live up to the sense of responsibility you say others should have—especially black folk and people of color. You often tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to make no excuses for our failures, and to instead admit our flaws and better ourselves. And yet so many of you, beloved, are obstinate to a fault, intransigent and thin-skinned when it comes to accepting the calling out you effortlessly offer to others. Donald Trump is only the most recent and boisterous example.
The first stage of white racial grief is to plead utter ignorance about black life and culture. It seems impossible to pull off, but many of you appear to live in what the late writer and cultural critic Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia.” When black folk get in your face, or even just expect you to know a little about black life, to take the past into account when speaking about black life, your reaction is often, simply, to forget it. It is a willful refusal to know. So often many of you claim no knowledge of black life, as if it never played a role in your world or made a difference to your existence. But it is no less distressing that you can so easily dismiss the history of a people you share space and time with as you both carve out your destiny together on the same national geography. It is not unlike those explorers and pilgrims who “discovered” America, that is, discovered a land full of native people. Native lives stopped mattering before they ever began to count.
The historical erasure of blackness strengthens this racially blind version of American history, makes it easier to make the argument that black folk never did a damn thing for the nation. Iowa congressman Steve King wondered in 2016 where in history “are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people . . . where did any other subgroup of people [other than whites] contribute more to civilization?” King said that Western civilization is “rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.”
Let’s be honest, my friends, this kind of sentiment is far more widespread than you may care to admit. It makes one thing clear: black and white folk are often speaking different languages with no common frame of reference, and therefore, no possibility of understanding each other. Thus the crudest conclusions possible in American history have stuck to black life. Black folk are often seen as simians at the high table of culture, aping white society. This poisons public discourse, distorting the history of American politics. Liberal professor Mark Lilla argued that Hillary Clinton’s “calling out explicitly to African-American” and other groups in the 2016 campaign “was a strategic mistake” because it left out the white working class and the highly religious. But the history of American politics is the history of accommodating whiteness at many levels, and while religiously influenced working class folk surely need to be heeded, it is odd that Lilla’s invective against identity politics appeals to the religiously rooted white working class at the expense of the black or brown religiously influenced working classes. Lilla’s view is amnesia with a bang, or really, a fang, an exposed snarl at the inconvenient messiness of real history.
Real American history is the sticky web in which black and white are stuck together. Stop trying to pretend that you don’t know this. You can kill us, even brutalize us, but history makes escape from us impossible. An even greater fear lurks barely beneath the surface. What horrifies many of you is that America, at its root, has been in part made by blackness. God forbid, but it may in part be black. Slavery made America a slave to black history. As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now. America doesn’t even exist without us. That’s why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America. America shudders and says to itself: The president’s supposed to be us, not them. In that light, Donald Trump’s victory was hardly surprising.
The one-drop rule, the notion to racial purists that even a speck of black blood contaminates one’s heritage, has always signified that white America believed that blackness was superior. Even the slightest presence of black blood was able to overcome and outsmart whiteness. Blackness had to be taboo because it couldn’t be vanquished or destroyed. Blackness feels like a curse to your view of history.
White America, you deliberately forget how whiteness caused black suffering. And it shows in the strangest ways. You forget how you kept black folk poor as sharecroppers. You forget how you kept us out of your classrooms and in subpar schools. You forget how you denied us jobs, and when we got them, how you denied us promotions. You forget how you kept us out of the suburbs, and now that you’re gentrifying our inner city neighborhoods, you’re pushing us to the suburbs. You forget that you kept us from voting, and then blamed us for being lackadaisical at the polls. Although it sounds delusional, perhaps more than a few of you feel the way Donald Trump’s former campaign chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, Kathy Miller, does. “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” Miller said. “You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” She also said, “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected.”
Think of how the members of the House of Representatives, influenced by the Tea Party, opened the 112th Congress in 2011 by reading out loud on the House floor the Constitution in its entirety. Except they didn’t read the entire, or the original, version, which included Article 1, Section 2, which says that black folk equaled three-fifths of a white person. The representatives lapsed into calculated forgetting.
That sort of behavior is not limited to the mostly white men who make up our Congress. It bleeds into the general population as well. How many high school social studies textbooks, like the one prepared for use in Texas, forget racial terror by downplaying slavery and barely mentioning segregation, presenting a seamless transition from bondage to freedom?
Toni Morrison, in her great novel Beloved, replaces memory and forgetting with “rememory” and “disremember” to help us think about who, or what, the nation chooses to remember or forget. President Donald Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his 2016 campaign slogan. It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days. But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember. It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture. Going back to a time that was great depends on deliberate disremembering.
One of the great perks of being white in America is the capacity to forget at will. The sort of amnesia that blankets white America is reflected in an Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman lyric sung by Barbra Streisand: “What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.” The second stage of grief flashes in the assertion “it didn’t happen.” Instead of “forget it,” there is “deny it.” Civil rights icon Joseph Lowery often says that we live in the fifty-first state, the state of denial. Denial is even more sinister than amnesia because there is some concession to facts that are then roundly negated. Here is where the gaslight effect goes wild. Black folk are made to feel crazy for believing something they know to be true.
Beloved, you must admit that denial of fact, indeed denial as fact, has shaped your version of American history. This is how you can ingeniously deny your role in past racism. You acknowledge that bigotry exists. For instance, you will often say that separate but equal public policy was bad. You just don’t find too many current examples of the persistence of racism, like the fact that, given they have the same years of education, a white man with a criminal record is often more likely to get a job than a black man with no record. Or that even when they commit the same crime, bl
ack folk are more likely to do more time than a comparable white person. Or that a black male born in 2001 has a 32 percent chance of going to jail—a one-in-three shot—whereas a Latino has a 17 percent chance, and a white male a 6 percent chance. Or that black women are far more likely than others to be evicted. Or that police stop black and brown folk far more than white folk. Or that black folk are frequently illegally excluded from jury service. Sure, there are no white and black water fountains, but inequality persists.
White denial thrives on shifts and pivots. “It was my ancestors, not me, who did this to you.” But what looks like confession is really denial. The “them, not me” defense denies how the problem persists in the present day. It is best to think of systems and not individuals when it comes to racial benefit in white America. Thinking of it in individual terms removes blame from many of you who are present beneficiaries of past behavior. The institutions of national life favor your success, whether that means you get better schools and more jobs, or less punishment and less jail. Not because you’re necessarily smarter, or better behaved, but because being white offers you benefits, understanding, and forgiveness where needed. A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you actively resist black success, or the success of other people of color. It’s what you do for each other, how you take each other into account, that makes up a lot of what we have come to call “white privilege.”
When it comes to race the past is always present. What Jim Crow achieved in the past through, say, redlining—where services like banking, insurance, health care, and supermarkets are denied to specific racial or ethnic groups—continues to this day. Formal segregation in housing policies may have been struck down, but steering, where real estate brokers direct home buyers toward or away from particular neighborhoods based on race, is as effective as ever. School segregation is no longer the law of the land, but classrooms today are depressingly re-segregated.
Yet no one is responsible. All we hear is the refrain from reggae star Shaggy’s hit, “It wasn’t me.” We end up with what social scientist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “racism without racists.”
My friends, if you simply look around, and reflect on even recent history, you’ll see that denial shows up in painful ways, even among young folk. A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that 56 percent of Millennials think that the government spends too much on black and minority issues, and an even higher number think that white folk suffer discrimination, and it is just as big a problem as that suffered by black folk and other minorities. Or those white youth wonder why they don’t have a White Entertainment Channel to match BET.
In the political realm, look at the Supreme Court in its Shelby v. Holder voting rights amendment decision. The Court struck down the requirement to get legal permission to change voting practices because it concluded such permission was no longer necessary. The court denied the primary reason for recent black voting success: the existence of the rule for preclearance—where a jurisdiction covered under the law cannot change voting procedure without written approval from the Department of Justice—in Section Four of the Voting Rights Act. Now they were throwing it out because the very success of the rule counted as evidence that it was no longer needed. It was a nifty and nasty bit of circular reasoning that denied the facts. Can you not imagine how this sort of reasoning makes us just a little bit crazy? How it makes us think that white folk are hell-bent on denying how much the past is still with us? Black folk were successfully voting because they were being protected. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg torched her conservative colleagues with blistering eloquence. She argued that “throwing out preclearance [the Section Four formula] when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella because you are not getting wet.” That’s just one example of why Ginsburg may be black folks’ favorite justice since the death of Thurgood Marshall—despite calling Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality “dumb and disrespectful,” an issue I’ll take up later.
Instances of denial clutter the landscape. Fox News channels such denial nightly. I’m distressed to see the right-wing network blaring from the television screens in the restaurants of hotels I stay in when I’m on the road in states like Ohio or Florida. Places where working class and poor whites don’t fare so well, and yet they cling to the racial fantasies of going back to a time when they ran things. But just as it was true when, say, Ronald Reagan was in office, working class whites and their poor kin won’t benefit from the economic policies of the conservative politicians they depend on to diss black people and other minorities. What they gain from not being seen as black they lose in real economic terms. It’s a Faustian racial bargain.
The third stage of white racial grief, appropriation, looms everywhere. If black history can’t be forgotten or denied, white America can, simply, take it. Appropriation is a tricky symptom of white racial grief, and one that, ironically, defers to black culture even as it displaces it. White culture bows at the shrine of black culture in order to rob it of its riches. White America loves black style when its face and form are white.
Rachel Dolezal, former president of the NAACP in Seattle, Washington, caused quite a stir when she lied about her racial identity, which was white, and claimed to be black. She was eventually forced to leave her post at the NAACP. Dolezal didn’t feel that her white identity should in any way still the heart of blackness that beat within her. White Australian rapper Iggy Azalea mimicked the dialect of the hood in America to cash in on the desire to have white hip-hop stars equal the achievements of their black peers, much like the truly great Eminem. Eminem has paid homage to hip-hop culture with extraordinary talent and hard work, just as Justin Timberlake does with rhythm and blues, except, in the case of Timberlake, he picks and chooses his way through blackness. He’s black at awards time, not so much when it comes to taking heat with Janet Jackson over their controversial halftime Super Bowl performance in which he tore off part of her clothing at the end of their act. Timberlake proves that cultural critic Greg Tate is right: such white stars want everything but the burden of the blackness they sample. The credo of appropriators is “it happened to me too.” Blackness, that is, but not its costs or penalties. Moreover, these stars claim an outsider status without actually having to be outsiders.
The novelist Lionel Shriver threw an opening salvo in the newest installment of the writing wars to determine who could say what about whom. Shriver dropped her bomb in 2016 when she addressed the Brisbane Writers Festival and rode herd on her free speech horse against political correctness. Millennials, and the generation trailing them, are especially vulnerable on this score, Shriver argued, because they are in a race “to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved—who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.” As Shriver sees it, the left has become all too nervous about living in the skin or brain or experiences of the other. The demand that folk write only about what they know or experience is utter nonsense to Shriver; it is suffocating orthodoxy that imperils the art of the novel. “Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina.” It’s easy to empathize with Shriver; after all, if you only write what you know, then you are left with precious little to write about.
Shriver’s argument, however, fails to see how other cultures—their people, their ideas, their identities—have always been treated as only fiction, have always been looted of their inherent value and forced to fit in to the schemes, worldviews, or novels of folk, especially white folk, who were invested in denying their own privilege and power to treat these other cultures just as they pleased. When Shriver talks about “free speech,” she gets the speech part right; but she only sees “free” from the perspective of the person doing the writing, not the one being written about. Shriver as a white writer is quite free to roam across the globe in search of whatever experience
s or insights will light her way to a nuanced, engaged piece of fiction.
But that freedom is not merely artistic; in fact, her art, the art of white writers, rests on power relations that have left black culture at a disadvantage, vulnerable to literary cherry-picking. Shriver’s grumbling is dressed up as the will to free expression, which should characterize the art of writing in any truly liberated culture. But underneath her gripes are a body of ideas and identities that have been abused, and appropriated, against the will of other cultures, and used at the discretion of writers who pay no mind to the people whose experiences they seek to borrow. Those people of color, for instance, have been cogs in the cultural machinery of white writers. Of course the writers’ purpose might be a good one, such as telling a story that hasn’t been told. But if the folk whose story is told don’t have the opportunity to tell their own story, what is on the surface a good thing becomes a matter of who has the power and privilege to spin narratives.
We must also not overlook how the use of such experiences can reinforce beliefs about communities of color that have harmful political consequences, such as William Styron’s controversial novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which painted Turner as a man more obsessed with violent sexual lust for a blonde teenager than political rebellion against slavery. Nor should we ignore how the appropriation of “minority” cultures by white writers with a political advantage leaves people of color little room to speak their truths in their own ways.
And we certainly can’t ignore how the more famous members of your tribe often get angry when they’re called on their appropriation. Fashion designer Marc Jacobs used candy-colored Etsy dreadlocks on mostly nonblack models in his 2016 fashion show, provoking ire and outrage. Critics claimed he trafficked in the worst sort of racial appropriation. Jacobs shot back at “all who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ or whatever nonsense about any race of skin color wearing their hair in a particular style or manner.” Jacobs displayed great insensitivity and ignorance when he argued that it’s “funny how you don’t criticize women of color for straightening their hair.” The reason for the lack of criticism may be simple: white folk have no corner on the straight-hair market, as witnessed by Asian and Latino follicles. Jacobs exposed his unconscious bias when he, of course, tried to claim the opposite: “I don’t see color or race—I see people.”
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