Tears We Cannot Stop

by Michael Eric Dyson

  I was torn. I wanted to honor his pain. I wanted the whiteness he had never confronted to fully wash over him, over me, over all of us in the class. I wanted the other white students to share his shame, if that’s how they truly felt—or to find it a bit much, or to feel entirely unsettled by his confession of white guilt. I didn’t want him to be alone in his head or feelings.

  But I also wanted the students who were savvier about whiteness to speak up. Those who knew how whiteness often avoids direct hits; those who knew how whiteness often distorts the arguments of its opponents to make itself appear more reasonable, more natural; those who knew how whiteness escapes notice in a blizzard of qualifications meant to avoid responsibility. I wanted them in the stew with him to help sort things out. I wanted the students of color in the class to weigh in too. I wanted them to tell us if they were learning new things about black pain. Or to let off steam from a simmering rage at how white folk could afford not to know what many of them couldn’t help but know.

  I’d seen enough in life to know that remorse has its place in our moral ecology. But I didn’t want my student to suffocate beneath an avalanche of guilt. White guilt changes nothing permanently, and bad feelings about black suffering don’t last forever. They certainly can’t remove the source of the shame. I wanted my student to know that whiteness is a problem to be struggled with, that it is a culture in which one comes to maturity, that it is an identity one inherits and perpetuates, that it is an ideology one might flourish under and, in turn, help mold, that it is an institution from which one benefits, an ethos in which one breathes, a way of life. For the rest of the semester we grappled with our guilt, our anger, and, for some of us, even our hopelessness, trying to make sense of it all.

  My student’s confession opened a way for us to say things that are often tough for white folk to say: that whiteness is a privilege, a declared, willful innocence, and that lots of white folk in our nation don’t know the kinds of things we were learning in class. One of my bright black students got exasperated at how many white folk protected themselves from such knowledge by seeing themselves as the victims of hurt feelings.

  “A lot of white people don’t want to confront these issues, and as a result, we end up reinforcing white fragility,” she said. It was the first time many in the class had heard the term. White fragility is the belief that even the slightest pressure is seen by white folk as battering, as intolerable, and can provoke anger, fear, and, yes, even guilt. White fragility, as conceived by antiracist activist and educational theorist Robin DiAngelo, at times leads white folk to argue, to retreat into silence, or simply to exit a stressful situation.

  I have seen this in many lectures I’ve given over the years. When many white folk disagree, or feel uncomfortable, they get up and walk out of the room. Black folk and other people of color rarely exercise that option. We don’t usually believe that doing so would solve anything. We don’t trust that once we leave the room the right thing will be done. Plus we’ve fought so hard to get into most rooms that a little discomfort is hardly a reason to drive us from the premises. Such rooms likely affect our destinies, something that many white folk needn’t worry about, because they have access to so many other rooms just like the ones they are leaving.

  I have, over the years, developed a pedagogy of the problematic to address the thorny matter of race, whether it is wrestling with the burdens and sorrows that honest talk of whiteness brings or discouraging my black students from the easy retreat into sanctuaries of black solace. I want students to confront the brutal legacy of race with the kid gloves off, and yet respect each other’s humanity.

  Such an effort isn’t easy. I get scores and scores of letters and e-mails from white folk who are angered by how my pedagogy of the problematic plays out in the media. They make sure to let me know what a moron I am, how unfortunate my students are to have me as a professor—okay, let’s be honest, at times that might really be true—how Georgetown should fire me on the spot. They often call me “nigger” to remind me of the inferior status I keep forgetting to embrace. And many are mad because they say I am trying to warp young people’s minds.

  On that score they have a point. I seek to fix the warp that racial bigotry can bring; I want to challenge, one brain and body at a time, the poisonous precincts in which some of my white students were bred. I want my students to be uncomfortable with their racial ignorance, with their sworn, or unconscious, innocence. I’m sure that feels warped to many whites.

  Teaching at a Catholic school like Georgetown has given me renewed appreciation for “culpable ignorance”—in this case, the idea that white people are responsible for things they claim not to know. Although I’m a man of books and thought, I’m also a man of faith. It is my faith that helps me see how whiteness has become a religion. The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

  * * *

  As my brave white student discovered, whiteness claims so loudly its innocence because it is guilty, or at least a lot of white folk feel that way. This is why, of course, your resistance to feelings of guilt is absurdly intense. There is a terror in accepting accountability, because it doesn’t end with your recognition that something is rotten in Denver or Detroit. It suggests something is amiss across our country.

  That’s a terrifying thought to field, a terrifying responsibility to absorb. It means accepting accountability for your unanimous, collective capacity for terror, for enjoying a way of life that comes at the direct expense of other folk who are denied the privileges you take for granted.

  If white guilt is real, so is black guilt, though it is quite different and has its own history. Black bodies that were captured and enslaved reached American shores half dead and soaked in racial guilt. They were guilty of their blackness, guilty of being dangerously different. They were guilty of resisting the loss of their freedom, guilty of their rage at injustice, guilty of trying to escape, guilty of the insubordination of indignation. They were guilty in every way of every crime, and whiteness, in adjudicating that guilt, told itself the very same lie every abusive parent, every batterer, and every spouse killer has told their victim throughout space and time: you made me do it.

  And when this innocence is questioned, whiteness rages, or it weeps in disbelief. Conservatives lambast the moral and intellectual inferiority of blacks. Liberals cry at our ingratitude. How dare the historically guilty point a finger at the innocent? No court in the land can change the immutable fact of race, of guilt and innocence by pigment. It might be the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that held that an enslaved man was his master’s property and that blacks are not citizens. It might be the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that cleared the way for the separate but equal policies of Jim Crow. No matter the weight of white transgressions, they are seen as small acts of badness within a bigger body of goodness. “We have bad seeds,” says the innocence narrative, “but those bad seeds only prove how good the plant is. A few of us are guilty, but only a few. The rest of us are innocent.”

  You preach responsibility as a personal credo, as a civic tenet, and yet you will have none of it. Your guilt is unbearable to you. But our daily subjugation, our not naming your guilt, is unbearable to us. We are unbearable to each other. And so we are stuck looking across a divide we cannot bridge.

  What I ask my white students to do, and what I ask of you, my dear friends, is to try, the best you can, to surrender your innocence, to reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in our complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings.

  Many of you find yourselves exhausted by thinking of how such colossal change might be made. You worry that your individual choice to do better won’t be a match for our horrible history of hate. And
even when individual black people confront individual white people, even when we love one another, white innocence still clouds our relationships. We are two historical forces meeting, and the velocity of that history is so strong that it can break the bonds of individual love. We are no longer two people asking each other to be understood. Instead, we are two symbols in a 400-year-old battle of guilt and innocence.

  This happens to so many of us, so many of you. The white person we love is no longer an individual, but, in their insistence on innocence, they are all of whiteness; they have chosen whiteness over us. This may happen between loving black and white classmates in a college course that probes the history of race. In these encounters abstract ideas often become concrete realities. The beauty of history, its ornate, or ugly, truths, are distant until we are brought face-to-face with their consequences. History takes shape in the person before me. When it is made personal, history becomes urgent. The neat irresolution of history becomes messy, yearning for an answer now.

  We are no longer ourselves alone. What was once the collective, institutional notion of whiteness becomes the white person I encounter. And my blackness is no longer isolated and atomistic; it forges destiny with all the blackness that came before me. And in my insistence on holding you accountable for privilege, for tiny but terrifying aggressions, for condescension, for any of the everyday racial slights that reinforce white supremacy, I have invoked again your sense of your guilt. I am not just a person, but a pointing finger, a scold, a challenge to the authority you were given as a birthright and that you cannot bear to relinquish.

  If this can occur between classmates, between friends, between lovers, between blood kin, imagine the stakes when it occurs between groups of people. Whiteness becomes a mob of innocence and it responds like a mob to a call for black justice. It responds with riot gear, tear gas, clubs, arrests, Tasers, rubber bullets, and real bullets too. It responds with a collective no. In that moment of mob innocence, it truly believes that if one police officer is indicted, whiteness itself is indicted. If one mass shooter at a black church is brutalized or injured before he can reach a fair trial, then whiteness itself is injured.

  White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top of. The fragility of ego versus the forced labor of slavery, the lynchings of Jim Crow, the beatings and the police violence sparked by the endeavors of desegregation. If it weren’t real, if it weren’t in action every single day—and every day seems to bring new stories of an unarmed black person being shot down by the police, new stories of black college kids being called “nigger,” new stories of white anger flashing in bigoted humor about the first black president—it would be a perverse joke.

  * * *

  Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your own hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life.

  This is why the cry “Black Lives Matter” angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary. It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity.

  The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.” But that is a tough thing for most of you to do. My students are a bit of a captive audience. They’re more willing to wrestle their whiteness to a standstill—or at least a tie between the historical pressure to forget and the present demand to remember. Believe it or not, that tiny concession, that small gesture, is progress.

  Of course it is hard to undo an entire life of innocence and the privileges it brings. And so you play a game. You pretend that by accountability we mean that you are guilty in a very specific way of some heinous injury. For instance, when we speak of affirmative action, we are not saying that you are individually responsible for the bulwark of white privilege on which it rests. We are saying, however, that you ought to be honest about how you benefit from getting a good education and a great job because you’re white. To twist that into the attempt to prosecute a case against all of white privilege through your individual story is an irresponsible ruse, and you know it, and yet you continue.

  There is a big difference between the act of owning up to your part in perpetuating white privilege and the notion that you alone, or mostly, are responsible for the unjust system we fight. You make our request appear ridiculous by exaggerating its moral demand, by making it seem only, or even primarily, individual, when it is symbolic, collective. By overdramatizing the nature of your personal actions you sidestep complicity. By sidestepping complicity, you hold fast to innocence. By holding fast to innocence, you maintain power.

  The real question that must be asked of white innocence is whether or not it will give up the power of life and death over black lives. Whether or not it will give up the power to kill in exchange for brotherhood and sisterhood. If it does, it can at long last claim its American siblings and we can become a true family.

  * * *

  Beloved, fake regrets or insincere apologies for wrongdoing only reinforce white innocence.

  I got a whiff of this sort of moral failure in 2015 when I watched the tribulations of Levi Pettit unfold in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa has a long history of white oppression. In 1921 white residents of Tulsa massacred hundreds of black citizens and torched Greenwood, one of the wealthiest black communities in America, in a matter of a few hours in one of the worst acts of racial terror in the nation’s history. Pettit, a University of Oklahoma student and former high school golf star, was caught on video chanting a frat song that exulted in saying “nigger.” It also endorsed lynching. The gist of the ugly ditty he led on a bus trip to a party for his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was that a black person would never be admitted to the group. When the video went public Pettit was expelled from the university.

  Pettit held a press conference at a black church in Oklahoma City to apologize for his racist behavior. The black leaders that he sought forgiveness from dutifully surrounded him. Pettit was performing a common three-step ritual of the remorseful: mess up, dress up, ’fess up.

  The beginning of Pettit’s mea culpa was promising. He thanked black state senator Anastasia Pittman, to whom he turned for guidance, for schooling him about the meaning behind his hurtful words. Pettit said he was sorry for his actions and admitted that there was no excuse for his behavior. He never saw himself as a bigot, but then, to be blunt, not many of you do. Pettit pledged to combat racism for the rest of his life.

  The trouble started when Pettit was asked where, and from whom, he learned the nasty song. He waved the question off, insisting that he was there to address his actions and not the song’s origins. That gesture was surely a sign of willful, durable white innocence. When he was pressed about what he was thinking as he mirthfully chanted the song, Pettit dismissed the question as immaterial to his apology. And yet he and his fellow fraternity boys were all enjoying themselves on the video. After only a few questions Pettit held up his hand, announced “I’m done,” and quickly exited the room.

  Pettit refused to address some of the most damning elements of his offense. Thus he took back with one hand what he had given with the other, that is, the willingness to confront racism head-on. Such a gesture is the prerogative of white innocence. My friends, there has been a great deal of talk, and no small consternation, about the idea of white privilege, the unspoken and often unacknowledged advantages that white Americans enjoy. And many of you are resentful of such talk; you think it is foolish. This was a glaring example. When Pettit stood at the lectern he appeared to take responsibility for his actions. In some ways he did, even as other culprits
were hidden from view. That hateful chant was undoubtedly passed down through SAE generations as part of the fraternity’s racist legacy, one that it clearly cherished. Pettit functioned that day as a scapegoat.

  It is harder to indict forces and institutions than the individuals who put a face to the problem. Institutional racism is a system of ingrained social practices that perpetuate and preserve racial hierarchy. Institutional racism requires neither conscious effort nor individual intent. It is glimpsed in the denial of quality education to black and brown students because they live in poor neighborhoods where public schools depend on the tax base for revenue. Minority students, like the ones I teach at Georgetown, are more often beset by economic and social forces than overt efforts to deny them equal education.

  Racial profiling is another strain of institutional racism. It is the belief that a person’s racial identity, and not their behavior, is a legitimate reason to be suspected by the police of criminal activity. Redlining is yet another example. Until the late 1960s, banks marked certain neighborhoods on the map to show where they would withhold investment. Those banks also overcharged black and brown people for services and insurance, or encouraged them to take on faulty mortgages. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed redlining, and yet the practice persists, arguably leading to the largest loss of black wealth ever in the subprime mortgage scandal that triggered an economic recession in 2007. And even though the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed the franchise, the relentless assault on black voting rights through unprincipled and often illegal voter ID tactics complicate that right. These are institutional practices that extend racial hierarchies.

  Beyond these institutional forces lie the symbolic meanings of public gestures. A pat on the back by one of the ministers gave the impression that Pettit was a victim in need of support and understanding. No such gesture was extended to the invisible sea of black students on campus, and across America, who had been antagonized by Pettit’s racist antics or very similar behavior.