The two are yoked: criticizing police brutality is said to be hating law enforcement. Sitting during the national anthem is said to be hating America. This sophomoric approach will remain a roadblock to genuine racial engagement until it is replaced by a deeper, more humane, more sophisticated understanding of the issue of race.
The silence of white athletes must be challenged too. Prominent white athletes shouldn’t leave Kaepernick out on a limb by himself. Those who are socially aware should speak up and challenge the narrow perspectives and white privilege that protects them. They must at least be asked to do so. The unawake and deeply apolitical black athletes, and the ones who mimic the conservative values of the white mainstream, must be called out too.
The best of our athletes have understood their responsibility to represent their people. They understood that their privileges meant nothing if others couldn’t enjoy them as well. They knew that if their kin and community were disrespected, it was only a matter of time before they were too. They could not justify remaining silent by making great sums of money and being embraced by the dominant culture while the masses of black people suffered. We have seen black athletes turning away from black suffering because they believed they were merely individuals, and not also part of a group. That sort of black exceptionalism is illusory. One cannot ultimately be exempt from the treatment of one’s brothers and sisters. They are you, and you are them.
The greatest mark of our humanity and character shows when we are concerned about others beyond our circle. The NFL dragged its feet in setting policy to address domestic violence long after it became a national issue. The NFL still has not received the message about racial violence and the injustice and oppression that prevail in our society. While the Rooney Rule, which mandates that teams interview minority candidates when coaching and senior football operations vacancies open, has not produced as many minority head coaches as wished for—teams still hire who they want—perhaps we can insist even more strongly that the rule be applied to the NFL front office. Teams should consider front office personnel with a balanced perspective on race, gender, and sexuality so that we might avoid the reactionary politics, resentment of difference, and the white panic that too often fills those spaces.
There’s been a transition in sports from social activism to social service since the apex of social protests in the sixties. Today’s athletes are discouraged from identifying with a progressive or unpopular cause, the way Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Wilma Rudolph, Althea Gibson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and Oscar Robertson did in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was seen as destructive and disruptive. Their activism helped to break down barriers and increase pay and open doors for others, including those who hadn’t protested. Still, we must not forget that they were strongly discouraged from their activism and harshly rebuked by the powers that be.
Since that heyday, leagues have begun promoting race-neutral charitable activities. Visiting a sick kid in a hospital is admirable, and a black athlete is often paired with a white child in an innocent, nonconfrontational setting. But that cannot replace speaking on behalf of black kids who are being gunned down in the streets by cops, or who are victims of the failures of the criminal justice system. Social service at times obscures the need for justice by confusing compassion with change. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that charity is a poor substitute for justice.
The white agents who represent black athletes have often undercut the value of social activism too. Many white agents counsel their players not to take on social issues. They are extremely careful about what causes may enhance or soil their clients’ brands. While brand management is vital, their hesitancy to encourage principled protest by their clients means that commercial interests trump social conscience. A less charitable interpretation suggests that white agents who don’t have deep investments in black communities are not motivated to address the plagues that black folk confront. These white agents fail to see the need of that athlete to speak up on behalf of the black and minority communities that nurtured and sustained them.
Kaepernick has bravely touched the third rail of American sport, one that we have not yet contended with. The status quo always favors neutrality, which, in truth, is never neutral at all, but supports those who stand against change. Cam Newton—the Carolina Panthers quarterback who refrained from saying whether he thought Kaepernick was right or wrong—may be superman on the field, but his response to Kaepernick’s cause of social justice has kryptonite written all over it. We don’t need Newton’s signature dab gesture on the field; we need to fight for all folk to get dab off it. The real heroes, the real supermen, are those willing to take a stand, even if it means taking a knee while the national anthem plays.
* * *
Beloved, your white innocence is a burden to you, a burden to the nation, a burden to our progress. It is time to let it go, to let it die in place of the black bodies that it wills into nonbeing. In its place should rise a curiosity, but even more, a genuine desire to know and understand just what it means to be black in America.
Being Black in America
4.
Nigger
Admit it, beloved, that word—that abomination—is still with us.
Yes, it’s ugly. Yes, it’s vile. Yes, it’s full of hate.
And yet, a lot of you, or at least a lot of the folk you know, still think of black folk as niggers.
I remember the first time I heard the white world call me “nigger.”
I say white world because it was not an individual man saying that to me, mind you, even though the words came from his mouth. This man was simply repeating what he had been told about me. I was every black person he’d ever meet. We were all the same. That’s what nigger meant. That’s what it still means.
It was 1965. I was seven years old. We and family friends were down south for a monthlong visit with our kinfolk. On that day I drove with our friends to see other relatives who lived hours away. In the backseat of the car my friend Johnny and I behaved like typical kids. We had quickly plowed through our brown paper bags of bologna sandwiches and our Mason jars of Kool-Aid. Soon our stomachs started to groan in hunger. A shiny diner appeared up ahead and we begged Johnny’s parents to stop. Looking back I’m not quite sure what made them ignore their sense of the likely reaction we’d all face. I think the cumulative indignities of racism had finally got to them. It was absurd not to be able to eat the same food at the same time in the same place with white folk. I think they just momentarily snapped. Well at least his mother did. His father knew all too well the price he might pay for offending the white world with something as simple as his voice. His pleasing baritone was a threat to the tenor of the times. That’s why he stayed behind in the car, while Johnny and I and his mother took a chance that just this one time some white person might be kind enough to treat us like human beings.
“We don’t serve niggers here.”
He didn’t yell. His eyes were cold but his words were dry and matter-of-fact. He spoke them the way you might tell someone they’d reached a wrong number. But for me they altered the shape of my universe.
Even if we were “good niggers,” we were still niggers. (That is why, when I preach, I can never say “good Samaritan,” as though the distinction between a good and bad Samaritan, like the one between a good and bad nigger, rests on anything except what the larger world deems good, that is, subservient.) The strength of the adjective had no way of modifying the vulnerability of the noun. Blackness could never be good in a way that could help black folk because a nigger could never be of any service to himself if he were busy living down to expectations. It was a wash from the start. If you accepted the term nigger, no speech or grammar could rescue you.
Johnny’s mama, a beautiful, high yellow woman, grabbed our hands and yanked us back out the door faster than we could walk.
“What’s a nigger?” Johnny a
sked. “What’s a nigger?”
I had never heard the word either. I lived in a world where blackness poured over us like warm molasses and filled our ears with affection, where black love didn’t have to be spoken to be felt. But I knew when the spell was broken and we were hurled into a parallel universe of quiet hate.
“What’s a nigger?” Johnny asked a third time.
In that instant I knew exactly what it meant. It was a tidal wave of foul water crashing down on me, staining me, choking me, and pulling me out to the point of no return. I knew it was a condemnation, not just of me and Johnny and his mama, but of every black person I loved, the ones I didn’t like, the ones I didn’t know, the ones I would never know. In that moment my mouth filled with the taste of hate beyond anything my parents or any adult in my life could fix.
Surely you won’t judge me, beloved. And please don’t make a silly false equivalence between us. Some of you claim that black folk are racists too when they use epithets like honky, redneck, cracker, ofay, gray boy, and the like. But you know that’s a lie, and I’ll tell you why a little later.
Don’t be taken aback by the wash of hatred over my preadolescent mind. Can you blame me? I was a seven-year-old child feeling the weight of the white world’s hate crushing my precious soul. There was no Benjamin Spock to explain the trauma I endured as a grade school victim of hate. There was no Jean Piaget to explain the impact of utter revulsion on my cognitive development. I would quickly learn how others of my race fended off your grave assault. A famous black leader told me how he and his young adult peers would rifle through the obituary section in the white papers and gleefully proclaim “another cracker gone.” I heard churchgoing folk who love the Lord sanctify their rage with holy profanity at your barbarous mistreatment or murder of us. “Goddamned crackas. Motherfucking honkeyass ofays. Fuck all of them redneck peckerwoods.”
“What’s a nigger, Mommy?” Johnny asked for the last time in utter exasperation.
His mama knelt down between us, her eyes level with ours, still holding our hands.
“Don’t tell your Daddy,” she said to Johnny. She turned to me.
“Promise you won’t tell, Michael. And promise you won’t tell your Daddy when we get back. Both of you, promise.” We promised. We stood there and swore the oath of secrecy that too many mothers and children of my era were compelled to swear. I knew from her worried eyes, her tight lips, her urgent tone, and her painful grip on my hand that this moment, this word, in this context, could never pass from my mouth to my father’s ears, even as it echoed in mine. When my father died in 1981 at the age of 66, I had not broken my promise.
Nigger.
I don’t remember what lie Johnny’s mother told her husband about why we didn’t bring back any food. I do remember that she didn’t want me to tell my father what happened because that knowledge—the knowledge that his son, his family, was in danger—was a black man’s kryptonite. Men like Johnny’s father and mine were still young enough and full enough of dreams inspired by the north’s meager but real freedoms that the treatment of black people in the south could lead them to act, as southerners would say, foolishly. The danger was always there. Even small gestures like being dismissed, or disrespected, or scorned made a black man taste his bitter limits. Forced to be less than they were, to be less than men, to witness the white man’s silly insistence that they eat from a different lunch counter. It all might suddenly be too much to bear. A man might snap at the awareness that he couldn’t protect his family, not really, not like white men. For a black man, the knowledge that his son and his loved ones had just been called nigger could turn, swiftly, to calamity.
I entered a dark room of knowing when Johnny’s mama swore me to silence. I began to realize that a word alone could sap my father of his powers. It could rip the cape off his manhood and he could no longer be his family’s superman like all good daddies deserved to be. It was not because he couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. That was easy. I’d seen him jump the tall homemade doghouse in our backyard in pursuit of a huge rat that threatened to bite us as we played. It was not because he was not more powerful than a locomotive. My father’s nickname was “Muscles.”
It was because there was one thing that Superman did that my father couldn’t do, and while I didn’t know it, I sensed it even then, when I still believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy: my father wasn’t faster than a speeding bullet, or more powerful than a noose. In that moment I inherited black intuition, a sense about the world that outpaced my knowledge of it. It was black intuition that, in retrospect, was inevitable because all black people get it at one time or another. It is passed down from generation to generation in the cellular memory of our vulnerable black bodies. I got my innocence snatched from me, with one word, more abruptly and years earlier than white children lose theirs. And for all that my own story is specific, it is the opposite of unique.
* * *
Nigger.
That one word. I know you recoil at its use. I know you have never used the word yourself, or at least almost never. You may admit, however, that, unfortunately, some of your kin have used it, especially the unlettered ones, or the previous ignorant generation. You know the ones. It’s mortifying, isn’t it? I know you hate its use in polite white company. You may even have called out a friend who used it. You think nigger is a linguistic fossil. It belongs in the museum next to the Confederate flag.
You watch the documentaries and docudramas about O.J. Simpson and his infamous murder trial. You nod your head in agreement with the plea of black prosecutor Chris Darden that the court not air a recording of racist white cop Mark Fuhrman uttering nigger because it is the “filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language” and it will “upset the black jurors.” (Of course you overlook, or ignore, how, as Darden speaks, the camera zooms in on Simpson’s handsome face, his furrowed brow and impish smirk suggesting a “nigga please” response to Darden’s declaration.)
You are proud of your principled stand against the use of hateful language. If the word must be referenced, it needs to be verbally castrated, stripped of its hostile spelling and snipped into harmless abbreviation. Nigger limps into the “N word.” My Lord, how you contort language; my God, how we demand that you do. You bend over backward grammatically to avoid the appearance that you for one moment tolerate bigotry. Yet the bigotry the word refers to remains in place. It is understandable that many of you cannot say that word, at least not in public, and never in front of black folk. We have made it clear, well, at least most of us, that we find it unacceptable for white folk to say it under any conditions. But despite all your effort and care, the word is still out there, still wreaking havoc, even when it’s not being spoken.
Nigger condenses the history of hate and the culture of violence against black folk. When white folk say the word they bridge the gap between themselves and the hateful history it reflects. It links verbal and physical violence. The term is also a form of moral violence. It has to do with the intentions of white folk when they hurl that word in our presence.
Beloved, I am not arguing there is evil magic in white lips to call down violence with words. The word nigger has such fantastically evil resonance because there is a kind of moral onomatopoeia at work: nigger is a word that comes as close as any to suggesting the racial violence that it describes. Nigger says lynching, castration, rape, rioting, intellectual inferiority, Jim Crow, second-class citizenship, bad schools, poor neighborhoods, police brutality, racial terror, mass incarceration, and more.
Nigger has no rival. There is no rough or refined equivalence between the term and the many derisive references to white folk. Those terms don’t evoke singularly gruesome actions. Nigger is unique because the menace it implies is portable; it shows up wherever a white tongue is willing to suggest intimidation and destruction. There are no examples of black folk killing white people en masse; terrorizing t
hem with racial violence; shouting “cracker” as they lynch them from trees and then selling postcards to document their colossal crimes. Black folk have not enjoyed the protection of the state to carry out such misdeeds.
The state, in fact, rendered black folk even more vulnerable. White racism was the government’s science project; bigotry was its nightly homework. Evil flashed a white face in a terrorizing crackerocracy, an exuberantly diabolic band of proud haters of black culture composed of the Klan, the White Citizens Council, neo-Confederate outfits, white nationalist groups, and the legions of unaffiliated fellow travelers. Their mottoes differ, but nigger is the rallying cry for all of them. We must effectively respond in our day to the ugly persistence of racism, even if its form has changed.
So what are you supposed to do?
My friends, what I need you to do—just for starters—is not act. Not yet. Not first. First I need you to see. I need you to see the pains and possibilities of black life, its virtues and vices, its strengths and weaknesses, its yeses and nos. I need you to see how the cantankerous varieties of black identity have been distorted by seeing black folk collectively as the nigger. It is not a question of simply not saying nigger; you have to stop believing, no matter what, that black folk are niggers and all the term represents. Instead you must swim in the vast ocean of blackness and then realize you have been buoyed all along on its sustaining views of democracy. What would this nation be without the efforts of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., to make it behave according to its ideals? What would it be had not Diane Nash and Fannie Lou Hamer given their all to quench the fires of hate?
You must not only deal with familiar black persons, but with blackness per se, with blackness as a moral arc, with blackness as history and culture, with simple yet profound black humanity. You may discover after all that we, black and white, are far more alike than you suspected—or feared. Your fear that we are just alike may cause you at first to doubt, but then, defensively, to embrace the lie of black inferiority your people have practiced from the start of our experiment in democracy.
Tears We Cannot Stop Page 10
