“I insist. Take it, please.”
He told us we could go free and to walk to the end of the block. I froze. I didn’t want him to shoot us in the back. I asked him to get on his knees. I don’t quite know why I asked, or why he complied. But, miraculously, he did. I said a very brief prayer for him. I didn’t want to test the Lord’s mercy or the man’s patience. He stayed on his knees as we walked away, unharmed.
Beloved, I know what you’re thinking. You’re not considering how social deprivation leads desperate people to act desperately. You’re not thinking of how communities bereft of hope and resource claim as its victims the people who seek to escape its fatal grip. You’re not thinking of how many of you were spared such a fate because of God’s grace and white privilege. Many of you are thinking that black folk kill each other every day without saying a mumbling word. Then we loudly protest a few white cops who kill black “thugs.”
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to ambush me with that “it’s-the-blacks-not-the-cops” claim on Meet the Press. It was right before the decision was made not to bring charges against white cop Darren Wilson, who had killed unarmed black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks,” Giuliani said. “We’re talking about the exception here.”
The notion that we are indifferent to murders by other blacks is nonsense. But we also know that if Jamal or Willie kills somebody, and they’re caught, they’re going to jail. Cops are rarely held accountable for their slaughter of black people. Neither Jamal nor Willie pledged to protect and serve the community. Neither of them has been issued a badge and a gun to represent the state. The police have a higher standard to meet, a greater obligation to be cautious in using lethal force.
Black folk do protest, to each other, to a world that largely refuses to listen, the killing of blacks by other blacks. We cry out against what goes on in black communities across this nation. We think it is horrid. We know such communities are vexed by problems faced by all neighborhoods that are depleted of dollars and hope. These communities are emptied of good schools. They are deprived of the social and economic buffers that keep Beverly Hills from turning into Beirut. People usually murder where they nest. They aim their rage at easy targets.
Beloved, what you see happening among us is not best understood as black-on-black crime. Rather it is neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If our neighbors were white, they’d be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It’s not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too. Where’s the white-on-white crime rhetoric? Where are the rants against white folk ruining white culture with their murderous ways?
One truth should be clear: If you want interracial killing you have to have interracial communities. Wasn’t that one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dreams? To live in a nation where black and white folk could be victims of crime in integrated neighborhoods? Didn’t he argue that thieves should pay more attention to the content of our Cadillacs than their color? Perhaps I am misremembering?
White folk commit the bulk of the crimes in our nation. And, beloved, it might surprise you that white folk commit the most violent crimes too. According to FBI statistics, black folk committed 36 percent of violent crime in 2015, while white folk committed 42 percent of violent crimes in the same year. White folk consistently lead all other groups in aggravated assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism. And white folk are far more likely to target the vulnerable too. White folk lead the way in forcible rape. You’re also more likely to kill children, the elderly, significant others, family members, and even yourselves. White folk commit a majority of gang-related murders too. A majority of the homicide victims in this country are white. White folk are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.” The white-on-white mayhem is profound, yet no one speaks of it in racial terms.
That’s because the phrase white-on-white crime doesn’t serve a larger ideological purpose. White-on-white crime does not jibe with the exclusive focus on a black-on-black narrative that conservatives, and liberals too, have bought into. The success of that narrative depends on a few things. You had to construct the ghetto as a space of savagery that was unique to black folk. Never mind the fact that its first occupants were the Irish, Poles, Italians—and especially the Jews. Then you had to say that any right-thinking folk wouldn’t kill each other.
But there is no inherent blackness to the crime that occurs in black communities. Take blackness out of the equation and you’d have social engineers and Ivy League professors trying to fix crime-infested communities. We know this because big brains and social reformers from the late 1800s well into the 1930s successfully addressed crime waves set in motion, and endured, by poor European immigrants. Keep blackness in place and you have social engineers and Ivy League professors blasting the intrinsic pathology and inherent depravity of black life. These experts will conclude that our families and neighborhoods produce the seeds of their own destruction. The 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro family—a report by Harvard professor and Johnson administration official Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned that a castrating black matriarchy and a “tangle of pathology” threatened the black family—is a famous example.
Beloved, you don’t stop there. You feel compelled to make crime merely a matter of ethical collapse. You don’t mention the systemic removal of goods and services that drive some folk to crime. Nor do you talk much of black folk lacking the social supports that other ethnic groups enjoy. There is hardly any mention of the failure of the markets that are supposedly neutral, but which, in fact, favor those who aren’t black or poor.
Beloved, let’s try a brief thought experiment. Let’s apply the logic of some of your arguments about black folk to you. Take your argument that we should pay more attention to black-on-black crime than white cops killing black folk because more blacks are killed by other blacks. Now let’s compare the number of white Americans killed by whites to the number of Americans killed by terrorist acts. I can already feel your hair standing on end. You see how hurtful it is to make such a comparison? You see how it could miss the point of giving each cause of suffering its due? According to your logic, we should not be concerned with political acts of terror committed on American soil because, since 9/11, less than 100 people have been killed in such attacks in America while 11,208 people were killed by firearms in 2013 alone and 21,175 died by suicide with a firearm.
By Giuliani’s logic, then, the obsession with terror is both misplaced and hypocritical. We should focus instead on the plague of firearms on the American population. Far more white folk kill each other than are killed by terrorists. So let’s stop worrying about terrorism and worry about white-on-white homicide. Stop griping about a couple of planes crashing into a couple of towers. Stop crying over a few folk getting butchered by a few religious fanatics when the routine crime that snuffs white life lies in a white man’s assault rifle.
Notice how just reading those words makes your blood boil? See how your nationalist bravado flashes? Can you imagine how your rage might spill over if that were said to you with the same callous disregard for white life that Giuliani speaks with when he dismisses cops killing unarmed black folk? See how your temperature rises by just reading those words? These are words that are rarely spoken directly to white America. Words that reflect back to you your dishonesty and indifference and tone-deafness to our plight.
* * *
Beloved, I must admit that there are ways that black folk do aim hate at each other, ways we do rip each other apart. A lot of it has to do with how we’ve taken into ou
r minds and souls the poisonous bigotry you’ve spread. It’s brutal and agonizing to watch, especially because we are imitating the hate for blackness, for “otherness,” that you taught us. But you seem hardly aware of this sort of black-on-black crime. Could it be that you don’t really care about black-on-black crime unless you can use its existence to attack us even more?
But there is some value to you in our folly. You can point to it and say, “See, black folk are just as bad as us. They’re even more destructive and hateful to each other than whites have ever been. See, just as the song in the Broadway play Avenue Q says, ‘We’re all a little bit racist.’” (Of course that’s a horrible misuse of the term. Better to say we’re all just a little bigoted, yes, or prejudiced for certain. But I’m afraid you’ve got to own racism all by yourselves, beloved. It signals the power not only to hate, but to make that hate into law, and into convention, habit, and a moral duty. Thank God brave Americans challenged the legal and ethical roots of racism in this country.)
You even find comfort in exploiting black prejudices—against darker black folk, against women, against queer folk, against poor folk. You feel good about it because it lets you off the hook as well. It’s as if you take glee in thinking black people are equally bigoted. Especially when you hear one of us tell our dark-skin children not to marry a dark-skin mate so they won’t have dark children. Or when you hear one of us say that only light-skin people have “good hair,” or that there was no homosexuality in Africa and that it’s a white man’s plague.
We have sometimes been faithful proxies of white supremacy. If you’d take the time to know us, you’d see that we’ve imported some of the harmful beliefs you’ve laid on our psyches. Or we’ve generated our own varieties of troubling blackness. In fact, your racist dogma was so appealing that even when you stopped barking it, we demanded more in our own cultural quarters.
The ventriloquist effect of whiteness has worked brilliantly; black mouths moving, white ideas flowing. What your vast incuriosity about black life keeps you from knowing, and this is heartbreaking to admit, is that we black folk often see ourselves the same way you see us. Sometimes we view our own culture, our traits and habits, through the distorted lens of white condescension or hatred. Often we make other vulnerable black folk in our midst the nigger you’ve made us all out to be.
This came home to me after I battled bias at Carson-Newman. The racial dynamics of the college were troubling. Black students couldn’t have been more than 6 percent of the student body. We weren’t warmly welcomed either, except if we played ball. When I asked why there weren’t more black speakers at the mandatory Tuesday chapel, it came down to crude mathematics: our small percentages mandated only one black speaker a year. Most of the other black students accepted that as par for the course; I was a few years older so it rankled me a bit more. I didn’t enlist their help. I formed a one-man quiet protest and refused to attend chapel. In return for my resistance—chapel was mandatory—I was unceremoniously booted from the school after my junior year.
Then I had to figure out what to do to support my family. I had worked all through college, cleaning and degreasing heavy machinery at a local factory. Later I pastored a couple of different churches. After getting my walking papers from Carson-Newman, I got “called” to a bigger black church in East Tennessee.
I went there thinking that I had found my life’s purpose. After being expelled from college, I was eager to apply my knowledge of the Bible and my beliefs about social justice in the black church setting. The only thing I really discovered is that God has a mighty sense of humor. The church I took charge of is named Thankful Baptist Church. They proved anything but grateful for me.
I decided that I’d challenge the black church’s sexism. It was another show of our moral hypocrisy, another way of looking down the ladder at the face and fate of the nigger beneath us. The sad irony of our sexism is that it targets the women who make up the vast majority of our congregations. Of course I wasn’t foolish. I knew that I’d have to teach for at least a year to get the church ready to ordain three women as deacons for the first time in its history.
In weekly Bible study, I hammered away at the parallels between sexism and racism. If God respected all people the same, then we had no right to deny women equal standing in our sanctuaries. All seemed well until a group of local ministers got wind of what I was doing and deemed it destructive to black Christianity.
“You gonna let this yellow nigga come down here and destroy the black church?” their leader asked members of my congregation.
“Y’all got to do something.” So they did.
When I got to the church one Sunday morning, my key didn’t work. Must be fixing the door finally, I thought. The key to my office didn’t work either. Finally, I thought, they are getting around to refurbishing my sparse quarters.
I preached my sermon and couldn’t help but notice faces I hadn’t seen before. I thought my preaching was winning new converts. Apparently God wasn’t one of them.
After church, a deacon rose to announce trouble.
“Pastor, there’s a real problem in this church.”
“Deacon, let’s deal with that trouble.”
“The problem is you.”
Oh damn, I’m the trouble. Well praise the Lord and pass the offering plate because this wasn’t looking too pretty for me.
The church erupted in applause, and then, in short order, took a vote to cast me out. It really hurt that most of the women in the church sided with their men against me and their own best interests. But I eventually understood; they had to live with those men long after I left.
* * *
I thought I had heard the Lord clearly when I got kicked out of school. I thought I’d become a church pastor and preach the prophetic word of God. I thought I’d lead the people into the vineyards of progressive theology and together we’d be a mighty witness for the black church, challenging all of the ills of society. I thought first we’d uproot the ills in our own ranks.
But mine was the only uprooting. I was sent packing with a month’s severance pay. Once again I was left with no means to support a wife and a preschooler.
I had little choice but to return to Carson-Newman and the bastion of whiteness from which I had been expelled to complete my education. I knew my return meant that I had to attend chapel regularly, but after my experience at Thankful Baptist, it seemed a harmless requirement. I had obviously heard God wrong.
It wasn’t just gender that proved to be a barrier, a real source of suffering for black folk, not only in my church but across the nation. The shade of skin was a problem too. The minister who led the charge against me was, like me, a yellow Negro, and by citing my color in his theological brief against me, he shined a light on the deep wound of colorism in black America. The “light, bright and damn near white” black person is often put into conflict with the darker and richer chocolate members of our community. I had seen up close how color-struck black folk are.
My father was a hulking man known for his brawn and his blue-black skin. As I grew into adolescence and my understanding of the white gaze deepened, I saw how you looked at him. I couldn’t help but notice how so many folk saw my father not as a man, but as a specimen, a hominid whose dark skin and outsized muscles conjured all the ruinous images of black folk fresh out of the jungle. Savages. Savages who woke at dawn to go to work to fuel the engines of your civilization. Savages without whom you could not turn the gears of the very world you demanded black bodies make for you.
After he was laid off from the factory, my father worked as a janitor and all-around utility man at a local pharmacy. I saw how the white owner of the store eyed him. The man valued my father’s epic strength. But at the same time he infantilized my father. I even heard him once say to my father that he acted like a boy. I half expected my father to lay him in his tracks and prayed he wouldn’t do so. Yet
I was angry that he hadn’t done so to preserve his sense of dignity and manhood. This same black man who was so tough on us kids didn’t say a word. It gave me a hint of the psychic costs of black manhood, of thrusting and parrying with the cold facts of white dominance that hushed one’s rage and yet encouraged it to flow against one’s own family. I suspect that my father’s suppressed rage found an outlet when he encouraged his sons to box each other, with gloves on but no headgear, to the point where we bloodied each other’s noses in our ghetto basement. This was a poor black man’s therapy.
At age seven, on our family trip south, I imagined what the word nigger might make my father do. At age fifteen, I saw in the pharmacy what it did to him. The word didn’t just exist in the air, to be brushed away like a gnat because he knew better. It resided in him. It resided in all of us. We black folk also viewed his dark skin with cruel disregard. He was the nigger, not just to you, but to us, too, because we have learned to see through your eyes. I saw what seeing himself through your eyes did to him. It ate at him. It circled his mind and frisked him like an abusive cop. I saw that he had chosen my golden-skinned mother—he called her “Ivory”—at least in part as an escape from the prison of his own darkness. In black life light skin is valued because it is closer to your white skin, and those with it are deemed to be closer to your so-called civilizing influence. That very notion reeks of barbarism, reeks of a crude, primeval equivalence between epidermis and humanity, reeks, therefore, of white supremacy.
Sometimes my father beat us something awful. It was ritual and tradition, of course, in so many of our communities. He got beat, and, therefore, he beat. It had long since passed into rite and folklore, long since been an artifact of the agonizing anthropology of complicated black domestic habits. It had now become part of the art of punishment and control—in part to keep us from being slaughtered in the white world. The logic is as simple as it is brutal: I will beat my kids so white folk won’t kill them.
Tears We Cannot Stop Page 12
