Not long after this, I was on another flight and sitting next to a white man who felt as if he could already be a friend. Our conversation had the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall afternoon. Or it felt like stepping out the door in late spring when suddenly the temperature inside and out reads the same on your skin. Resistance falls away; your shoulders relax. I was, metaphorically, happily outdoors with this man, who was open and curious with a sense of humor. He spoke about his wife and sons with palpable affection. And though he was with me on the plane, he was there with them as well. His father was an academic, his mother a great woman.
He asked who my favorite musician was, and I told him the Commodores because of one song, “Nightshift,” which is basically an elegy. He loved Bruce Springsteen, but “Nightshift” was also one of his favorite songs. We sang lyrics from “Nightshift” together: “I still can hear him say, ‘Aw, talk to me so you can see what’s going on.’” When he asked if I knew a certain song by Springsteen, I admitted I didn’t. I could only think of “American Skin (41 Shots)”: “No secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin.” I knew those lyrics, but I didn’t start singing them. I made a mental note to check out the Springsteen song he loved.
Eventually, he told me he had been working on diversity inside his company. “We still have a long way to go,” he said. Then he repeated himself—“We still have a long way to go”—adding, “I don’t see color.” This is a statement for well-meaning white people whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when little black children and little white children are judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”9 The phrase “I don’t see color” pulled an emergency brake in my brain. Would you be bringing up diversity if you didn’t see color? I wondered. Will you tell your wife you had a nice talk with a woman or a black woman? Help.
All I could think to say was “Ain’t I a black woman?”10 I asked the question slowly, as if testing the air quality. Did he get the riff on Sojourner Truth? Or did he think the ungrammatical construction was a sign of blackness? Or did he think I was mocking white people’s understanding of black intelligence?11 “Aren’t you a white man?” I then asked. “Can’t you see that? Because if you can’t see race, you can’t see racism.” I repeated that sentence, which I read not long before in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.
“I get it,” he said. His tone was solemn. “What other inane things have I said?”
“Only that,” I responded.
I had refused to let the reality he was insisting on be my reality. And I was pleased that I hadn’t lubricated the moment, pleased I could say no to the silencing mechanisms of manners, pleased he didn’t need to open up a vein of complaint. I was pleased he was not passively bullying. I was pleased he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation—random, ordinary, exhausting, and full of longing to exist in some image of less segregated spaces.
Not long after this exchange the man on the flight got in touch with me. He and his wife had read one of my books and we planned to get together. Our schedules, however, never worked out and time passed. Then I wrote the piece about speaking with white men about their privilege and I sent it to him. I didn’t want to publish it without letting him know I had recounted our conversation. I then asked him if he would respond to what I had written. He wrote back:
When you challenged me on my “I don’t see color” comment, I understood your point, appreciated your candor, thought about it, and realized you were right. I saw your response as an act of both courage and generosity.
I’ve thought a lot about our conversation since that flight. In fact, not long afterwards I realized that I had misrepresented something I’d said to you about my hometown. I don’t know why. I certainly hadn’t done it intentionally, and I believed I was being honest in the moment. But after our talk, it was evident. I told you I didn’t notice much tension between the black kids and the white kids in our town (I grew up and went through the public-school system of a middle-class suburb in the Northeast in the 1980s and early 1990s). I guess it’s not that I didn’t notice it so much as I wanted to forget it, because thinking back, tension was everywhere. I graduated from high school more than 25 years ago, and, except for college summers and a few months after graduation, haven’t lived there since. Maybe it was such a constant in our lives that I didn’t think about it—except for the overtly ugly incidents, like the time the white kid who sat in front of me in freshman algebra turned around and asked if I were planning to go to the varsity basketball game that night to watch “the [racial slur] play.” I remember only a couple of physical fights between black kids and white kids, but cruelty, from mostly white to black, was always only a comment away. My home and my family (even my extended family, who were first and second generation from Mediterranean and Eastern European countries) were the antithesis of that type of behavior. But thinking back, it was all around us. It’s interesting that something in our conversation made me realize it.
As I read and reread this response, I realized I had accepted what he said about his childhood hometown not as the truth but as the truth about his whiteness. I had accepted it as the truth, as social justice activist Ruby Sales would say, about the “culture of whiteness.” The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have. From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared. Though my seatmate misrepresented the fact of the matter, he did not misrepresent the role those facts played in his own life. I don’t doubt that he believed what he said at the time. And in the days that followed our conversation, I don’t doubt the repressed reality began pushing at the fiction of the facts, which is also in its way a truth. To let me in was to let in the disturbance of racial relations in a lifetime of segregated whiteness. If white people keep forgetting to remember that black lives matter, as they clearly do given their acceptance of everything from racist comments by friends and colleagues to the lack of sentencing of most police officers who kill unarmed blacks, to more structural racist practices, then they will always be surprised when those memories take hold.
NOTES
1. Text What are Shirley Cards and how did they determine what was the correct skin tone balance?
Notes and Sources Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication: “‘Skin-colour balance’ in still photography printing refers historically to a process in which a norm reference card showing a ‘Caucasian’ woman wearing a colourful, high-contrast dress is used as a basis for measuring and calibrating the skin tones on the photograph being printed. The light skin tones of these women—named ‘Shirley’ by male industry users after the name of the first colour test-strip-card model—have been the recognized skin ideal standard for most North American analogue photo labs since the early part of the twentieth century and they continue to function as the dominant norm.”
See also Estelle Caswell, “Color Film Was Built for White People. Here’s What It Did to Dark Skin,” Vox, and Sarah Lewis, “The Racial Bias Built into Photography,” the New York Times.
2. Text “Given the seeming novelty of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for Ronald Reagan, ‘critical whiteness studies’ gained media attention and a small foothold in universities.”
Notes and Sources Daniel Wallis/Reuters, “Audio reveals Ronald Reagan calling African delegates ‘monkeys’”: “In a recently emerged audio recording from 1971, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan can be heard disparaging African delegates to the United Nations as ‘monkeys’ during a phone call with U.S. President Richard Nixon…. ‘To see those monkeys from those
African countries, damn them,’ Reagan can be heard saying, prompting laughter from Nixon. ‘They are still uncomfortable wearing shoes.’” In the 1984 presidential election, forty-nine of fifty states voted for Reagan.
3. Text Did he understand that, today, 64 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population? White men have held almost all the power in this country for four hundred years.
Fact Check Maybe. 62 percent and 30 percent are the updated numbers from the Reflective Democracy study. The study seems sound.
4. Text The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems conferring racial dominance on my group.”
Fact Check Yes. The term was put in circulation prior to McIntosh.
Notes and Sources Theodore W. Allen was conducting an analysis of what he variously called “white skin privilege,” “white racial privilege,” and “white privilege” in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. See his text The Invention of the White Race. For a thorough discussion of the term’s use prior to McIntosh, see Jacob Bennett, “White Privilege: A History of the Concept” (master’s thesis, Georgia State University, 2012), https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_theses/54.
5. Excerpted from a conversation between Manthia Diawara and Édouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II (August 2009)
Manthia Diawara
We’re travelling aboard the Queen Mary II, on our way to New York from Southampton. Why a ship, when it would have been easier and faster to travel on a plane?
Édouard Glissant
Ever since I started having heart trouble, I’ve been unable to take long-distance flights. And since it’s eight and a half hours from Paris to Fort-de-France, I’m obliged to take the boat, and this one is pretty much the only one that makes regular trips. It’s all quite ambiguous, because you’d think that a boat is a sign of comfort and ease, but in my opinion it’s quite the opposite. It’s a sign of catching up the time lost; the time that you cannot let slip away or run away, the times that you become caught up in things—you can’t flee or run anywhere. It seems to me that on any kind of boat you can be closer to yourself, while in a plane you’re really detached from yourself—you’re not yourself, you’re something else. And I’m saying this jokingly—and I’m not alone in this—it’s not normal for a person to be suspended in the air even if man’s always dreamed of being a bird. Accordingly, I take this boat regularly when I have to go to Martinique or New York….
MD A boat connotes a departure from point A and an arrival at point B—in this context, it is a departure for the Africans who are captured for the first time and pushed onto a boat. What does departure mean to you?
ÉG It’s the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. In other words, for me every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity. I think that’s what’s important in all the movements of the world, and we, the descendants, who have arrived from the other shore, would be wrong to cling fiercely to this singularity which had accepted to go out into the world. Let us not forget that Africa has been the source of all kinds of diasporas—not only the forced diaspora imposed by the West through the slave trade, but also of millions of all types of diasporas before—that have populated the world. One of Africa’s vocations is to be a kind of foundational Unity which develops and transforms itself into a Diversity. And it seems to me that, if we don’t think about that properly, we won’t be able to understand what we ourselves can do, as participants in this African diaspora, to help the world to realise its true self, in other words its multiplicity, and to respect itself as such.
6. Text The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, in Whiteness of a Different Color, describes the twentieth century’s reconsolidating of the nineteenth century’s “Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans and Slavs.”
Notes and Sources Jacobson traces immigration history and policies from the second half of the nineteenth century, when “white” Europeans were cataloged by their distinct racial types, to the early to mid-twentieth century, when perceived differences of those same racial distinctions declined dramatically. Frye writes, “Immigration restriction, along with internal black migrations, altered the nation’s racial alchemy and redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans and Slavs.”
7. Text I asked if he gets flagged by TSA. “Not usually,” he said.
Notes and Sources See the April 17, 2019, article on ProPublica, “TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating against Black Women, but Their Body Scanners Might Be”: “Black women have been raising alarms for years about being forced to undergo intrusive, degrading searches of their hair at airport security checkpoints. After a complaint five years ago, the TSA pledged to improve oversight and training for its workers on hair pat-downs. But it turns out there’s an issue beyond the screeners: the machines themselves.”
8. Text The word “home” turned him back to his son. He said his son’s best friend was Asian and had been admitted to Yale on early action or early decision or early admissions.
Notes and Sources See Anemona Hartocollis and Stephanie Saul, “Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans,” in the New York Times: “A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called ‘the Asian tax.’”
Evidence for white advantage in elite admissions processes is elite institutions’ preference for legacy students, recruited athletes, and children of faculty. Daniel Golden’s ProPublica article, published in July 2018, “How the Fight against Affirmative Action at Harvard Could Threaten Rich Whites,” examines how these special categories give certain white applicants a leg up at Harvard. Golden reports that children of Harvard alumni comprise 21.5 percent of accepted white applicants, and only 7 percent of those identified as Hispanic, 6.6 percent of Asian Americans, and 4.8 percent of African Americans. Golden writes that, according to Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, “Overall, across six years, Harvard accepted 33.6 percent of legacy applicants, versus 5.9 percent of non-legacies.”
Golden also reports that “recruited athletes get the biggest edge of all, with an 86-percent acceptance rate. They comprise 16.3 percent of white students who are admitted to Harvard, as against 8.9 percent of blacks, 4.2 percent of Hispanics, and 4.1 percent of Asian Americans.”
Golden notes too that Harvard accepted 46.7 percent of the children of Harvard faculty and staff.
9. Text This is a statement for well-meaning white people whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when little black children and little white children are judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Fact Check Examples of colorblind rhetoric below.
Notes and Sources Supreme Court judge John Harlan’s early invocation of color blindness in Plessy v. Ferguson: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
Former Republican Party chairman and George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign manager Lee Atwater’s allusions to “colorblind racial ideology” during a taped interview in 1981 (quoted in Colorblind Racial Profiling: A History, 1974 to the Present by Guy Padula): “Here’s how I would handle that issue … as a psychologist, w
hich I am not, is how abstract you handle the race thing. You start out, I don’t want you to quote me on this, you start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
10. Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.
Hortense J. Spillers
11. Just when I start thinking I’ve been underestimated a lot in my career, I remember that I’ve still always been a giant white dude whenever I walked into the room.
I never once was made to feel like I didn’t belong somewhere (even when I really didn’t belong places).
Alexis Ohanian
evolution
A black friend says white people are taking over antiracism work. Is he serious? He doesn’t mean it just economically. He’s not being asked to run diversity workshops when white spaces can get white women to do that. I ask jokingly, isn’t that what black and brown people have been asking for? “It’s not my job to educate white folks”—isn’t that a statement I’ve heard numerous times? But like my friend, I feel race relations and differences are more complicated than simply an ignorant dynamic I resent being party to. We all feel we know what’s up but can we, for all our entanglement, truly know what motivates the other? I do know my life, livelihood, and life possibilities depend on knowing more of certain things that white people willfully ignore. Who will represent that reality if a black person isn’t in the room? I see my friend’s point.
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