Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  Later that same day I ask a white friend about white people speaking among themselves about their racism. It doesn’t happen, she tells me. Nonetheless, she believes, that’s how whites would learn to build stamina regarding their collusion with structural racism. The least of it are the daily infractions whites commit by saying and doing regrettable things, given their socialization in a culture that is set up to keep them ignorant of their ignorance of the violence committed against people of color, whether by policy, exception, surveillance, or neglect. Their socialization fundamentally affects people of color, whether or not individual whites are present for the institutionalization of racist decisions and omissions.

  Because decisions get made that reinstate white hierarchies every day, it would be good if the culture of whiteness were marked and made visible to those who can’t see it by those not invested in keeping it primary. Awareness has to happen in rooms where everyone’s white, since those rooms are already in place.1

  But, I tell my friend, I think it’s ironic that conversations allowing whites to speak openly about whiteness should start within segregated spaces. Aren’t these conversations, which are ostensibly attempts to work on whiteness without reinstating white hierarchical thinking, choosing white comfort over white discomfort and integration? Is that a problem?2 Cognition formation is in part influenced by environment.

  My friend says this is a “stark” way to look at it. But if you’re white and you’re getting messages from your surroundings that reaffirm the idea that white solidarity is the way to organize your world, even while doing antiracist work, then how are you not going to believe that a constructed all-white world isn’t you at your most functioning? How isn’t that going to feel natural and right? Stark, yes. Ironic, yes.

  Not long after this conversation, a white male friend attends a diversity workshop. He sends me crazy emoji faces during the faculty and staff workshop. I call as soon as he indicates the workshop is over. The session was run by two white women. Only one black faculty member was in the group. All participants were given examples of a classroom situation that seems to clearly involve racism.

  The scenario states: “While teaching a section on African Art you display the following image and ask students what they think of the image. A student states that the image ‘looks like a monkey.’ Some students in the class laugh at the response and some black students look upset.”

  The people in the workshop say the comparison between a black person and a monkey is a joke. Jokes can be used to own and not to own a moment, a feeling, or a racist feeling. I’m kidding. Lighten up. Jokes allow one to run from and own a thing simultaneously.

  No one mentions Pamela Ramsey Taylor, who commented on Facebook that “it will be so refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady back in the White House. I’m tired of seeing a [sic] Ape in heels.”

  Comparing a black person to a monkey is one of the oldest and most expedient forms of racism in the unwritten manual of white supremacy.3 Saturday Night Live cast member Leslie Jones felt compelled to tweet: “OK I have been called Apes, sent pics of their asses, even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m trying to figure out what human means. I’m out.”

  Was it a white person who made the comparison in the scenario? My emphasis is on “white” and not on “person.” The individual referenced is less important than the use of the word “monkey,” which attempts to erase the personhood of the one it attaches to. Don’t “monkey this up,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said during his 2018 gubernatorial race, and we all understood the statement historically meant don’t vote for the black candidate even as DeSantis denied it.

  Theorist Benjamin Eleanor Adam observes that Google searches for the term “evolution” result in portrayals of the height of evolution as the body of a white male, thereby “relating whiteness and humanity, an association that has its roots in racial science and ethical justifications of colonialism, slavery, and genocide….4 By presenting whites as the quintessential humans who possess the bodies and behaviors taken to be deeply meaningful human traits, whites justified, and continue to justify, white supremacy.” Hence the use of the word “monkey” in relationship to black people places white men in the primary position on the evolutionary line, an idiocy addressed by James Baldwin in an interview entitled “James Baldwin Discusses the Problem of Being White in America”: “Whites sought to civilize black people before civilizing themselves.”

  If the structure that structures the scenario is itself racist, are the questions trick questions?

  In the diversity workshop, no one asks why the scenario leaves out the race of the student who states that the image of the black figure “looks like a monkey.” That might be helpful. White? Asian? Latinx? I extrapolate that the one who made the statement isn’t black since the black students are marked by their race: “Some Black students look upset.” Is it beyond conceivable that white students could also be upset by this, or Asian students or Latinx students or black Asian students or black Latinx or indigenous or … ? Since there exists no scenario where white students are upset by the statement, are we to understand any distress they would feel to be insincere, passing, and not actionable?

  As reported by my friend, the white faculty and staff in the room insist on giving the “joking student” (is he/she/they white?) the benefit of the doubt. The lone black male faculty member in the room offers up the thought that maybe the student didn’t mean anything by it. He, too, is willing to give the student (is he/she/they white?) the benefit of the doubt.

  My white friend waited to see what the white women leading the workshop would say. They said nothing. The facilitators moved on after everyone who wished to respond responded, despite the fact that white women in management are usually the ones calling for diversity training. Only then did my friend interrupt to point out that while it might be a joke, it’s still a racist joke. If you all are hearing it as an innocent comment, what’s innocent about it? he asked. The black faculty member changed his alliances to support my white friend. Yes, that’s right, he added. Only then did the others suggest that the student (is he/she/they white?) be taken aside and spoken to. I wondered about the phrase “taken aside.”

  The taking aside lends privacy to the act, putting the student’s statement outside of the room, and fails to take into account the public distress the student (is he/she/they white?) occasioned.

  At the periphery of my friend’s descriptions of the afternoon diversity training session there remains a question: If white people don’t see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? Was the student white? Who wrote the scenario? Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?5

  After hanging up the phone, I walked to my front door and opened it. The lawn was covered by fallen leaves. For all its apparent beauty, the dead leaves were rotting. Staring into the leaves, I remembered that weeks before a white woman said to me, “I’ve been doing antiracist work since the eighties. I’m here to tell you it makes no difference.” In the moment I laughed with my full face. My laughter was so embodied she started to laugh as well. What were we laughing about? The air was crisp. I closed the door and returned to my desk, where I dawdled by lineating a statement from a Baldwin interview.

  from James Baldwin’s The White Man’s Guilt

  I have often wondered, and it is not a pleasant wonder,

  just what white Americans talk about with one another.

  I wonder this because they do not,

  after all, seem to find very much to say to me,

  and I concluded long ago that they found the color

  of my skin inhibitory. This color

  seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror,

  and a great deal of one’s energy is expended

  in reassuring white Americans

  that they do not see what they see. This is utterly

  futile, of course, since they do see what they see.

  An
d what they see is an appallingly oppressive

  and bloody history, known all over the world.

  What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present

  condition which menaces them, and for which

  they bear an inescapable responsibility.

  But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy

  to change this condition,

  they would rather not be reminded of it.

  Does this mean that in their conversations

  with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds?

  It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand,

  it seems all too likely.

  NOTES

  1. Text Awareness has to happen in rooms where everyone’s white, since those rooms are already in place.

  Fact Check Yes, see sources on segregation below.

  Notes and Sources For “rooms where everyone’s white,” see the Washington Post report by Chris Ingraham, “Three Quarters of Whites Don’t Have Any Non-White Friends,” on a study that found that 75 percent of white people have “entirely white social networks without any minority presence.” According to a 2017 Pew report, the rate at which white newlyweds marry other white people was 89 percent. Entire counties exist that are almost 100 percent white. Another recent Pew study found that “most black and Asian adults (63% and 66%, respectively) say race or race relations come up in their conversations with family and friends at least sometimes, compared with about half of white (50%) and Hispanic (49%) adults.” For an overview of recent data on spatial segregation in the United States, see this Washington Post report: “America Is More Diverse Than Ever—but Still Segregated.”

  From a historical perspective, the effects of long-standing segregationist policies and laws at the federal, state, and local levels are still felt and seen today. According to Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law in regard to housing, current residential segregation “is not the unintended consequence of individual choices … but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” Rothstein maintains that even without such government-mandated racial segregation, “other causes—private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation—still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression.”

  2. Text Aren’t these conversations, which are ostensibly attempts to work on whiteness without reinstating white hierarchical thinking, choosing white comfort over white discomfort and integration? Is that a problem?

  Notes and Sources For an extended argument for integration, see the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration.

  3. Text Comparing a black person to a monkey is one of the oldest and most expedient forms of racism…

  Notes and Sources The philosopher Charles Mills and sociologist Wulf Hund edited a volume on “simianization,” which collects essays on dehumanization as a form of racism with particular attention to the comparison to apes. It offers both a review of contemporary cases of this form of racism and a history. The volume, given its publication date, does not include former BBC broadcaster Danny Baker’s tweet, which contained the image below referencing the birth of the royal mixed-race baby in 2019.

  4. Text Theorist Benjamin Eleanor Adam observes that Google searches for the term “evolution” result in portrayals of the height of evolution as the body of a white male…

  Notes and Sources In her book Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins, scholar Monique Scott describes these linear illustrations of evolution, from nineteenth-century Darwinian discourses to F. Clark Howell’s 1965 Time-Life book Early Man, the first representation of men marching single file. Scott writes, “Images from the earliest evolutionary books, newspapers, and exhibitions illustrate that from the earliest incarnation of human evolution, the concept has been accompanied by such visual progress narratives … the ‘march of progress’ image.”

  Also see the interview “James Baldwin Discusses the Problem of Being White in America” (1985): “When Americans say change in the generality, they really mean progress. And when they say progress, they really mean—and they don’t know they mean this—they really mean how quickly and to what extent and how profoundly a black person becomes white. They take themselves quite helplessly as the only possible model of what they call change.”

  5. Text If white people don’t see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? Was the student white? Who wrote the scenario? Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves … ?

  Notes and Sources See “Try and Make Me! Why Corporate Diversity Training Fails,” published by the American Sociological Association in 2007, for a history of diversity training, starting in 1961 with John F. Kennedy’s executive order making it a requirement for federal contractors to take “affirmative action” against discrimination. By 2005, diversity training was offered by 65 percent of large firms and companies.

  lemonade

  The blond marriage counselor is clearly a brunette. I wonder if the yellowing of her hair is intended to take her a step closer to desirability outside of the office or relatability within it? Where do I fit in? None of these thoughts do I share as my husband and I sit across from her in the office; instead I tell her rather dramatically that the Internet of health statistics claimed I should be dead, but it was the twenty-first century, and after a year of being made nauseated by toxic chemotherapy drugs and radiation, I now feel better.1

  The threat of imminent death had built a mansion in my mind where before there existed only a motel for passing fears. In obedience to my new reality, I lived in three-month intervals between blood work. Would there be elevated levels of protein cells indicating my cancer’s return? The cells stayed still, and then, one day as we drove to the hospital, as if I were Denzel Washington’s character in the film adaptation of the August Wilson play Fences, I sat in a speeding car, and because metaphors can also be realities, speedily informed my husband that, in my remaining time, though always the time remains unknown, I needed to find a partner who would make me laugh. It was a humorless moment and so proved my point. This is how we’d ended up in this marriage counselor’s office after twenty years of a high-functioning marriage full of collaborations and films and parenting and dog walking and sharing novels and hosting dinner parties.

  Both my husband and I in our decades together spent much of our time making art addressing the racist treatment of American citizens. We tracked police shootings of unarmed black people; we tracked legislators and judges who were committed to mass incarceration; we shared articles about black children being treated worse than animals by law enforcement; we both cried shamelessly when a black girl was thrown across the classroom by a white male school resource officer and when a black girl at a pool party was slammed to the ground in McKinney, Texas, by a white policeman. Year in and year out we listened and exchanged looks as white people said egregiously racist things in our presence. We attempted to make sense of it all in coherent narratives and images. We fought about esoteric issues like point of view and mundane ones like money. Over the years, we walked miles inside museums and sat hours inside theaters considering how to do what we do better. We helped each other in our endeavors and were pleased by each other’s achievements. My husband calmed me down when confronted by inequity and I calmed him down when confronted by bureaucracy. And so the years passed.

  Though we wouldn’t stop, this once I suggested we redirect the drive that was our life. My husband told the counselor I had communicated deeply painful things over the past months, the worst of which was when I’d told him he should go forward with confidence into divorce-freedom, because as a tall, blue-eyed, middle-aged white man in reasonably good shape, he would have no trouble replacing me, a black woman, in America.

  This was a hurtful thing to say, it seemed to the counselor, not because it was untrue, but because my husband felt hurt by it. This ability to separate fact from affect
is what one learns in therapy.

  When I met my husband at thirty, he was serious-minded and fully aware of what racism made possible. I came to know him through his work first: images of African American children whose life circumstances no one deserved. His understanding of racial politics and the justice system in the United States was more various and clear-eyed than my own. I didn’t have to convince him, or show him, or explain anything about how white antiblack racism worked. He heard the slights in real time. It was a relief. He was the relief. It was with him I entered my first prisons to visit over-sentenced youth. He made a difference in the lives he encountered without having economic privilege or legal access. He visited as a friend. From him I learned what it meant to simply show up and take a picture of what you saw.

  Do you not value yourself? The counselor asks this as if she had never seen how black women are treated in the world. Of course I do, I say slowly to give myself time to figure out her line of reason. I am not talking about myself. I can’t support, marry, or integrate myself. This I say to give her time to consider what she will say next. Don’t you understand how much your husband values you? is her next question. Okay, I say. But isn’t my husband, whoever else he is, also white America?