Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  A white woman effectively ends the conversation on 45’s campaign tactics by turning our gaze toward the dessert tray. How beautiful, she says. Homemade brownies on a silver tray? Hers is the fey gesture I have seen exhibited so often by white women in old movies—women who are overcome by shiny objects. It’s so blatant a redirect I can’t help but ask aloud the most obvious question: Am I being silenced?

  I’m aware my question breaks the rules of social engagement. I’m aware I will never be invited back to this house, back into the circle of these white people. I understand inadvertently causing someone to feel shame isn’t cool. But: Am I being silenced?

  I wanted this white woman to look me in the eye and say, Yes. Yes, you are. I wanted her to own her action and not cower. I would have liked her then. Instead, all of us around the table have to watch her sink into her seat as she looks down at her hands as if I’ve refused to shake them. Now the others have to take sides. White solidarity needs to be reestablished. It’s then I understand I forfeited the game the minute I stepped into a house where I am the only black person.

  The woman and I could have started conversing, instead of one of us using language to erase the next moment. Doesn’t she see that, even as a white woman, she remains subject to the arbitrary power of our executive branch? Shouldn’t we get clear on how we got here? Or are alliances set? Does she see my insistence as its own form of erasure, or is white civility simply being put to work to maintain the fiction of white benevolence and the uncouthness of blackness?

  As I wonder if it’s time to leave, in order to restore my own and the dinner’s equilibrium, someone else steers the conversation, consciously or unconsciously, away from the brownies to a gentler way of speaking about race. Race and children. The question at hand is whether a child study center should delete the word “study” from its title. The center is located in a city with a sizable black population. The dominant feeling around the table seems to be that the concern over the name is frivolous—the center is attached to an academic institution after all, where all is done in the name of study and research.

  As I sit there listening to these polite white people discuss this, I realize the history of experimenting on black people does not hold a place in their referential memory.5 No one makes mention of Tuskegee’s syphilis experiments on black men, or the military experiments of mustard gas on black soldiers, among other nonwhites, or J. Marion Sims’s experimentation on black women.6 No mention of Henrietta Lacks. My historical memory starts tossing examples at me as if it’s having its own dinner party. In the real one, no one wonders what the parents of the black children think when they see the word “study” associated with the center.

  Knowing that my silence is active in the room, I stay silent because I want to make a point of that silence. Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes that “if you name the problem you become the problem.”7 To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself.

  But all the structures and all the diversity planning put in place to alter those structures, and all the desires of whites to assimilate blacks in their day-to-day lives, come with the continued outrage at rage. All the perceived outrage at me, the guest who brings all of herself to dinner, all of it—her body, her history, her fears, her furious fears, her expectations—is, in the end, so personal. The mutual anxieties and angers blow invisible in the room. A wind. Blustery, turbulent, squally, overcast: find a discomfort level. I push my brownie around my plate. I am middle-aged and overweight. I shouldn’t eat this. I shouldn’t eat anything. Nothing.

  Moments like these make me understand that the noncomprehension of what is known on the part of whiteness is an active investment in not wanting to know if that involves taking into account the lives of people of color. And the perceived tiresome insistence on presenting one’s knowledge on the part of blackness might be a fruitless and childish exercise. Do I believe either of these positions enough to change my ways? Might as well stop weather from coming.

  Had the woman who admired the dessert tray, in an attempt to redirect the conversation, said to me, Here’s your coat. What’s your hurry? Now, that would have made me smile—the corners of my mouth would have lifted and raised my cheeks to form crow’s feet around my eyes. I would have smiled with my eyes in admiration of her directness—get out—rather than serving up redirection and false civility.

  NOTES

  1. Text It’s my belief antiblack and anti-Latinx racism couched in the terms “Obamacare” and “immigration” and “the wall” was the mighty engine…

  Notes and Sources One major study that supports the argument that race was a determining factor in the election is John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck’s Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America: “Another and arguably even more important element of the context is political actors. They help articulate the content of a group identity, or what it means to be part of a group. Political actors also identify, and sometimes exaggerate or even invent, threats to a group. Political actors can then make group identities and attitudes more salient and elevate them as criteria for decision-making.”

  2. Text … the very president who refers to himself as a nationalist.

  Notes and Sources “Trump Says He’s a ‘Nationalist,’” by Neeti Upadhye: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000006175744/trump-nationalist.html

  USA Today, “‘I’m a Nationalist’: Trump’s Embrace of Controversial Label Sparks Uproar”: “You know, they have a word—it’s sort of become old-fashioned—it’s called a nationalist. And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.”

  3. Text … “many factors” are the rhetorical tide I swim upstream against, as if George Wallace hadn’t attributed his political success to the articulation of racist rhetoric.

  Fact Check Yes. Wallace attributed his political rise to racist rhetoric and policy but not specifically his four terms as governor. See below.

  Notes and Sources See Dan T. Carter’s biography of George Wallace, The Politics of Rage: “Wallace shrugged. ‘I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I couldn’t make them listen,’ he told Louis Eckl, editor of the Florence Times. ‘Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor.’”

  4. Text It’s harder than you would think because white people don’t really want change if it means they need to think differently than they do about who they are.

  Fact Check Yes, but just to note—there may be counterexamples.

  Notes and Sources Ashley Jardina’s work may be of interest: “When the dominant status of whites relative to racial and ethnic minorities is secure and unchallenged, white identity likely remains dormant. When whites perceive their group’s dominant status is threatened or their group is unfairly disadvantaged, however, their racial identity may become salient and politically relevant.”

  Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals, by Cydney Dupree and Susan T. Fiske: “White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites—that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent…. This possibly unintentional but ultimately patronizing competence-downshift suggests that well-intentioned liberal Whites may draw on low-status/competence stereotypes to affiliate with minorities.”

  5. Text As I sit there listening to these polite white people discuss this, I realize the history of experimenting on black people does not hold a place in their referential memory.

  Notes and Sources Harriet
A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present: “The Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) has been busily investigating abuses at more than sixty research centers, including experimentation-related deaths at premier universities, from Columbia to California. Another important subset of human subject abuse has been scientific fraud, wherein scientists from the University of South Carolina to MIT have also been found to have lied through falsified data or fictitious research agendas, often in the service of research that abused black Americans. Within recent years, the OPRR has also suspended research at such revered universities as Alabama, Pennsylvania, Duke, Yale, and even Johns Hopkins.”

  Linda Villarosa, “Myths about Physical Racial Differences Were Used to Justify Slavery—and Are Still Believed by Doctors Today,” the 1619 Project, the New York Times Magazine: “Over the centuries, the two most persistent physiological myths—that black people were impervious to pain and had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work—wormed their way into scientific consensus, and they remain rooted in modern-day medical education and practice. In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that black people could bear surgical operations much more than white people, noting that ‘what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.’ To drive home his point, he added, ‘I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.’”

  6. Text … experiments of mustard gas on black soldiers, among other nonwhites…

  Fact Check Yes. The military did conduct mustard gas experiments on black, white, and other nonwhite soldiers. See below.

  Notes and Sources “Secret World War II Chemical Experiments Tested Troops by Race,” by Caitlin Dickerson on NPR’s Morning Edition: “White enlisted men were used as scientific control groups. Their reactions were used to establish what was ‘normal,’ and then compared to the minority troops.”

  7. Text In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes…

  Notes and Sources Sara Ahmed also addresses impressions in the introduction to The Cultural Politics of Emotion: “To form an impression might involve acts of perception and cognition as well as an emotion. But forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (‘she made an impression’). It can be a belief (‘to be under an impression’). It can be an imitation or an image (‘to create an impression’). Or it can be a mark on the surface (‘to leave an impression’). We need to remember the ‘press’ in impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. So not only do I have an impression of others, but they also leave me with an impression; they impress me, and impress upon me.”

  violent

  A white friend, who’s aware I’m writing on perceptions of whiteness, phones to recount an interaction she just had with her child. I have questioned her on previous occasions regarding how whiteness is talked about in her family, in her home, in her world. She is white, her husband is white, and their child is white. This day her young son returned home from school upset. An Asian boy told him he “ruined” his drawing of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by coloring Goldilocks’s skin brown. Her son knows there are also people in his world with brown skin. My friend assures her son that he has nothing to worry about.

  One thing I thought about since we talked is his preschool. We’d moved here when he was three and we wanted him to have a diverse classroom. So his teacher who he had for nearly two years was East Indian and the class was diverse. Also, the director of the preschool was black. I don’t know if this had any impact on why he colored Goldilocks brown, but I do think it impacted his reaction to his classmate’s comment that he’d ruined her. My son felt hurt and confused. I think he colored Goldilocks brown because he sees it as an artistic option, a way to represent the world. This year for Christmas when given the choice to paint his ceramic Santa, he opted to paint him black. I didn’t ask him why.

  Wondering what goes on in the imagination of the Asian boy who also attends this diverse preschool, I decide one possibility could be that he has been read “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” so many times his visual memory was assaulted.1 The brown crayon represented Goldilocks differently from her normal portrayal, despite my friend’s son’s attention to her blond hair. But can we say she is ruined? My friend’s curiosity is no doubt piqued by whether or not the Asian boy objected based on what he knows about the text or what he knows about the world we share. Ruined? Has anyone explained color-blind casting to him? I jokingly ask my friend. But since wondering, as Emily Dickinson would tell us, “is not precisely Knowing and not precisely Knowing not,” we don’t jump to any conclusions about the boy because context is everything.

  I mention to my friend that children’s ideas about race are formed by the time they arrive in kindergarten and their racial bias is not random. Social psychologist Kristina Olson makes the claim that “by 3 or 4 years of age, White children in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe show preferences for other White children.” This, she says, happens because no matter what we tell children, they model their behavior after their surroundings. Erin Winkler agrees: “As children become more aware of societal norms that favor certain groups over others, they will often show a bias toward the socially privileged group.” I am suddenly flooded by a memory of all the doll tests done over the years based on psychologists Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll tests, the results of which were used in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to show the adverse effect of racism on black children, but what about the adverse effects on white children?2 Or Asian children? Should we care about that?

  Winkler’s argument is also supported by the work of psychologists Phyllis Katz and Jennifer Kofkin in their 1997 article “Race, Gender, and Young Children.”3 They followed black and white children and, according to Winkler, “found that all of the children expressed an in-group bias at the age of 30 months. When asked to choose a potential playmate from among photos of unfamiliar white and black boys and girls, all of the children chose a samerace playmate. However, by 36 months, the majority of both black and white children chose white playmates … and this pattern held at the 60-month mark, although it decreased slightly at that point.” I wonder if parents who agreed to their children’s involvement in the study were surprised by the results. Social bias, according to psychologists Danielle Perszyk, Ryan F. Lei, Galen V. Bodenhausen, Jennifer A. Richeson, and Sandra R. Waxman, becomes more difficult to change once the children get older.

  How does one combat the racism of a culture? It’s difficult to be hopeful when even the “eye gaze patterns” of teachers in preschool tend to target black children, especially boys, at the sign of any disturbance in the classroom.4 One wonders how this could not become a social cue for all the children.

  Another friend who is black tells me the director of her son’s private school called to tell her her son was put out of the class for his behaviors. In the ensuing exchange the school director describes the four-year-old as violent. Violent? He threw a puzzle piece and he pulled the teacher’s hair when she removed him from the room. He had a meltdown. Violent, my friend keeps repeating. He is four years old. Did you tell his teachers there are words besides incompetent that can frame their use of the word “violent”? I ask.

  The feminist, queer, and postcolonial theorist Sara Ahmed writes in “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” “To give a problem a name can change not only how we register an event but whether we register an event. To give the problem a name can be experienced as magnifying the problem; allowing something to acquire a social and physical density by gathering up what otherwise remain scattered experiences into a tangible thing.” My friend laughs, but says she just wants her c
hild to be in a safe space where he is allowed to have developmentally appropriate toddler tantrums and yet be helped to deal with his emotions in a compassionate way. If you don’t name what’s happening, everyone can pretend it’s not happening, I say, somewhat annoyed. I know, she says, but those white women are not my concern. When she removed her son from the school, his white teacher cried because there should be no consequences to the school staff’s reading of black boyhood as violent.5 Violent. Help. Help.

  After I hang up with this friend, I wonder at my own irritation. It is not simply about the white director’s use of the word violent. It is also about what I perceive to be my friend’s passivity. Maybe she didn’t push the moment to its crisis because she saw the white woman’s tears as a concession of some sort. Was I being ungenerous in my dismissal of the teacher’s feelings? She cried because she was sad about what was happening.6 Even if the tears are motivated by a sense of persecution rather than guilt, they are still tears, my therapist points out. Is there no room for her to be more than one thing? I am taken aback by this question. But why do I need to perform something she couldn’t perform for a four-year-old? Am I supposed to give the benefit of the doubt to an adult who can’t give it to a child? Nothing is suspended for her, even given my inability to take her tears into account, and still I must take her tears into account. The tears signify a failure perhaps, a sense of failure perhaps, or is it a sense of victimhood or a sense of guilt, maybe; but I can’t be sure the teacher knows she’s the one who failed my friend’s child (rather than my friend failing her) unless we name the failure. I can’t be sure, but how I read the tears is less important than acknowledging that they communicate some kind of emotional understanding or lack of understanding, my therapist tells me. I ask my friend what she was thinking faced with the tears of the white teacher.