Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  whitening

  A makeup artist and I are shooting the breeze when I ask her what are the needs of her clients based on race? My Russian girls want their lips bigger, she says, making a starburst gesture with her hand in front of her mouth. My Asian girls need to be as light as possible. She adds, I get it. The makeup artist is black and dark skinned like me, so I assume she means she gets how culturally people with lighter skin are preferred no matter their race-colorism.

  The resignation in her voice brings to mind an Asian student I once had, who put her head down on my desk when I asked if she wanted to write about her mother. Her mood changed so drastically I feared her mother had passed away and I had inadvertently hurt her.

  Without looking at me, she said, my mother is racist. I hopefully responded with my most deadpan voice. Really? How does she communicate her racism? The student, who is a talented writer and a natural-born storyteller, perked up. She said, my mother tells me my father is so handsome, he must have some white in him.

  I didn’t ask if her mother said the same about her.

  There are other things too, she added.

  I see, I said. I see.

  A 2016 Chinese laundry detergent ad showed a black man being stuffed into a washing machine only to reemerge without his blackness. Antiblack racism is not limited to the United States or Europe or South Africa. The skin-whitening industry across Asia, South America, and Africa thrives in the twenty-first century. Apparently, everyone understands what is valued and rewarded. Whiteness and globalization might just as well be one thing. Or maybe it’s just anything but blackness.

  I am watching Naomi Osaka, Asian and black tennis phenom, and wondering how she makes sense of the fact that her Japanese mother was estranged from her parents, Naomi’s grandparents, because of her love for a Haitian man. The fifteen-year estrangement, which lasted until Naomi was eleven years old, remains mind boggling even as I know this is not unusual.

  How does one feel betrayed for a decade and a half because of whom one’s child loves? Is it shame of the contagion of foreignness or is it that the purity of one’s bloodline is polluted by blackness? Probably both. This could be the stuff of movies; still I can’t comprehend how association with blackness, the thought of that, could be worse than the loss of contact with a child one gave birth to, nursed, and cared for all her young life. I think of my own child, whose life and loves inform my life. I try to line up that nonnegotiable love against the knowledge that some lack of association with who I am would be worth the loss of everything, everyone, that one.

  Imagine hating a people so much that only when the world embraces your grandchild, only then can you construct an embrace. The reality would floor me if it weren’t ordinary. The depth of such hatred remains, perhaps, what many refuse to understand.

  Osaka beat Serena Williams in the 2018 US Open where all manner of absurdity occurred. In the week following Osaka’s Grand Slam win an Australian cartoonist portrayed Williams in what many understood to be a stereotypical racist manner and portrayed Osaka as blond. The whitening of Osaka since her rise has been a dynamic she has been forced to comment on. Advertisements by one of her Japanese sponsors, Nissin Foods, lightened her skin as she was portrayed hitting the ball in her tennis whites. Unfortunate but unintentionally racist was Osaka’s take: “I’m tan. It’s pretty obvious…. But I definitely think the next time they try to portray me or something, I feel like they should talk to me about it.” Unlike the Australian cartoonist, Nissin, at least, did not color her hair blond, though Osaka has been known to dye the ends of her hair blond. Why not.

  One tweeter noted that at least sponsors are not doing “blacker” portraits of Osaka. The whitening was in some ways, the responder seemed to imply, the lesser of two evils. Perhaps her sponsors by lightening her skin are only trying to protect her and their products from anticipated Japanese antiblack racism. Justified? After Osaka’s 2019 win at the Toray Pan Pacific Open in the country of her birth and citizenship the comedy team A Masso at an event stated that Osaka “needed some bleach.” According to an article in the Root by Maiysha Kai, other hāfu or mixed-raced individuals have been referred to as kurombo, Japan’s version of the N-word. As Osaka gets framed as her generation’s Serena Williams, we begin to understand her succession as forming inside a similar racist frame.

  In press conference after press conference, Osaka responds to the racist rhetoric targeting her, and as I note her wariness, I wonder if she would receive the same treatment if she were Haitian Filipino, Haitian Chinese, Haitian Vietnamese, Haitian Korean, Haitian Indian, etc. What are the Asian countries where the people believe their “origin stories” are not tainted by their association to blackness? I am thinking their anxiety, if anxiety exists, is enmeshed with how blackness is viewed in the white imaginary. And given this possibility, who are the Asians who understand themselves to be so-called “junior partners” within the structures of white supremacy? Obama received 62 and 73 percent of the votes from Asian Americans in the 2008 and 2012 elections. What did they believe our first black president could safeguard for them?

  liminal spaces iii

  My friend says the gravitational force of an origin story is difficult to get over.

  I am thinking of white supremacy.

  How many narratives are there for black people in the white imaginary?

  The theorist Barbara Johnson suggested whatever narratives exist are “already read.”1

  I would add that, in the end, all the narratives end up naming blacks with words that begin with the letter “N.” Nurse could be one. Nanny another. No one, could be yet another.

  We’re not helpless but we are “conditioned to be indifferent,” to use Bryan Stevenson’s phrase. All these years of white neighbors suspecting, accusing, or killing black people occur inside the law more often than not. Lynching postcards were delivered through the US mail.

  “9-1-1, there’s a black man across the street opening his front door. Hurry.”

  Recall mechanisms of my brain bring forward a question and a statement taken from a mural and a billboard.

  How long is now?

  There are black people in the future.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates wants us, at the very least, to talk about what reparations could look like.2 He’s in a conversation with historical memory, the archives, “the logic of white supremacy,” an American public shaped by that logic, a structural reality shaped by that logic, and Mitch McConnell, or what McConnell, shaped by that logic, stands for: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for which none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.”

  McConnell’s is a rehearsed and strategic statement. Repetition becomes insistence morphing into an accepted and acceptable position. Help, help.

  Coates is modeling a response to this repetition and what he calls “fair-weather patriotism.” He’s pulling us back from the ordinariness of capitulation to the built-in violence in white supremacy.

  Tell me, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”

  Tell me, “I don’t see color.”

  Tell me, “I’m not racist, I’m just not used to voting for black people.”

  Tell me, “I have a black friend.”

  And then take in the voting patterns in the US:

  Those who voted in 2016 to be represented yet again by this form of violence, the 62 percent of white men and 47 percent of white women, a plurality, how am I to understand them?

  How should I understand their origin stories?

  How am I to interpret their comfort with children sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers dedicated to the suffering unto death of these children?3

  And then take in the accepted norms in the US:

  “Like it or not these are not our kids. Show them compassion but it’s not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.”4

  How am I to understand the fluidity with which we continue in our days?<
br />
  How to understand all our looking away?

  Teju Cole writes, “There are no refugees, only fellow citizens whose rights we have failed to acknowledge.”

  How is it these children don’t end up in comas like their European counterparts, refugees in countries like Sweden? Those children suffer from “uppgivenhetssyndrom” also known as “resignation syndrome.”5 They give up on life and the state and a nation that rejects them; they give up on a life that feels like “too much.”

  Primo Levi described this category of people in Nazi concentration camps, those known as Muselmänner: “One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”6

  This calls me back to ethical loneliness, to the isolation one experiences when one is, according to Jill Stauffer, “abandoned by humanity or by those who have power over one’s life possibilities.”

  To give up feels like a form of protection from life itself. Hands up, don’t shoot.

  But giving up is not a thing to want.

  But giving up might be what our lives will look like looking back. Not comas nor emaciated near-death Muselmänner but indifference and tolerance for the unspeakable under the category of helplessness.

  I imagine helplessness might itself be a thing to be managed, however.

  Why aren’t all people actively involved in our present American struggle against a nationalist regime?

  Have so many become so vulnerable to white dominance that the pathways to imagined change are wiped out of our brains and our default consciousnesses are in their lowest levels of activity, meaning we can no longer envision a new type of future or even really see what’s happening in our present?

  In the liminal space in the train station in Boston Back Bay a recording reminds me and my fellow travelers, “If you see something, say something.”

  But then, as if the automated response suddenly understands to whom it speaks, it adds, “Seeing something means seeing an action not a person.”

  Who knew to add that?

  Who dared to utter it?

  Because of racism, because of the assumption of a single public, because of white supremacy, because of nationalism, it implies, first monitor yourself.

  The next time I was waiting for Amtrak in Back Bay, the second statement in the reminder was gone.

  Why was it taken away?

  I sometimes joke that my optimism has been stolen by white supremacy.

  Don’t be burdened by white supremacy, my friend responds.

  The “toomuchness” of our present reality sometimes gives rise to humor but could occasion disassociation, detachment from engagement, a refusal to engage in our democratic practices given how structural and invasive white supremacy remains.

  A white supremacist orientation is packaged as universal thinking and objective seeing, which insists on the erasure of anyone—my actual presence, my humanity—who disrupts its reflection. Its form of being.

  The idea that one can stand apart is a nice fantasy but we can’t afford fantasies.

  Fantasies cost lives.

  Universalized whiteness, that racial imaginary, lives in every moment.

  We have to be willing to think about this despite spending most of our days not thinking at all.

  In most cases we have already decided about everything and everyone, but real thinking, the affect theorist Lauren Berlant writes, “interrupts the flow of consciousness with a new demand for scanning and focus…. To be forced into thought is to begin to formulate the event of feeling historical in the present.”

  She wants us to “jam the machinery that makes the ordinary appear as a flow.”

  Even as we exist as people in relation—people across the table from each other, people talking in a car, on a plane, by the water fountain, in detention centers, in prisons, at picnics, at work, next door, on trains, in waiting rooms, in classrooms, at bedsides, in taxis, on the subway, at the store, on the street, in the clinic, at the post office, at the DMV, or on Zoom social distancing, wherever—one conversation has already occurred between you and me as our encounter newly unfolds.7

  Default positions and pathways might already mean that what I imagine doesn’t matter given that I am a black woman.

  What would white people have to graft onto their fantasies so they can treat as real the possibility of true change? True equality?

  In 2008 and 2012, people of color, in the defined categories of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics (leaving out Middle Eastern and Indigenous peoples to the category of Other), managed to elect a black president despite a majority of the white vote going to white candidates.8

  Once the victory occurred, white people claimed it as a break in their racism despite the fact that a white majority did not vote for a black candidate in either election. But, suddenly, falsely, it was the whites’ possession and progression.

  What about Obama? I have heard again and again when I pointed to the continuation of our white supremacist reality in this country.

  What about him? I’ve answered back before pulling up the voting percentages I keep on my phone.

  Reimagining agency is the conversation I want to have. How do “all of us” believe again in our inalienable rights?

  Agency is right there and I am willing it forward.

  Anchored in unknowing, I yearn to rise out of the restlessness of my own forms of helplessness inside a structure that constricts possibilities.

  Let me ask you or just tell me why or, better yet, how can we?

  But who is this “we”?

  Is it even possible to form a “we”?

  Is this even the question?

  E pluribus unum might have been the first national mistake.

  Is there a “one” that the rest of us should step out of the way of or map ourselves onto?

  And once that pledge is made, what are we citizens of?

  We the people are citizens of what?

  I won’t say again the “what” that gives me pause, but I will quote Fred Moten here: “The analysis of our murderer, and of our murder, is so we can see we are not murdered. We survive. And then, as we catch a sudden glimpse of ourselves, we shudder, for we are shattered. Nothing survives. The nothingness we share is all that’s real. That’s what we come out to show. That showing is, or ought to be, our constant study.”

  Appropriate that.

  Is it possible to live E pluribus unum?

  As a naturalized citizen, I am as connected to the ones who say “go back to where you came from” or “send her back” as I am to the democratic process that names me an American citizen. And as unknowable as I am to anyone else, I forever remain in relation to everyone else.

  I am not a part of the one but I am one.

  There is no beyond of citizenship.

  A stranger tells me he thought the goal was understanding himself as different from but then he came to understand his sameness. He came to understand himself to be living also among other humans who are not white, living within a structure set up to disenfranchise those others.

  Arthur Jafa said, “As a black person you know whiteness [and] experience it—how do you contain that and white people who you know and love?” I might extend this to all persons who you know and love. Each one. One at a time.

  Our lives could enact a love of close readings of who we each are, the love of a newly formed, newly conceived “one” made up of obscure but sensed and unnamed publics in a yet unimagined future.

  What I know is that an inchoate desire for a future other than the one that seems to be forming our days brings me to a seat around any table to lean forward, to hear, to respond, to await response from any other.

  Tell me something, one thing, the thing, tell me that thing.9

  NOTES

  1. Text The theorist Barbara Johnson suggested whatever narratives exist are “already read.”

  Notes and Sources Barbara Johnson, “The Critical Difference: BartheS/Bal
Zac”: “First, it implies that a single reading is composed of the already-read, what we can see in a text the first time is already in us, not in it; in us insofar as we ourselves are a stereotype, an already read text; and in the text only to the extent that the already-read is that aspect of a text that it must have in common with its reader in order for it to be readable at all.”

  2. Text Ta-Nehisi Coates wants us, at the very least, to talk about what reparations could look like.

  Notes and Sources From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, June 19, 2019: “The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement, and reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that this nation is both its credits and debits. That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings. That if D-Day matters, so does Black Wall Street. That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow. Because the question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them. Thank you.”

  Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” the Atlantic:

  “And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

  “Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt…. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”