The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  the oil spill changed nothing: In the early days of the oil spill, BP blamed the explosion and ensuing ecological disaster on BP’s business partners in the Deepwater Horizon venture, Halliburton and Transocean. Transocean and Halliburton executives blamed each other and BP. All of them together blamed a variety of technicalities, including the fact that the Deepwater Horizon was owned by Transocean but was simply leased and operated by BP. Halliburton owned the cement in the well and maybe some of the equipment, but definitely none of the faulty equipment. The details are difficult to glean. Everyone agrees, though, that the oil itself was owned by BP, since the company paid tens of millions of dollars to the US government—which claims exclusive economic rights to anything above or below the surface of the water across a large swath of the Gulf of Mexico—in order to lease the mineral rights to the Macondo Prospect, where the Deepwater Horizon was drilling when it blew up. President Obama called their finger pointing a “ridiculous spectacle,” which was, perhaps, all part of the spectacle.

  Finally, the chief executives of the five major oil and gas companies appeared before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in June of 2010. The session was one long self-righteous admonishment, beginning and ending with committee members criticizing how the companies spent and didn’t spend their money. One particular gripe was that though BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobile, and ConocoPhillips had together amassed nearly $289 billion in profits over the previous three years, their average investment for safety was less than one-tenth of 1 percent of those profits.

  Mostly the executives maintained their composure, remaining calm and expressionless. Then, under combined pressure from Representatives Bart Stupak of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California asking specifically about the companies’ disaster response plans, ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson became uncharacteristically flustered. His face reddened and his voice cracked as he admitted that, yes, when it comes to oil spills, his oil company—every oil company, in fact—is “not well-equipped to handle them. There will be impacts, as we are seeing.”

  To be perfectly honest, each of these companies’ disaster response plans is a bit of a joke, some only five pages long. Several of the plans list, for instance, “walruses” under “Sensitive Biological and Human Resources” in the Gulf Coast. Luckily, no walruses were harmed in the Gulf Coast oil spill, but maybe that’s because walruses haven’t occupied the Gulf of Mexico for 300 million years.

  Soon after the hearing, BP set up the BP Disaster Victim Compensation Fund for people living on the coast whose lives and livelihoods had been “adversely affected” by the spill. It seemed like a gesture of good faith until the fund began litigating all claims at every step, arguing it was too easy for businesses and individuals to claim economic damage without evidence. This same line of argument was at least part of the reason BP CEO Tony Hayward was fired three months after the spill. Officially, spokespeople for BP claimed he had resigned, but it seems clear that what led him to be transferred to a BP outpost in Siberia was, in fact, the public’s ire. People weren’t pissed so much about the spill, but rather that Hayward had suggested that Americans were likely to file bogus claims with the compensation fund. His comments drew criticism from President Obama and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, among others, but that didn’t stop Hayward from taking a vacation to England’s Isle of Wight to watch his yacht compete in a race, or from saying, fresh off his private transatlantic flight, “There’s no one who wants this [spill] over more than I do. I want my life back.” In the end, it’s likely he was fired because he did not prove himself to be capable of behaving “in ways that earn the trust of others” (one of the self-stated values of BP) and not, in fact, because his company broke an oil well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. That, it seems, might have been forgivable on its own, since it wasn’t even the first time oil was spilled in the Gulf of Mexico.

  In 1979 Pemex, a state-owned Mexican petroleum company, was drilling an oil well when a blowout occurred. The oil ignited and the drilling rig collapsed, just like the Deepwater Horizon did a little over thirty years later. Oil from the rig, the Ixtoc I, began gushing out into the Gulf at a rate of ten thousand to thirty thousand barrels a day for almost an entire year before workers were finally able to cap the well. Ten years later, in 1989, the Exxon Valdez hit a reef off Prince William Sound in southern Alaska, piercing the hull and dumping thirty-nine thousand tons of oil into the sound. Compared to the Gulf spill, the Exxon Valdez was small, but it created a complete ecological disaster for a coastal community. Despite attempts to use dispersing agents and oil-skimming ships, oil washed onto thirteen hundred miles of Alaskan coastline. It’s unclear exactly how much marine life was affected, but an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, and up to 22 killer whales died, along with billions of salmon and herring eggs. Even today, oil remains a few inches below the surface on many of Alaska’s beaches.

  Eventually, the US government appointed Kenneth Feinberg as the administrator of the BP Disaster Victim Compensation Fund. Feinberg had spent his career in this sort of role as a court-appointed special settlement master in cases involving Vietnam veterans and the Agent Orange product liability litigation, as well as the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. As had become usual, he was appointed by the government to manage the fund; however, in this case, his salary was paid by BP, including a flat fee to his firm of $1.25 million a month for labor and overhead costs. The terms of his lucrative compensation arrangement with BP are somewhat murky. It is unclear, for example, whether even one unspoken condition was that Feinberg find any number of reasons to refuse payment to 116,000 of the 331,560 claims, as when the claimants provided no documentation or insufficient documentation or were just plain ineligible.

  what we Americans consume in our automobiles in a single day: In 2010 alone, Americans consumed roughly 377 million gallons of gasoline per day, which would have been refined from no less than 833 million gallons of crude.

  “Gifts from the earth or from each other”: See Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Gift of Strawberries” in Braiding Sweetgrass.

  AGAINST WHITENESS

  “If white American feminist theory”: Audre Lorde continues:

  What is the theory behind racist feminism?

  In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure . . . to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

  “No one was white before he/she came to America”: James Baldwin writes in “On Being White . . . And Other Lies”:

  There is, for example—at least, in principle—an Irish community: here, there, anywhere, or, more precisely, Belfast, Dublin and Boston. There is a German community: both sides of Berlin, Bavaria and Yorkville. There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank of the Holy Ghost and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish community, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants and Turkish baths. There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.”

  in order to become intelligible to others: For some, the process of becoming white was a process of simply “passing” for white. For others, who had formerly been labeled “ethnic whites,” the process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over the Immigration Act of 1790, which offered naturalization only to “any alien, being a free white person.” Courts denied the status of “whiteness” to i
ndividuals in at least fifty-two cases. By 1923, courts began using a “common-knowledge” standard, concluding that “scientific evidence” for whiteness was inconsistent and incoherent.

  In How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev argues that becoming white wasn’t simply a matter of erasing difference or of legal status. During the 1840s and 1850s, Irish immigrants were able to lay claim to a lesser and inferior whiteness in America by distancing themselves from former slaves, whose economic circumstances were not unlike their own and with whom they often found themselves competing for jobs. Whiteness meant they didn’t have to compete as much for these jobs, but it required that they ally themselves with their oppressors against their economic equals.

  a system of racial hierarchy: Theodore Allen, author of The Invention of the White Race, writes:

  The introduction of this counterfeit of social mobility was an act of “social engineering,” the essence of which was to reissue long-established common law rights, “incident to every free man,” but in the form of “white” privileges: the presumption of liberty, the right to get married, the right to carry a gun, the right to read and write, the right to testify in legal proceedings, the right of self-directed physical mobility, and the enjoyment of male prerogatives over women. The successful societal function of this status required that not only African-American bond-laborers, but most emphatically, free African-Americans be excluded from it. It is that status and realigning of the laboring-class European-Americans that transformed class oppression into racial oppression.

  the jury ultimately acquitted them of these charges: After the acquittal of the four officers—Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno—the Department of Justice sought indictments at the federal level, and the grand jury returned indictments against Powell, Wind, and Briseno for “willfully and intentionally using unreasonable force” and against Sergeant Koon for “failing to take action to stop the unlawful assault.” The subsequent federal trial returned a guilty verdict for Powell and Koon, who subsequently served thirty months in prison despite Judge John Davies’s acceptance of much of the white officers’ version of the beating, finding that King had likely provoked the actions by “failing to comply.”

  “Can we all get along?”: Although I remember this as a plea to the entire world, King was very much making a direct plea to people of color to end what must have seemed to him a campaign of retributive violence on his behalf. He continues:

  Can we? Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? And . . . I mean we’ve got enough smog in Los Angeles let alone to deal with setting these fires and things . . . it’s just not right. It’s not right. And it’s not going to change anything. We’ll get our justice; they’ve won the battle, but they haven’t won the war. We’ll get our day in court and that’s all we want. And, just, uh, I love—I’m neutral, I love every—I love people of color. I’m not like they’re making me out to be. We’ve got to quit. We’ve got to quit; I mean after-all, I could understand the first upset for the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see the security guard shot on the ground—it’s just not right; it’s just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again. And uh, I mean please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along. We just gotta, we gotta. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while, let’s, you know let’s try to work it out, let’s try to beat it, you know. Let’s try to work it out.

  Rachel Dolezal notoriously decided to reject whiteness: For nearly ten years, a white woman named Rachel Dolezal passed herself off as a black woman, working as a lecturer in the African American studies department at Eastern Washington University (where she taught such classes as “African and African-American Art History,” “African-American Culture,” and “The Black Woman’s Struggle”), as a freelance black hair stylist, and also as the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. She was “outed” in early June 2015 during a TV interview on KXLY by reporter Jeff Humphrey. The pretext for the interview was to ask questions about the hate mail Dolezal had received at her home. At one point Humphrey asked, “Are you African American?” Dolezal looked stunned; several moments passed before she answered, “I don’t understand the question.” He asked, “Your parents: are they white?” Dolezal lowered her head, walked off camera; she was saying “I refuse . . .” when the recording stopped.

  In June 2015, many people spent a lot of time talking and thinking and writing about the Rachel Dolezal scandal. Mostly people were baffled, I think: about her decades-long hoax, about her claim of being “transracial,” about her hair. On June 17, 2015, Dolezal sat down for an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, who said to Dolezal, “It’s one thing to embrace the questions [of race] as an academic matter; it’s another thing to just actually be honest and transparent about who you really are.” “Right,” Dolezal responded. “I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am. So, what’s the word for it? You know I mean, the closest thing I can come to is if you’re black or white, I’m black. I’m more black than I am white.”

  Writing in The Stranger, Ijeoma Oluo offers what is, in my opinion, the best take on Rachel Dolezal:

  Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn’t center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort.

  Whiteness is, in fact, a fairly modern fiction: The eighteenth century in particular was a period for a lot of theorizing about race, with Carl Linnaeus in 1758 proposing two separate species for humans: Homo sapiens; europaeus, the preferred category for light-skinned Europeans, and Homo sapiens, the category for everyone else. In 1775 Immanuel Kant used the term weiß, meaning white, to refer to the race “of northern Europe.” With differentiation came biases about superiority and inferiority. The writings of Thomas Jefferson in particular helped rationalize slavery in a nation otherwise dedicated to liberty and equality: “I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” he wrote in 1781. Many historians have noted that the idea of an inherent inferiority was used to make it possible to deny kidnapped Africans the liberties that would be granted to European immigrants as rights.

  “My ancestors never owned slaves”: In “Who Invented White People?” whiteness scholar Gregory Jay writes:

  I may not intend anything racial when I apply for a loan, or walk into a store, or hail a cab, or ask for a job—but in every circumstance my whiteness will play a role in the outcome, however “liberal” or “anti-racist” I imagine myself to be. White men have enormous economic advantages because of the disadvantages faced by women and minorities, no matter what any individual white men may intend. If discrimination means that fewer qualified applicants compete with you for the job, you benefit. You do not have to be a racist to benefit from being white. You just have to look the part.

  “We do not know the history / Of ourselves in this nation”: See “Riddle” in The Georgia Review.

  public acts of racial terror: In 1923, James Scott, a black man, was accused of sexual assault against a college professor’s daughter and was lynched by a white mob in Columbia, Missouri.

  In Excelsior, Missouri, Walter Mitchell, a black man, was lynched for the alleged attempted rape of a white woman in 1925.

  In 1931, a mob lynched Raymond Gunn, a black man, but only after forcing him to confess to killing and attempting to rape a white schoolteacher in Maryville, Missouri.

  Cleo Wright, a black man, was arrested for the alleged attempted rape of a white woman and burned alive in Sikeston, Missouri, in 1942.

  In my hometown, Henry Williams, a black man, was lynched i
n 1898 for allegedly assaulting two white girls.

  We think of it as a dark exception: Lauret Savoy writes, “How a society remembers can’t be separated from how it wants to be remembered or from what it wishes it was—that is, if we believe stories of ancestors reflect who we are and how we came to be. The past is remembered and told by desire.” See Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape.

  sense of “racial superiority”: See Leon F. Litwack’s “Hellhounds,” in James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon Litwack, eds., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.

  shot and killed Michael Brown in his own neighborhood: Comply was such an interesting word for Darren Wilson to use in his ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos the day after the grand jury failed to bring charges, given that “failure to comply” is the citation of choice for the Ferguson Police Department’s fifty-three officers, who wield it often and with impunity almost exclusively against the city’s black residents for any number of offenses that are not in fact crimes, such as when they refuse to identify themselves, or to take their hands out of their pockets, reach into their pockets, take photographs or video of white police officers using excessive force, move too slowly, move too quickly, talk back, refuse to answer questions, ask questions, squirm while being electrocuted with a Taser gun, leave their homes after being told to stay there—when they refuse, in other words, to obey. Comply shares the same root word as compliment and compliant—to not only obey, but to do so politely, flatteringly, with deference and courtesy.