Tears We Cannot Stop Read online

  The officer gave Mwata a ticket and a stern warning that if he ever saw him again he would take him straight to jail. He also insisted that Mwata park the car and not drive again that night. Literally five seconds after he let Mwata go the cop pulled over another black motorist. So many whites say they hate the quotas they associate with affirmative action, but quotas don’t seem to bother the white folk in blue who can’t get enough of them as they harass one black citizen after another.

  To this day my grandson is worried every time he sees a cop. He fears the cops will try to arrest him and his father. He can’t understand why the color of his skin is a reason to be targeted by the police. Mosi is only seven years old.

  Lord, what are we to do?

  When I look at Mosi and my other grandchildren, Layla and Maxem, all beautiful, all bright, all full of life, I swear to you, Oh Lord, it fills me with fear, and then anger, and grief, to think that some son of a bitch with a badge and a gun could just take their lives, take our lives, as if it means nothing. I am beyond rage, Oh Lord, at the utter complicity of even good white folk who claim that they care, and yet their voices don’t ring out loudly and consistently against an injustice so grave that it sends us to our graves with frightening frequency. They wring their hands in frustration to prove that they empathize with our plight—that is, those who care enough to do so—and then throw them up in surrender.

  What we mostly hear is deafening silence. What we mostly see is crushing indifference. Lord, what are we to do in a nation of people who claim to love you and hold fast to your word and way and yet they let their brothers and sisters murder us like we are animals?

  Lord, Dear Lord, I don’t want to feel this way, but I swear to you I want to kill dead any Godforsaken soul who thinks that killing black people is an acceptable price to pay for keeping this nation safe. But then, am I any better than that soul?

  I am reminded, Oh Lord, of the modern parable of the chicken and pig having a conversation about each making a contribution to breakfast. They are stopped short when they realize that their contributions aren’t equally demanding, won’t have the same consequence. All the chicken has to do to make a good breakfast is lay an egg. But the pig has to give his behind to make bacon. He has to die.

  Lord, Oh Lord, I am so tired—we are so tired—of being the pigs. We are tired of having to sacrifice our hides to feed America. That may help explain why some black folk take special delight in referring to the cops as pigs. We want them to share our grief, to feel our pain, if just a little of it, in a term they find offensive. But if they think that insult is abominable, if the reference is disrespectful, can they not imagine, Oh Lord, what it means to be the pig, to surrender life to fill the bellies of a nation that eats our souls and culture while excreting us as so much waste?

  Lord, convict this nation as never before. Let our lives testify to your majesty, your love, your grace—and may this land know your displeasure, taste your holy wrath, for killing us like pigs without conscience. Let this nation repent of its murderous ways. Only then will we even believe that white folk know the God who plants a foot on earth and regulates the wheel of time and circumstance. Until then, Oh Lord, give us the courage to tell the truth to white folk who need it more than air itself—who, we pray, will come to hunger for it more than they hunger for our death.

  IV.

  Scripture Reading

  Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the . . . need that some people have to feel superior. A need that some people have to feel . . . that their white skin ordained them to be first.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Book of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968: 3–8

  Martin Luther King, Jr., is the most quoted black man on the planet. His words are like scripture to you and, yes, to us too. His name is evoked, his speech referenced, during every racial crisis we confront. He has become the language of race itself. He is, too, the history of black America in a dark suit. But he is more than that. He is the struggle and suffering of our people distilled to a bullet in Memphis. King’s martyrdom made him less a man, more a symbol, arguably a civic deity. But there are perils to hero-worship. His words get plucked from their original contexts, his ideas twisted beyond recognition. America has washed the grit from his rhetoric.

  Beloved, you say you love King, or at least admire him, but you don’t really know him, not the King who was too black and too radical for most of America. King drank from roots deep in black culture. He bathed in black language. He sprang from a black moral womb. Black teachers and preachers shaped King. They gave him fuel for his journey and the inspiration to change the world. King told the truth about you in black America, to black America, in ways he couldn’t tell you. He said the toughest things about you in sacred black spaces. He did it because he felt safe with us. He did that to let us know that he knew what we were up against. He did it to let us know we weren’t crazy. If the most celebrated black man on the globe could feel the way he did, then we had every right to feel the same way. That didn’t make King a Janus-faced liar. He was, instead, a man of noble forbearance. He understood what white folk could hear; he knew what you dared not listen to. He knew what you could bear to know. He understood the white psyche and when and how to pressure you to do the right thing.

  Early in his career King believed in the essential goodness of white America. He trusted most whites to put away their bigotry in the face of black suffering. In the last three years of his life he grew far more skeptical of the ability or willingness of white folk to change. He concluded, sadly, that most whites are unconscious racists. In sermon after sermon before black congregations, King lashed out at American racism. I know his words may surprise many of you. You may be tempted to dismiss them as the rants of a man gone off course, of a soul made black by bitterness. But they are the words of the greatest American prophet. This is civic Holy Writ; this is political scripture. They are the sentiments of the man whose carefully selected words grace his national memorial and fill the innocuous speeches of countless dignitaries. King’s soul was indeed black, but it was made beautifully black by the culture that produced him, a culture of proud, loving, loyal, complicated blackness, a blackness that is often hidden from mainstream view even to this day.

  Let us now read from the Book of King.

  “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King said. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.” We are “perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”

  In 1968 King said the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were penned by men who owned slaves, thus, a “nation that got started like that . . . has a lot of repenting to do.” Before his own Atlanta congregation in 1968 King declared that for black folk the Declaration of Independence “has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.”

  King said that black folk couldn’t trust America and compared us to the Japanese who had been interned in concentration camps in World War II. “And you know what, a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the forties . . . will put black people in a concentration camp. And I’m not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now.” Here King reverted to black vernacular to forge his link with the black folk whose comfort he sought as he got blasted in white America for criticizing the Vietnam War and for fighting to get rid of inequality. King concluded that black suffering has generated a “terrible ambivalence in the soul of white America.”

  In 1966 King said in Mississippi that our nation “has a choice. Either you give the Negro his God-given rights and his freedom or you face the fact of continual social disruption and chaos. America, which will you choose?�
�� In 1967 King also declared that the “fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans . . . to genuine equality for Negroes.” And just two weeks before his death, he announced, with a broken heart, “Yes it is true . . . America is a racist country.”

  That is why King is important to this generation, to this time, to this nation, to our people. He spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.

  V.

  Sermon

  [T]he destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville

  Repenting of Whiteness

  1.

  Inventing Whiteness

  Beloved, let me start by telling you an ugly secret: there is no such thing as white people. And yet so many of them, so many of you, exist. Please hear me out. I know you’re flesh and blood. I know that you use language and forks and knives. I’m not talking about your bodies or your garages or your grocery stores. I’m talking about the politics of whiteness. I’m talking about an identity that exists apart from the skin you’re born in. I’m talking about a meaning of race that supersedes the features you inherit when you come out of the womb. You don’t get whiteness from your genes. It is a social inheritance that is passed on to you as a member of a particular group.

  And it’s killing us, and, quiet as it’s kept, it’s killing you too.

  Race has no meaning outside of the cultures we live in and the worlds we fashion out of its force and energy. Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

  So I want to tell you right off the bat that whiteness is made up, and that white history disguised as American history is a fantasy, as much a fantasy as white superiority and white purity. Those are all myths. They’re intellectual rubbish, cultural garbage. The quicker you accept that, the better off you’ll be, and so will the rest of us.

  Yes, yes, I know many of you are proud to be Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish. And those ethnic groups are as real as any other groups with identifiable cultures, languages, and histories. But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness. That whiteness is slapdash, pieced together from the European identities at hand. But there is a pattern to it all. It helped the steady climb of European cultures to dominance over the long haul of history.

  Whiteness forged togetherness among groups in reverse, breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was cut off from the old tongue and connected to the new land. So groups that were often at each other’s throats learned to team up in the new world around whiteness. The battle to become American forced groups to cheat on their old selves and romance new selves. Old tribe for new tribe; old language for new language; old country for new one. The WASPs stung first, but the Italians landed plenty of blows, the Irish fought bare fisted, the Poles grimaced and bore in, and the Jews punched above their weight, all with one goal: to champion their arrival as Americans. That’s how you went from being just Irish, just Italian, just Polish, or just Jewish to becoming white. So please don’t deny this when you approach me to tell me about how your experience as a white ethnic parallels my experience as an African-American. The comparison ends at the hyphen.

  My friends, I know reading this frightens many of you. It may even anger you. Please bear with me. Until you make whiteness give up its secrets none of us will get very far. Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are. Of course the paradox is that even though whiteness is not real it is still true. I mean true as a force to be reckoned with. It is true because it has the power to make us believe it is real and to punish those who doubt its magic. Whiteness is slick and endlessly inventive. It is most effective when it makes itself invisible, when it appears neutral, human, American.

  * * *

  Let me share with you one of the first times I faced this truth as an adult. Last year I returned to Carson-Newman College, my alma mater, for the first time in thirty years. I had bolted from this southern Baptist outpost in Jefferson City, Tennessee—a dreadful throwback to Jim Crow—in 1985 after graduating with high honors and the top prize in philosophy. I had transferred there after spending two years at Knoxville College, a black school thirty miles up the highway that didn’t have enough philosophy courses for my degree.

  When I walked onto campus I got mugged by a version of whiteness that seemed to leap straight from a segregated bus in the fifties. Nestled within tree-lined streets, Carson-Newman still has a Mayberry feel all these years later, though Jefferson City isn’t fictional, except in the way that all such towns spring from an innocent white imagination.

  I hadn’t been back since the president barred me from campus. It’s not as if I got an official letter; there was no formal edict. But my failure to garner an invitation to return to school even after I gained notice in my vocation was proof enough. When I was a senior, the administration chose six students to make a commercial that would air in the region to promote the college. We had all received fellowships to attend prestigious graduate schools. Mine was the only one in the Ivy League.

  The president wasted no time in summoning me to his office. Although the man had no doctorate, he still belonged to a fading southern aristocracy. He demanded that I produce proof on the spot that I’d gotten into Princeton. After all, Carson-Newman’s name was on the line. If I turned out to be a fraud I could damage the college’s reputation. I whipped out my offer letter from Princeton. He wasn’t pleased, but neither was he deterred.

  I was especially nervous because I owed the school seven thousand dollars in unpaid tuition. Sneering, the president looked me straight in the eyes and told me that I should get a job and pay my bill instead of going to Princeton. Until I did, my final transcript would be withheld. I quietly seethed.

  A Princeton dean later assured me that the school had seen most of my grades and didn’t require the transcript for me to enroll. But at the moment I had no such consolation. All I knew was that I’d made it through the blazing guns and bare-knuckled fists of Detroit and this white man wasn’t going to stop me from getting to the Ivy League. I was desperate and determined. I wanted to tell the president that my straight A’s in philosophy should have brought me more financial aid. But I was in no mood for begging. The moment of truth had arrived, and I was consumed by anger. I was angry that he had slung his invincible whiteness in my face. That anger turned to ice-cold rage and chilling verbal ire. If Ralph Ellison warned against doing brain surgery with a switchblade, I wasn’t in much better shape, attempting heart surgery on my college president with a verbal safety pin, operating on him prick by prick.

  “Sir, you must know that for me to take a job and give up a world-class education would be extremely shortsighted,” I said frostily. “You’ve got to know the value of such a degree. But then, I suppose you have no way of knowing since you never earned a PhD.”

  He blushed beet red, sensing my contempt.

  My defiance didn’t defeat whiteness, but I took pride in giving it a body blow that day. I left his office, and shortly thereafter, the college, never to return, or to be invited back, until he was long gone. Some of my former professors confirmed that as soon as I left the college he heartily embraced the idea that I shouldn’t come ba
ck. This was whiteness that demanded total deference to its will and way, a whiteness that demanded respect while offering none in return. The president was angry that I wouldn’t let him ruin my life. He certainly tried.

  Here’s something else I learned in the company of white folk: my teachers and fellow students never had to say they were white until someone who wasn’t white showed up. The white people at my college saw me as a trespasser. But I made them see that the whiteness they invested in wasn’t natural. It was, instead, a contrivance, a historical sleight of hand. They swore that their invented history was objective and built on fact. Any other interpretation had to be challenged. Whiteness has only two modes: it either converts or destroys. My black body was a thorn in the flesh of whiteness. My very presence as a black man revealed that whiteness was as artificial as the idea of race on which it rested. And so my flesh, my history, my culture, my mind, my tongue, my being had to be removed.

  * * *

  I realize this is a lot for you to take in. It must make you woozy and weak at the knees. So much has been invested in whiteness that it is hard to let it go. It is often defensive, resentful, full of denial and amnesia. The only way to save our nation, and, yes, to save yourselves, is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports.

  I’m not asking you to let go of your humanity, but, in the best way possible, to find your way back to it. You can let go of whiteness when you see it as a moral choice, an ideology, a politic, a terribly fearful reaction to the thing it hates the most but can least afford to do without: the black people it helped to will into existence. White or black identity is nothing without the people and forces that make it true. White and black folk are bound together, even when we breathe very different meanings into race.