Tears We Cannot Stop Read online

  I didn’t have the heart, really the courage, to say to him that wasn’t Rivera’s point. I didn’t say to him that blonde hair was a synecdoche for the string of white women he dated, one of whom he married.

  “Thank you for calling, Mr. Simpson,” I said, hanging up the phone in shock, even as my wife’s guffaws drowned out my thoughts.

  A few days later I saw Johnnie Cochran.

  “Hey man, why in the hell did you give O.J. my number?” I asked in only half-feigned outrage. I knew that Johnnie was the only way his most famous client got those digits.

  “Professor, he just wanted to speak to you,” Cochran said as he flashed that million-dollar smile of his.

  “He had me shook,” I told Johnnie, lapsing into black vernacular. “I know he kill white people, but do he kill black people too? I know you his lawyer, and you can’t say nothing, man, but you know he killed them people.”

  Cochran just laughed.

  I didn’t take any surveys, but I believed that most black folk knew deep in our hearts that O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole and Ron. There’s more evidence against O.J. than there is for the existence of God. It’s not that Marcia Clark and her team didn’t do their due diligence. O.J.’s accusers and prosecutors lost before they stepped into the court. The hurts and traumas against black folk had piled so high, the pain had resonated so deeply, and the refusal of whiteness to open its eyes had become so abhorrent that black folk sent a message to white America. No amount of evidence against Simpson could possibly match the far greater evidence of racial injustice against black folk. And you can’t claim ignorance here, my friends. If a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police couldn’t convince you of the evil of your system, then nothing could.

  The celebration of the not guilty verdict was a big “fuck you” from black America. It was the politest way possible to send a message you had repeatedly, tragically, willfully ignored: things are not okay in the racial heartland. Black folk weren’t necessarily aware that they were doing this. Here blackness operated like whiteness does. The black perception of what was convincing, or not, was shaped by jurors’ experiences. It was molded by the black community’s heartbreak. It seemed to black folk that the only way to combat white privilege was with the exercise of a little black privilege.

  And even though the egregious errors of the criminal justice system existed long before Simpson, the constant refusal ever since to even charge most white police in the killing of unarmed black motorists is a kind of collective payback for O.J.

  Can’t you see, my friends, that whiteness is determined to get the last word? That it is determined once again to make its unspoken allegiances and silent privilege the basis of justice in America? Don’t you see it’s your way or no way at all? Please don’t pretend you don’t understand us. You didn’t get mad when all of those white folk who killed black folk got away with murder in the sixties. Byron De La Beckwith bragged for years about killing Medgar Evers in 1963. He was finally convicted in 1994. The men who killed Emmett Till got off scot-free, even though everybody knew they lynched that poor child. That’s ancient history to you. But that history got a hearing in the Simpson verdict: Medgar; the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi; the four girls bombed in the Birmingham church; poor 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who was brutally shot down in a store in Los Angeles in 1991; and every instance of police brutality unanswered by the state, every unjustified killing of black flesh. The Simpson verdict was your forced atonement.

  O.J. awakened your collective white rage. That or you’re obsessed with him because he’s the one that got away, the one who challenged your view of whiteness, made you madder than anybody—that is, until Obama. But there’s little real justification for Obama hate, except that he was a black man in charge of our country, and many whites wanted to take it back and make it great again. Hence, the election of Donald Trump as president.

  And let’s be real: O.J.’s betrayal hurt worse than Obama’s ascent. O.J. shared your worldview. O.J. took full advantage of the privilege you offered him as an honorary white man. He accepted the bargain in a way Obama never did, never could. Your anger for O.J. is that he was, finally—like you fear all black folk could potentially be—an ungrateful nigger. O.J. seemed to fully revel in whiteness and gladly deny that he was black, that is, until he got in trouble. Then that racial reflex kicked in: back against the wall, black against the wall.

  You shouldn’t be too angry with O.J. He’s as white a black man as there’s been in the last half century. Even Clarence Thomas is blacker than O.J. It is true that Thomas is a darker version of Simpson. But Thomas was reviled by black culture for his dark skin. He repays us with decisions on the Supreme Court that mock our humanity and lower his dignity with each stroke of his pen.

  What the Simpson case makes clear is that even though whiteness is an invention, it is nontransferable, at least to black folk. No matter how we try we still can’t be white, can’t truly enjoy white privilege. Many of you were willing to chalk up the black belief in Simpson’s innocence—well, truly, black folk never claimed Simpson was innocent, just not guilty, a distinction that whiteness has taught us—as an instance of black denial, of black delusion. It never occurred to you that that is just how whiteness operates at all times. It’s been that way ever since it was created a few centuries back to justify treating black people like dogs. It has stayed that way right up until this moment.

  * * *

  I must say to you, my friends, that teaching in your schools has shown me that being white means never having to say you’re white. Whiteness long ago, at least in America, shed its ethnic skin and struck a universal pose. Whiteness never had to announce its whiteness, never had to promote or celebrate its unique features.

  If whites are history, and history is white, then so are culture, and society, and law, and government, and politics; so are logic and thinking and reflection and truth and circumstances and the world and reality and morality and all that means anything at all.

  Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history.

  You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others. You love history when it’s yet another book about, say, the Founding Fathers. No amount of minutia is too tedious. No new fact is too obscure to report. The curiosity about presidents is nearly inexhaustible.

  History is a friend to white America when it celebrates the glories of American exceptionalism, the beauty of American invention, the genius of the American soul. History is unrestrained bliss when it sings Walt Whitman’s body electric or touts the lyrical vision of the Transcendentalists. History that swings at the plate with Babe Ruth or slides into home with Joe DiMaggio is the American pastime at its best. History hovers low in solemn regard for the men who gave up the ghost at Appomattox and speaks with quiet reverence for the Confederate flags that gleefully waved to secession. Of course all of you don’t sing from the same hymnal. But American history, the collective force of white identity that picks up velocity across the centuries, mouths every note.

  Beloved, I must admit that I’ve encountered many of you as white allies who know that whiteness is privilege and power. You know that white skin is magic, that it is a key to open doors. Yet you also know that whiteness for the most part remains invisible to many white folk.

  It has been striking, too, to observe whites for whom their whiteness isn’t a passport to riches, whites for whom whiteness offers no material reward. But there is a psychological and socia
l advantage in not being thought of as black; poor whites seem to say, “At least there’s a nigger beneath me.” And it’s a way for poor whites to be of value to richer whites, especially when poor whites agree that black folk are the source of their trouble—not the corporate behavior of wealthier whites who hurt black and white folk alike. It’s a way to bond beyond class. It’s a way for working class whites to experience momentary prestige in the eyes of richer whites. And there are a lot of privileges that white folk get that don’t depend on cash. The greatest one may be getting stopped by a cop and living to talk about it.

  * * *

  After more than a century of enlightened study we know that race is not just something that falls from the sky; it is, as the anthropologists say, a fabricated idea. But that doesn’t mean that race doesn’t have material consequence and empirical weight. It simply means that if we constructed it, we can get about the business of deconstructing it.

  And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes. The idea that whiteness should be abolished, an idea that some white antiracist thinkers have put forth, disturbs a lot of you—especially when you argue that whiteness is not all murder and mayhem. Historian David Roediger has questioned if there is a “white culture outside of domination.” At the University of Minnesota, where he taught for five years, conservative white kids on campus said there was a need for a white cultural center if a black cultural center existed. When he asked his class what they’d put in a white cultural center, he said “there was the longest silence that I have ever experienced in a classroom.” The silence “was broken by a hand going up, and a shout: ‘Elvis!’ And then laughter, that Elvis would somehow be considered unambiguously white.” Of course there was laughter. If ever there’s been what Norman Mailer termed a white Negro, at least in style, and one who’s made money and his reputation off a derivative blackness, it’s Elvis Presley. If Elvis belongs in a white cultural center, then so do Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

  Beloved, I haven’t given up on your ability to confront whiteness, to give it the old college try, literally. Back at my alma mater Carson-Newman, after being banned for 31 years, and even though I felt the time warp, I also got cause for hope. When I preached in the chapel, I was certainly far more blunt and vocal in challenging whiteness than I had been when I went to school there. I preached about the black prophetic mission and its demand for social change. I riled up some conservative white students. Many got up and walked out. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it was racial déjà vu all over again.

  But I also spoke of the need to combat class inequality, gender oppression, and homophobia. I tried to link these ills and thus lighten the load of responsibility that white folk would have to carry alone. But those young conservatives still got mad. I suspected they hadn’t heard a sermon like mine before, hadn’t had to hear it, either, at least not in the school’s chapel or their home churches. Some of the students threatened to protest my presentation later that evening where the entire local community gathered. I told the folk in charge that I didn’t mind that at all, and that I’d be more than happy to entertain their questions and to answer their outrage.

  The protest never happened. But one of the angriest young men stayed behind to ask me a question as I signed copies of my books. He wanted to know how I could be a Christian and say the things I do; that I should take into account views with which I disagreed. I assured him that doubting my Christianity put him in good stead with many black folk I know, who, because of my stand against homophobia, count me among the religiously unwashed. Let me be real: my joyful embrace of the secular dimensions of black culture has landed me in trouble. It makes a lot of folk uncomfortable when I taunt the supposed abyss between the sacred and profane. I told the young man that to be black in America means always taking in views we disagree with, not out of altruism, but out of necessity and the impulse to survive. I gently insisted that he take off the blinders to his whiteness. I encouraged him to think of how he was reared and what role that had on his views, and how his rearing had a lot to do with the privileges of whiteness. I knew my crash course in whiteness wouldn’t convince him. But at least he listened. Instead of an angry protest, we shared an open, honest conversation. I asked him to recall an earlier question from one of his classmates in the audience, in whose voice I detected a fellow traveler.

  “For a white working class kid, who learned about Western philosophy from reading the sermons and speeches and essays of Dr. King—that was actually how I learned about old dead white people, is through a black man. Given that context, how would somebody in my position be an ally? How . . . do I seek to supplant imperialism, how do I seek to supplant militarism, how do I seek to supplant white supremacy and the patriarchy without perpetuating those very same things through my action?”

  Answering this earnest young man, I acknowledged the limitations of our subject positions. I also acknowledged that our lives are constantly in process. I told him that some of the greatest victims of whiteness are whites themselves, having to bear the burden of a false belief in superiority. I told him how I also loved the words of many old dead white men, from Tennyson to Merle Haggard, even though many of those white men would find me troublesome. I asked him not only to challenge white privilege, but also to resist the narcissism that celebrates one’s challenge to whiteness rather than siding with those who are its steady victims. Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding.

  It felt at that moment, on that night, that something good might happen. I had no reason to doubt that at many other moments like this, on many other similar nights, hope might prevail. If you, my friends, would make a conscious effort to change. If you would stop being white.

  2.

  The Five Stages of White Grief

  Let’s face it, you’ve grieved ever since you were forced to share some of your historical shine with the black folk you’d kept underfoot for centuries. You didn’t think we deserved that much attention; you’ve tried to hide us, even bury us, for too long. First we were the enslaved lackeys at your beck and call, then the servants at the family dinner. Later we were the embarrassing kinfolk at the family picnic. We finally made it to the holiday gathering too, but your paternalism relegated us to the children’s table. You were forced to invite us to affairs of state, but you mostly ignored us.

  It has been exceedingly tough for you to wrap your minds around the notion that black folk are your equals in any realm. The exception might be sports, but you control the purse strings there, too, so no sweat off your billions. And as long as we know our place, and don’t, for instance, take a knee while the national anthem is played to protest injustice, we are well rewarded for our athletic exploits—gladiators for your titillation and fantasy leagues. But when that fantasy is up, and proper black manhood and womanhood is reclaimed, we know that you revert to your old ways and think of us as not worth the trouble. In most other realms of pursuit you deem us largely incompetent and irrelevant, and yet black folk, and the rest of the rainbow of colors too, keep proving you wrong.

  It is being proved wrong that leaves you distressed. There is often sorrow and anguish in white America when blackness comes in the room. It gives you a bad case of what can only be called, colloquially, the racial blues, but more formally, let’s name it C.H.E.A.T. (Chronic Historical Evasion and Trickery) disorder. This malady is characterized by bouts of depression when you can no longer avoid the history that you think doesn’t matter much, or when your attempts to deceive yourself and others—about the low quality of all that isn’t white—fall flat. It’s understandable that you experience mood swings. It bears some resemblance to the five stages o
f grief a person passes through when they know they’re dying.

  You’re determined not to lose the battle to control the historical narrative. After all, you realize that the pressure to broaden the scope of American history pries loose your headlock on the national mythology. Other cultures and other peoples are having their say as well, especially the black voices that have too long been suppressed. So you portray blackness as the enemy of all that is smart, or sophisticated, or uplifting, or worth emulating or transmitting. But the debt American culture owes to black folk can’t be easily erased, so you fight even harder to keep our story from being told in all its unforgiving brilliance and its undiscouraged beauty.

  Yet you don’t seem ever, finally, to win the war to keep our history hidden. And the more you lose that battle, mostly because it’s built on lies, the more you kick your defensiveness into higher gears and vent your frustration, resentment, and sadness. So the quicker you admit you’re a (victim of) C.H.E.A.T., that you’ve got it bad and that ain’t good, the better off you will be, and the rest of us will be too. If not treated early on, C.H.E.A.T. leads to other disorders, including F.A.K.E. (Finding Alternative Knowledge Elusive), F.O.O.L. (Forsaking Others’ Outstanding Literacy), and L.I.E. (Lacking Introspection Entirely).

  The only way for you to overcome C.H.E.A.T. is to confront the disorder head-on and acknowledge the five stages of white racial grief that you experience as you grapple with the presence of black folk and the history they created—and the very way they have changed American society. You are often stumped by feats of black competence; or you display a tolerance for blackness that slides quickly to condescension. There is resistance and rage too. There is anger at the refusal of the “other” to cave in to whiteness, to see history, American history, the way you see it, anger at our refusal to curtail black agency. During the eighties and nineties and the ballyhooed canon wars, you were fit to be tied when a writer like Toni Morrison, who should have been recognized long ago for her genius, finally got her due as an American master. It upsets you when black folk say that white history dressed up as American history is not a perfect picture of reality.