Tears We Cannot Stop Read online

  Too bad that so many white folk believe that pretending not to see race is the way to address racism, and that when they get caught seeing race for their advantage—as in using the natural hairstyles of black folk—they claim not to see race to their advantage. Jacobs overlooks the point that black folk wearing their hair in locks at work is often seen as inappropriate; dreadlocks are widely viewed as incompatible with our nation’s business culture. Black folk can’t choose to wear their hair in locks and get work, an option that only white folk appear capable of choosing. Basically Marc Jacobs wants us to shut up and not notice that he’s ripping off black culture. He is inspired by us and pays homage to us—in a supposedly nonracial fashion—while he refuses to see color. You see how this can so quickly go south? How about just giving credit where credit is due?

  The irony is that well-meaning white folk like Marc Jacobs draw their inspiration from a misreading of the civil rights movement and the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. The civil rights movement that inspired King, that he inspired in turn, has been appropriated too, and often in troubling ways. We end up with a greatly compromised view of the black freedom struggle. In the narrative of American history, especially the kind told in our nation’s textbooks, the movement didn’t seek racial justice as much as it sought a race-neutral society. American history hugs colorblindness. If you can’t see race you certainly can’t see racial responsibility. You can simply remain blind to your own advantages. When some of you say, “I don’t see color,” you are either well-intending naïfs or willful race evaders. In either case you don’t help the cause. The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.

  One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you’re called on it. But even then, that price pales, quite literally, in comparison to the high price black folk pay for being black. We pay a price, too, for not even being able to derive recognition, and financial reward, for the styles that make the world want to be black so bad that they don’t mind looking like us, as long as they never, ever have to be us.

  If the appropriators can freely rip off our culture with no consequences, those who revise racial history—the fourth stage of white racial grief—are even less accountable for their deeds.

  The way of the racial revisionist, when it comes to black life and history, is, simply, to rewrite it. Their motto is, “It didn’t happen that way.” There is a flood of writing that tells us that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery but about the effort to defend states’ rights. But, my friends, you’ve got to put yourself in our place and see the absurdity of such a claim. Defend the right of the state to do what? To enslave blacks. But even here the irresistible logic of whiteness, that is, irresistible to whites themselves—and to all of us who are subject to white whim—springs into full action. White American history is so powerful that even when it loses it wins, at least in skirmishes within whiteness itself. From the right wing there is the belief that the Civil War was fought over the ability of individual states to beat back a federal government out to impose its will. From the left wing there’s the belief that the Civil War was a conflict between the planter class and the proletariat. In each case, race as the main reason for the war is skillfully rewritten, or, really, written out.

  Slavery is rewritten too. Some white Christian apologists contended that black folk needed slavery to save their souls, or to rescue their cultures. A contemporary twist on this argument radiates in thinkers like Dinesh D’Souza, who claims that American blacks brought here through slavery are now doing far better than their African kin. Some white critics argue that since blacks sold other blacks into slavery, bondage was a black man’s problem, not a white man’s burden. But revisionists would much rather describe the dehumanization of black folk as little more than a commercial transaction. It’s another way of washing their hands of racial responsibility.

  The effort to rewrite history surfaces in how Malcolm X is treated in the mainstream. It hardly seems likely that the culture he fought with all his heart could be depended on to grasp his true meaning. Malcolm is often read as an apostle of violence, as a frightful figure consumed by destructive rage. Yet the truth is far more complex; and Malcolm was far more complicated. But isn’t The Autobiography of Malcolm X so enduringly appealing because it shows Malcolm X giving up on hatred as a means to racial justice? Malcolm X believed in the liberation of black folk from the mental and psychological chains of white supremacy. He was not committed to nonviolence as a way of life or a method of social strategy. He believed that such a commitment prevents the full realization of black emancipation. Yet he was not personally violent. As Ossie Davis said in his eulogy, responding to the claim that Malcolm preached hate and was a fanatic and a racist: “Did you even talk to Brother Malcolm? . . . Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance?” The rage that flowed in Malcolm’s veins was the rage against a force of whiteness that aimed to wash its black kin from the face of the earth.

  The urge to rewrite black history occasionally gives way to the final stage of white racial grief, which is, simply, when it comes to race, to dilute it. That is, to argue that bad stuff doesn’t just plague black folk. To summarize: “Bad stuff happens to everyone.” This argument surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The storm certainly hit black folk, but it hit white folk too. This is the sordid version of reverse American exceptionalism.

  It is the same “me too” impulse that flares in the bitter battle against affirmative action. Beloved, I can’t help but notice that affirmative action is the bee in so many of your bonnets. You look around in your classrooms and you think every black person is there because they got an unfair shake from the system. You look at your job and you think that your black coworker got an unjust nod of approval from the powers that be.

  You never stop to think how the history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action. You never stop to think that Babe Ruth never had to play the greatest players of his generation—just the greatest white players. You never stop to think that most of our presidents never rose to the top because they bested the competition—just the white competition. White privilege is a self-selecting tool that keeps you from having to compete with the best. The history of white folk gaining access to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale is the history of white folk deciding ahead of the game that you were superior. You argue that slots in school should be reserved for your kin, because, after all, they are smarter, more disciplined, better suited, and more deserving than inferior blacks.

  That’s like concluding that the Cleveland Cavaliers can’t possibly win the NBA championship because they are down three-games-to-one to the Golden State Warriors. Throw in the towel and call it a series. But they must play the series to determine the winner. Whiteness is having all the advantages on your side—the referees blowing the whistle for you, the arena packed with only your fans. In fact, whiteness means you never even have to play the game at all, at least not in head-to-head matchups with the talent and skill of black folk.

  You’ve been handed a history where you got most of the land, made most of the money, got most of the presumptions of goodness, and innocence, and intelligence, and thrift, and genius—and just about everything that is edifying and white. So it’s hard to stomach your gripes about the few concessions—surely not advantages—to black folk and other folk of color that are suggested in affirmative action. And the irony is that, in aggregate, when we add in white women and other abled folk, it is white folk who are the overwhelming beneficiaries of affirmative action.

  That makes it sound like malarkey when so many of you complain that you aren’t being treated fairly, either. You say that our demand for justice causes you unjust suffering. You think you miss out on jobs that go to less-qualified blacks. That may be one of the greatest claims to co
llective self-pity known to mankind, and yet you, with straight faces, keep telling black folk and others that we’re the ones throwing self-pity parties around the country.

  There is more, beloved. If black folk hurt because of race, you say you hurt because of class. Many of you can’t see that race makes class hurt more. And when many of you claim that black folk shouldn’t get affirmative action, that the kids of, say, Barack Obama, or some rich black person, shouldn’t get a bid for a job or a space in a classroom usually reserved for white folk, you miss a crucial fact: wealthy blacks didn’t get a pass from Jim Crow; well-to-do blacks don’t get an exemption from racism. Of course our status mostly protects us from the worst that you can do to most of us, but it doesn’t stop us as a class of folk from being denied opportunities that our smarts and our success should have guaranteed.

  Another way you dilute black history is to make yourselves the heroes of our struggles. You argue that there have always been good white folk helping us out. Let’s just call it dilution through distortion. It is the sting of noblesse oblige. Just look at the movies. Films about slavery must feature a sympathetic white character who wants black folk to be free. John Quincy Adams must be the real hero of Amistad, since Cinque couldn’t rebel effectively without help from his great white defenders. Ghosts of Mississippi, about the murder of Medgar Evers, highlights the heroic white prosecutor, Bobby DeLaughter, who fought to open the case, and much less the brave black widow, Myrlie Evers, who fought white supremacy to make sure he paid attention. Mississippi Burning, supposedly about the killing of three civil rights workers in the sixties, celebrates two white FBI agents, heroes in a state where white terror rarely had better allies than silent white law enforcement or brutal local police.

  If such portrayals might be laid at the feet of last century’s retrograde racial politics, the present is also flush with white savior movies. In Free State of Jones, Matthew McConaughey plays real-life figure Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County, Mississippi, who galvanized a group of white army deserters and escaped enslaved folk against the Confederacy during the Civil War. And in Freedom Writers, Hillary Swank plays a white teacher in Long Beach in the mid-nineties who educates nonwhite high school students in the midst of inner city hardship. With white friends like that black folk need no heroes of their own.

  My friends, we cannot deny that white folk of conscience were of enormous help to the cause of black struggle. Black and white folk often formed dynamic partnerships to combat racial inequality. But too often white folk want to be treated with kid gloves, or treated like adolescents who can’t take the truth of grownup racial history. So we have to spoon-feed you that truth and put your white faces in our stories to make you see them, perhaps like them, or at least to consider them legitimate and worthy of your attention. Appealing to your ego to protect our backsides, that’s the bargain many of us are forced to make.

  Beloved, it’s not just on the silver screen where you dilute and distort our history. In everyday life the refusal to engage black folk tells on you through your exaggerated sense of insult where none should exist. Many of you are “shocked, shocked!” that black folk have taken to reminding you that “Black Lives Matter.” Some of you are just peeved, but others of you are enraged. That’s because you’re used to distorting and diluting our history without much frontal challenge. You fail to realize that the nation has already set the standard for determining which lives matter and which don’t. Black lives were excluded from the start. The reason “Black Lives Matter” needs to be shouted is because American history ignored black history, didn’t tell black stories. The founding documents of American society didn’t include black life. When black folk say “Black Lives Matter,” they are in search of simple recognition. That they are decent human beings, that they aren’t likely to commit crimes, that they’re reasonably smart. That they’re no more evil than the next person, that they’re willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did. That they are loving and kind and compassionate. And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of gratitude in return.

  * * *

  To argue that we matter is not to deny that there are things about us that have always mattered more than they should, especially how we look. Black folk now glory in what was once the source of our grief: our black skin. And yet the phenotypic differences among the races have made our culture stand out. With us, history was altered by color. Our skin, the economy of the epidermis, permits white America to dismiss us by differentiating us. But the world we made together, the history we forged in conflicted congress, bears forever the mark of our offending, yet transformative, blackness.

  Our history, black history, has been denied, but it has never really been invisible. In fact we have always been the most visible thing about America. Everyone else, all of your kin, the white immigrants, assimilated. But by virtue of our very skin color, we stood out. Ironically, the very thing that bound us to slavery also made it impossible for us to hide, to assimilate, to pass gently out of an outmoded institution.

  American history is the history of black subjugation. The Constitution is a racially hypocritical work of genius. The north and the south are divided because of us. The history of the twentieth century in America is the history of our struggle against white America. And yet nowhere, apart from South Africa under apartheid, is the omission of black folk from history as glaring an omission. Our presence is so saturating, so embedded, so inextricable, that white America’s most reactionary, racist identities revolve around us—the Klan rally is grievous testimony to ineradicable black identity. And the most intimate and industrious spaces in white America, from the kitchen to the construction site, rest on our labor. There is no getting around blackness. In slavery, it was the intensity of our proximity—of white and black—that defined us. In that sense whiteness and blackness are an American invention. Our agency, our story, is linked to your history, your story. Black and white together.

  Beloved, you must give up myths about yourself, about your history. That you are resolutely individual, and not part of a group. That you pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps. You must also forcefully, and finally, come face-to-face with the black America you have insisted on seeing through stereotype and fear. Whiteness can no longer afford to hog the world to itself or claim that its burdens are the burdens of the universe. You must repent of your whiteness, which means repenting of your catastrophic investment in false grievances and artificial claims of injury. You must reject the easy scapegoating of black folk for white failures, white disappointments, and white exploitation.

  3.

  The Plague of White Innocence

  Beloved, you are ensnared in one of the bitterest paradoxes of our day. You say we black folk are thin-skinned about race. You say a new generation of black activists focus too much on trendy terms like “micro-aggressions.” You say they are too sensitive to “trigger warnings.” You claim they are too insistent on safe spaces and guarding against hateful speech that hurts their feelings. You argue that all of us are too politically correct.

  And yet you can barely tolerate any challenge to your thinking on race. I say thinking, my friends, though that is being kind. Many of you hardly think of race. You shield yourselves from what you don’t want to understand. You reveal your brute strength in one contemptible display of power after the next, and yet you claim that we reap benefit by playing the victim.

  To be blunt, you are emotionally immature about race. Some of you are rightly appalled at the flash of white racial demagoguery. Yet you have little curiosity about the complicated forces of race. You have no idea that your whiteness and your American identity have become fatally intertwined; they are virtually indistinguishable. Any criticism of the nation is heard as an attack on your identity.

 
But, my friends, your innocent whiteness is too costly to maintain. We are forced to be gentle with you, which is another way of saying we are forced to lie to you. We must let you down easy, you, the powerful partner in our fraught relationship. Your feelings get hurt when we tell you that you’re white, and that your whiteness makes a difference in how you’re treated. You get upset when we tell you that whiteness has often been damaging and toxic. You get angry when we tell you how badly whiteness has behaved throughout history.

  But we must risk your wrath to speak back to a defiantly innocent whiteness. You often deem black dissent as disloyalty to America. But that black dissent may yet redeem a white innocence that threatens the nation’s moral and patriotic health.

  * * *

  “For the first time in my life, I feel guilty about being white,” my student admitted in shame. His voice barely rose above a whisper. He hunched over in embarrassment, his cheeks flushing.

  A momentary hush came over our sociology seminar. Our intimate setting gave us a stronger emotional connection than we might have had in a bigger class. The subject matter made our bond even more intense. We were studying how black folk died throughout American history. The readings opened my student’s eyes to what he had never before been made to know.