Tears We Cannot Stop Page 9
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My friends, sometimes the call of white innocence is far more insistent, far more explicit, far more unapologetic. And there are occasions where you have sought to hide behind a figure who gives bigger voice to your grievances and your fragility, to your angry insistence of innocence. In such instances you outsource it to a vile political figure who echoes your most detestable private thoughts. Even before the nation got a full blast of such a phenomenon, I saw it up close.
It was the summer of 2015, and there I was, in the lobby of the NBC building in New York, confronted with the flaming orange visage that is Donald Trump. I had just finished criticizing him on a daytime talk show when our paths crossed in front of the elevator bank.
“You’ve been very tough on me,” the future president said. “But I love you.”
There’s no question that Donald Trump has “huge” charisma. He possesses a brutally appealing magnetism that, tragically, amplifies the most virulent rumblings of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has reckoned with in quite some time. That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology.
Each election, we hear that this run for the presidency says more about who we are than any other—Obama defines us, Reagan embodies us, Bush will be the ruin of us all. We’ve become inured to the get-out-the-vote sales pitch; the nation endures. And yet the 2016 election was indeed the most eventful of my lifetime, and perhaps the most important. Whiteness was at stake in a way it hadn’t been in decades.
Trump’s efficacy as an ambassador of unrepentant white innocence, and ignorance, and privilege, doesn’t depend on whether his personal racial views add up to bigotry. What he’s done in public will suffice to pass judgment. Trump’s political popularity took off when he sullied the citizenship of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. The “birther” claims were driven by unwarranted skepticism about the place of Obama’s birth and the status of his birth certificate. Trump’s recent assertion that Obama is an American still rang false and appeared as little more than an attempt to deflect responsibility for his vicious views onto his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. His admission that he said Obama was born in America to keep his campaign going was a moment of ruthless honesty that sealed the case.
It is not simply a matter of voicing disapprobation for Trump; his supporters, too, must be answered. Many are driven by rage that for eight years a black man represented a nation that once held black folk in chains and that still depends on the law to check black social and political aspirations. Barack Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this country that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that we haven’t seen since the height of the civil rights movement.
Trump, more than anything else, signifies the undying force of the fear unleashed by Obama’s presidency. He manipulates a confused and self-pitying white public. Yes, yes, some will say—but not all Republicans are like Trump. Not all of them even like Trump. It is true that parts of the Republican establishment finally, and unconvincingly, rebelled against Trump. But it was these same “reasonable” Republicans who ignored his early impact. They refused to listen to those who insisted that his vitriol was destructive to the country. As long as it didn’t impact Republican, or white, interests, the lives Trump imperiled didn’t matter. Now that he has been elected president, many Republicans have overcome their misgivings and enthusiastically returned to the fold. The party for which he is now standard-bearer must be held accountable for his creation.
It wasn’t so long ago that Obama led millions of white Americans to believe that they were voting for a transformational figure. He would make the country permanently better. A vote for him was a vote for decency and intelligence, a vote against hate and chaos. It meant, simply, being on the right side of history.
Yet Obama’s impact has been so quickly and thoroughly eclipsed by a pervading sense of racial and national doom. What many of us didn’t see coming is that Obama’s success would also be counted as his failure. The election of the nation’s first black president tapped into a deep vein of escapist hope, that it would be a simple, painless way to heal our historic wounds. We projected onto Obama our desire to crush bigotry with enlightened democracy. Obama, a stalwart of social justice, a wonder of political rhetoric, would be the unifying force of national identity and speak redemption into our bones.
But too many of you, my friends, more than I could bear to imagine, resented Obama’s rise. What we did not fully understand, or account for, is the deep-seated, intractable anger of the white Americans who never viewed Obama as either fully American or quite human. Donald Trump has exploited these people, promised them a different transformation, one that returns the country to what they would like to believe it once was: theirs. This is the naked, unapologetic face of white innocence on steroids. We have moved backward in so many ways since the high point of Obama’s first election.
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The sort of willful innocence that Trump conjures is far more visible, and thus susceptible to opposition, than subtler visions of whiteness tied to American identity. For so many of you, what it means to be white is what it means to be American, and vice versa; your American identity is indissolubly linked to your whiteness. It is a possessive whiteness, too, one that hogs to itself the meanings of democracy.
Very little reveals the heart of innocent whiteness more than a challenge to professional football. It is a game that tests the durability, and rigidity, of American ideals of patriotism and national belonging. It is a game that also seeks, paradoxically, to cast out the very black bodies that have come to define the sport.
Beloved, this became clear with the uproar over the decision of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to kneel, instead of stand, during the playing of the national anthem. He did so to protest injustice against black folk. Despite the backlash, Kaepernick says, “[I am] going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed. To me, this is something that has to change, and when there’s significant change—and I feel like that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent, and this country is representing people the way it’s supposed to—I’ll stand.”
Kaepernick has been accused of being a traitor to the nation, a disruptive, self-aggrandizing narcissist, and a loathsome human being who disrespects the military. Clearly, it is still difficult to talk about race in an informed and intelligent fashion. And clearly conservative forces are arrayed against athletes, making it difficult for an athlete of color to forge ties to his people, and to speak out about issues that affect a significant portion of his fan base. My friends, can you not understand how this highlights the hypocrisy of a sport that has given second chances to players like Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald, who were accused of domestic violence? That warmly embraces Ben Roethlisberger, twice accused of sexual assault? And yet the sport is enraged at a player making a humane gesture of identification with the victims of racial violence?
Kaepernick has been criticized for his lack of patriotism. The accusation is nothing new. Black folk have been viewed suspiciously throughout American history because of a willingness to be critical of the nation even as they love and embrace it. How many of you who claim that Kaepernick is unpatriotic realize that many black men put on an American uniform and fought overseas, only to return home to be spurned and denied the rights for which they fought? How many of you realize that black soldiers who had fought valiantly for American liberties sometimes returned home to die on the lynching tree because racist whites resented them for wearing the uniform or hoisting the American flag? How many of you know that in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, during a Boston City Hall demonstration against court-ordered busing, a white student protester turned an American flag, tied to a pole, into a weapon to viciously assault Ted Landsmark, a black lawyer?
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Black folk have, throughout h
istory, displayed their patriotism by criticizing the nation for its shortcomings. And they, in turn, have been roundly criticized. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who fled from slavery, offered a famous oration on the meaning of Independence Day, asking, “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” The great black poet Langston Hughes grieved in verse, “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’” When Martin Luther King, Jr., said that America “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and opposed the Vietnam War, he was branded a traitor who, according to black journalist Carl Rowan, had created “the impression that the Negro is disloyal.” Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title and run out of the ring for his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War.
Now all of these figures are celebrated: King’s birthday is a national holiday and Ali was given a hero’s burial not long ago. Michelle Obama, once pilloried as ungrateful and unpatriotic, is more popular than her husband, and Barack Obama, once assailed as unpatriotic for not wearing a lapel pin of the American flag, won not one but two terms.
My friends, none of these black figures hated the nation. Instead, they wanted the nation to straighten up and fly right. Douglass refused to join the chorus of black voices yearning to return to Africa and decided to stay put in America. Hughes was hurt by America but longed for her acceptance when he titled his poem “Let America Be America Again.” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that white America had to do blacks right, yet he spoke for most of us when he said, “We ain’t going nowhere.”
What some of you are missing is that Kaepernick is the best kind of American there is: one willing to criticize his country precisely because he loves it so much. James Baldwin said it best when he wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Both Baldwin and Kaepernick have offended you so greatly because they insisted on separating whiteness from American identity. The two are neither synonymous nor exhaustive; they neither signify all that America means, nor can they possibly radiate the full brightness of her promise. Donald Trump is missing the point when he says that Kaepernick should “find a country that works better for him.” Instead, Kaepernick believes so deeply in this country that he is willing to offer correction rather than abandon the nation—and to donate a million dollars in support of racial justice causes. But innocent whiteness recoils at such instruction. It pushes back against the notion that it could possibly learn anything from a black body kneeling on white sacred territory. But it is that same territory that profanes and then swallows the bodies of unarmed black folk. We must see Kaepernick’s criticism as love—the tough love that America needs. Even though his decision not to vote in the 2016 presidential election was a grave political miscalculation, Kaepernick’s social protest remains a vital, valid gesture.
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The opposition to black displays of dissent rests on a faulty premise and a confusion of terms. Many of you who oppose our dissent because of patriotism are really opposing us because of nationalism, and, whether you know it or not, a white nationalism at that. There is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism.
Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it. Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism. Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely.
Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected. The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor. The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it. It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots. That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump’s amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments. In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot.
Beloved, there appears in this flap to be a confusion of symbol and substance. The worship of the flag is, too, a form of nationalist idolatry. It is not respectful love. It confuses the cloth with conviction. The power doesn’t reside in the flag; it resides in the ideals to which the flag points. The worship of the flag gets us nowhere, nor does enthusiastically embracing the troubled song that accompanies it. Listen to the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which includes the words, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” Whiteness was pitched into the nation’s collective memory through song in the same way that it was stitched into the nation’s pride through a waving banner.
Most of us know nothing of our anthem’s political pedigree or its racist implications. That’s why American hero Jackie Robinson wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world.” What can lift the Stars and Stripes higher are the real-life practices that make that flag and that song meaningful. If we cite the Bible, and yet fail to live according to its codes, the Bible becomes just another book. But when we live it, it becomes powerful. If you believe it, the words of scripture say that we become living epistles in whose life others read the presence of God.
It should be clear to you, my friends, that American sports, despite all of the black bodies that make it go, is still a profoundly white enterprise. Surely you must see that it is only the court or the playing field that is integrated. Nearly 70 percent of football players are black; the NBA is 80 percent black. But the NFL’s front offices in particular teem with white men whose outdated viewpoints and narrow understandings of race—and at times bigoted perspectives—hamper true progress. The players in football and basketball may be overwhelmingly black—and in the case of baseball, increasingly Latino—but the front offices of major American sports are a white man’s game. For example, according to the Racial and Gender Equity Report Card for the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, in 2016 just 22.2 percent of professional administrator positions on National Football League teams were held by people of color. In the NFL’s league office, only 9.4 percent of those with management positions were black in a league where nearly two-thirds of its players are black.
That may explain why, according to sports website Deadspin, anonymous NFL executives (it is interesting that they will not own up in name) say they don’t want Kaepernick near their teams because he is a traitor and has no respect for our country, and “[expletive] that guy.” Others state, “I have never seen a guy so hated by front office guys as Kaepernick.” As long as black athletes keep their mouths shut and play the game, they’re fine. Once they range beyond deference and obedience, they’re out of bounds, and huge penalty flags are thrown.
Kaepernick’s courage has also thrown a harsh light on some of the sport’s biggest black stars—like Jerry Rice, Rodney Harrison, and Hines Ward—who have retired and now offer commentary. Harrison argued that Kaepernick’s heart is in the right place, but that he’s “going about it in the wrong way.” He said that Kaepernick doesn’t seem to realize that a lot of folk sacrificed to “give him the freedoms and the liberties he has,” and that “sitting his butt down” during the anthem will only make folk mad. Harrison also attacked Kaepernick’s racial authenticity, saying he wasn’t really black, and claimed later he had no idea that Kaepernick is biracial. Was Harrison then suggesting that Kaepernick wasn’t r
eally black because he had no ghetto credibility?
The attempt to censor Kaepernick by citing his lack of racial bona fides is a tragic game that, once one begins to play it, can never be won, because there’s always somebody blacker than thou.
Hines Ward also criticized Kaepernick for the manner of his protest. That instead of sitting down during the anthem he should give his entire check to the cause he believed in. Yet Kaepernick’s method of disruption proves his point: giving a million dollars, or even his entire salary, may have showcased Kaepernick’s generosity, but it wouldn’t by itself have drawn attention to the underlying oppression that he is protesting. It would not have landed him on the cover of Time magazine as a patron saint of sorts for black justice. Legendary 49ers receiver Jerry Rice tweeted that “All lives matter”—a definite and well-known rebuke to “Black Lives Matter”—and that Kaepernick shouldn’t “disrespect the flag.” Rice later had a change of mind and tweeted his support for Kaepernick “bringing awareness for injustice!!!!”
Rice’s evolution notwithstanding, these men do not realize how they have been seduced, how white innocence has made them accomplices in opposing blackness. They clearly don’t understand that without some brave soul in the past like iconic running back Jim Brown speaking up at the “wrong” time, they wouldn’t enjoy the perks of fame and wealth today. Without protest and social pressure the major sports leagues would not have been integrated. The criticism of Kaepernick by these former players reveals their astonishing amnesia.
Of course, the same astonishment and anger also greets those blacks who protest in the streets and are said to be disrespecting the police.