The Reckonings Read online

  I bristled when I read that question because, on the surface, it appeared to include me in a group to which I didn’t feel I belonged. Yes, I have blond hair and pale skin and blue eyes, but I’m not white like affluent white women are white, I thought. I put myself through college by working at Walmart and, for one summer, in a strip club, where I scraped together enough money for tuition and rent by taking off my clothes. I brought home furniture I found in a secondhand store, or in the dumpster, or on the street. “White trash” felt more comfortable and familiar as a racial category for me. I was almost white, not quite white, so close to the edge of whiteness I might fall off.

  In class I said, “Lorde is saying ‘white women,’ which is a term that describes me, but she’s not actually talking about me, or about any of the women I know,” and the poet I admired said, “Well, since no one is talking about that, maybe you should be talking about that.”

  * * *

  I think of that moment especially now as I am confronted each day with violences, large and small, that I am asked to accept, how my power and privilege depend on this acceptance, and also on the condition that I keep silent about it all my life. What does “whiteness” even mean? It’s not as if being “white” actually refers to my skin, or to anything biological or natural or real. Whiteness isn’t even cultural since people who call themselves white do not necessarily share a culture. There is no “white community” that extends from the mansions of Beverly Hills all the way to the farm where I grew up in rural Missouri, though “whiteness,” as an idea, wants me to believe that there is and that this community is large and welcoming enough to include even me.

  But in reality, at no point in the history of the “white race” has whiteness been large and welcoming. Whiteness scholar Noel Ignatiev has argued that one condition of being white is policing who is not, that whiteness itself exists only in relation to the privileges it bestows and their constant threat of revocation. Whiteness pushes poor whites to the margins, threatens them with terms like white trash or its more euphemistic equivalent, working class, demands that they demonstrate their allegiance to whiteness by violently protecting its boundaries against the advancements of people of color. Whiteness is in no way inextricable from affluence, autonomy, and the capitalistic promise of accumulated wealth.

  “No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin writes. “It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” My own ancestors, for instance, gave up being Irish and Scottish and Welsh, and hid being Polish and Greek and African, in order to become intelligible to others, and to one another, as “white.” Generations later, I still feel those effects: whiteness has made me a “desirable candidate” for student loans, housing, jobs; it allowed me to become upwardly mobile, to go to graduate school and transform myself from someone who is “not quite white” into one who is affluently white. In exchange, whiteness has demanded all this time that I buy into a system of racial hierarchy that keeps a very few white men wealthy and in power and very many people poor and disenfranchised. It demands that when this hierarchy is enforced with violence, I look the other way, that I accept it or ignore it, that I say nothing at all.

  * * *

  In truth, whiteness did not exist in my imagination until I was twelve years old, when my sister became estranged from our family because she was “living in sin” with a black man. I was twelve when she moved out of our house and into this man’s house, and felt somewhat confused by people’s reaction. Race had never been a thing that was discussed—not the idea of it or the real, lived consequences of that idea. Only after our family name was exchanged for a racial slur and I found myself unfriendable, always sitting alone at the lunch table, unable to ask questions in class without being sent to the principal, did I understand what people believed the sin to have actually been.

  During this time, each of the three television stations in my hometown in Missouri had been running nightly footage of four police officers trying to kill Rodney King on the side of the road—trying to bash his skull in, trying to break his bones. I remember noticing that there were several more officers who did not participate in the violence but stood to the side, letting it happen, their hands on their guns or near them, looking on.

  Rodney King suffered a fractured cheekbone, eleven broken bones at the base of his skull, and a broken leg at the hands of those four police officers. They were eventually charged with use of excessive force, though the jury ultimately acquitted them of these charges—a verdict that sparked six days of intense protests throughout Los Angeles that Representative Maxine Waters called a “rebellion,” an “insurrection,” and that authorities treated like a war.

  Each evening the footage ran almost continuously on the news: the protesters attacking motorists, burning buildings, throwing rocks, smashing windshields, overturning cars and setting them on fire, breaking through windows and ransacking stores, exchanging gunfire with police and with store owners trying to fend off looters, burning down entire city blocks. As the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the California Highway Patrol, the fire departments of neighboring cities, the Seventh Infantry Division of the US Army, the First Marine Division, and nearly six thousand National Guardsmen prepared to move in to “restore order,” Rodney King made a tearful statement to a crowd of reporters, pleading to the police, to the protesters, to anyone who would listen: “Can we all get along?”

  That question arrived in the living room of my home, where I noticed, for the first time, that I was supposed to be part of an intangible something that called itself “white”—like the police officers who beat Rodney King were supposed to be white, like most of the jury who acquitted those officers were white. The mayor of my hometown was white, I realized, and the city council members were white, and also all of the judges and police officers. All of the people who were so upset about my sister’s relationship were white: not only my parents, but also their parents, our church leaders, people we ran into at the grocery store, bank tellers, the pharmacist, our neighbor down the road. There were one hundred students in my year, and ninety-five of them were white. The five black students, I suddenly realized, lived very separate lives. Their houses were on the other side of town from mine, across the railroad tracks. There was a church on that side of town, the Second Baptist Church; the Baptist church my family attended, an entirely white congregation, called itself “First.”

  I wish that I could say that during this time I understood the responsibility I had to destroy a system I knew even at that moment to be profoundly wrong, but in fact I had only a few conversations about it—mostly with my parents about the way they were treating my sister—and those were inadequate and mostly calm. I had no more power to change people’s minds, I soon told myself, than I did to stop the police with their swinging black batons in Los Angeles. It was a thing that had already happened, it seemed, a reality with which whiteness demanded I go along.

  * * *

  Most people—aspiring to whiteness—sign on to this social contract without any inkling of guilt or remorse, maybe without realizing they are doing it, maybe without consideration for how the inequality whiteness produces is itself profoundly unjust, or without even thinking about how much of ourselves or others it requires we give away. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” President Johnson famously said, “he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

  In her unwillingness to accept the terms of this arrangement, Rachel Dolezal notoriously decided to reject whiteness and instead become black. “Nothing about being white describes who I am,” she told an interviewer after her parents outed her as “Caucasian,” though nothing about the origin of that term in the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe describes her either. Her discomfort with whiteness might more accurately be called a conscience, though having a consci
ence doesn’t give any white woman the moral authority to become a black woman instead.

  Whiteness is a claim to this authority, to righteousness, to power, to full protection under the law—a claim to a neutral existence at the invisible, unraced center of an otherwise racialized world. It’s a collective fantasy that also leads white Christians to believe Jesus is white and Mary is white, despite the fact that they were Middle Eastern Jews. It is why Santa is white on nearly every Christmas card and why the Tooth Fairy is white in nearly every cartoon. The pathological fantasy of white supremacists is a return to the former greatness of a purely white ethnostate, even though there has never been such a thing in history. Most white people haven’t even always been white. They just learned to look the part and to say nothing about it at all.

  * * *

  This is all to say that whiteness is not a monolith, is neither fixed nor stable. Whiteness is, in fact, a fairly modern fiction, dating at its earliest to the period of European colonialism and imperialism, when “race” became justification for capturing and selling humans as slaves. There has been no point in history when all “white people” have experienced white privilege in the same way. Even now, Donald J. Trump is white in a different way from how Honey Boo Boo is white. This is not a denial of racism or the real and devastating effects of white supremacy on the lives of people of color, but rather an acknowledgment that whiteness is constructed, and its construction has everything to do with power and very little to do with skin color.

  The resistance of poor whites in particular to ideas about white privilege hinges on this distinction: that white privilege at the margins of whiteness doesn’t work the same way it does at the center, that whiteness oppresses in ways that poor whites also feel—that power is real and feels just beyond our reach. Poor whites point to statistics that we are also shot by police, are targeted by police, are assumed to be breaking the law, are arrested and detained unlawfully by police. Not at the same rates as people of color, to be sure, but when occupied with alleviating one’s own suffering, the comparative suffering of others can sometimes seem a long way off.

  So when a term like white privilege arrives to suggest that any success we do enjoy is not fully our own doing but a kind of racial cheating—cashing in an unearned advantage because of the color of our skin—and that any prosperity we find is not our own, well, for some people it’s too much to take in. And if we cannot take it in, there is no way to admit or acknowledge that the little power we do have comes with the condition that we deny it to someone else. It is much easier for the ego to reject all responsibility, to deny all blame. White people might say, “Well, I have never discriminated against anyone personally.” Or, “My ancestors never owned slaves.” And yet if we did not in some way already understand that we reap even very small benefits from the systemic oppression of people of color, there would be nothing about which to deny our individual guilt.

  * * *

  “We do not know the history / Of ourselves in this nation,” writes poet Jericho Brown. Or we do know our history but deny our responsibility for what is happening in the right here and now. I learned only after moving away from Missouri that it is the type of place where the man my sister loved and with whom she lived could have wound up dead in his own neighborhood; where, in some counties, even in the northern part of the state where I lived, a set of sundown laws at one time prohibited African Americans from remaining in a given county after dark; and where between 1880 and 1940, white mobs lynched at least sixty black men and women in public acts of racial terror (mostly for alleged crimes against white women) and faced virtually no consequences for their actions—the second most of any state outside the Deep South.

  We think of it as a dark exception in our history when black men in particular were routinely lynched for using disrespectful language, for insubordination, for laughing at the wrong time or for a prolonged silence, for refusing to tip one’s hat to a white person, for failing to yield sufficient space to them on the sidewalk, for resisting a beating by a white man, for writing a letter to a white woman, or simply for looking at her, for political activities, for union organizing, for discussing the lynching of someone they knew, for being in debt, for refusing an offer of employment, for displaying one’s wealth or property, for refusing to give up one’s wealth or property, and, most egregious, for acting in a way that was offensive for being too white.

  Less frequently, these same mobs also lynched people who might be described as “white” under any other circumstances; their crime, more often than not, was being not white enough. Both cases prove what one southern critic observed: that men are most likely to lynch when the victim offends their sense of “racial superiority.”

  Whiteness demands this violence: that we either commit it or accept it, and if we refuse we are in danger of becoming its victims ourselves. This is not some relic of our remote past, but rather the current moment on a never-ending time line of seemingly inviolable power. In St. Louis, two hours east of where I grew up, a police officer, believing himself to be white, shot and killed Michael Brown in his own neighborhood in broad daylight after he refused to comply with an order to get out of the empty street. In New York City, a white police officer choked Eric Garner to death on the sidewalk while arresting him for selling cigarettes. In South Carolina, a white police officer shot Walter Scott in the back for running away. A white police officer shot and killed Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy, on a playground in Ohio, within thirty seconds of arriving on the scene. In Minnesota, a police officer, aspiring to whiteness, shot and killed a beloved cafeteria worker in the chest with his wife and young daughter in the car.

  Each time, the officer faces no consequences because he has killed to protect whiteness, and whiteness in turn protects him. Each time, rage swells and carries people out of their homes and into the streets of St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, DC—places that are not so different from the Deep South, despite what their white residents like to think. The rage is not pathological. Racism is. Whiteness is. Denying the evidence of our eyes and ears is pathological. Silence is pathological. Apathy is pathological. And yet each time police arrive in riot gear and in armored vehicles, they wear gas masks and launch tear-gas grenades into the crowds of protesters, who raise their hands in peaceful surrender. At home, people who call themselves white watch the violence on television. They shake their heads and change the channel. It is pathological to see this injustice and do nothing about it at all.

  * * *

  “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there,” Audre Lorde writes in “The Master’s Tools.” “See whose face it wears.” For most of my life, I didn’t know enough to recognize that the face of difference I most feared was my own. When I was twelve, and twenty-seven, and all the ages in between, I had no sense of perspective, of my own power or purpose—or I did have a sense but refused to acknowledge it for reasons I am now ashamed to admit. I wanted to deny my responsibility and blame for the difficulty others experienced because I had also experienced difficulty. I didn’t think I should be held accountable for a history of racist violence because I had also been a victim of violence. When I had gotten stuck on the only line in Audre Lorde’s essay that seemed to prove my exception from her critique of white feminism, it was, in effect, a failure to see the most important thing about it, which is how it also, and maybe especially, applied to me.

  When I watched a white man yell at a woman I admired in front of her class and said nothing, that was a failure too: a failure to reckon with the fact that my struggle was not the only one that mattered, that my experience was not the only one that had meaning, that I would never be the only person in any room who had something I was afraid to lose. It wasn’t that she needed me; she was then, and still is now, quite capable of holding her own. It’s that I stood by and let whitenes
s work in the way it has always worked, watched how it can assert itself as almost anything: as poetry, as superiority, as the loudest voice in a tiny room, as a violence that demands I watch and do nothing at all.

  At the end of that academic year, the poet I admired left the university where, to my knowledge, the white tenured poet faced exactly zero consequences for yelling at his junior colleague in front of her class. That’s the protection whiteness gave him and, for all I know, gives him still. There’s no reason to expect that anything has changed in that regard, and if we continue to do nothing, it never will.

  I no longer feel responsible for what happened in the classroom that day, but I choose to take responsibility for what happens now, what can happen and will. Whiteness is a moral choice: if it is learned, we must unlearn it. If it is a transaction, we must refuse to buy in. If whiteness is a structure, it is vulnerable at its margins, like all built things, and we have a responsibility to burn it to the ground.

  GOLIATH

  I am sitting in my car at a stoplight in a small midwestern city. It is a bright, cloudless Tuesday in that tiny wedge of time between late summer and early fall when each day begins with a chill that evaporates just after sunrise. Today I am driving from the suburb where I live in my sister’s basement to an office building downtown, where I have a job interview scheduled for 8:00 a.m. The radio DJ who is normally so coarse and insulting is saying they don’t know what has happened exactly, only that there has been an explosion in New York. The other DJ, who normally laughs at everything the coarse DJ says, isn’t laughing. There are no answers, only questions and more questions. I know only that it is my birthday and just last night I was saying to my older sister that it is probably lucky to have an interview on my birthday.