by Ian Williams
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2021 Ian Williams
Images courtesy of the author
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2021 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Disorientation : being Black in the world / Ian Williams.
Names: Williams, Ian, 1979- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210153806 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210153970 | ISBN 9781039000223 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781039000230 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Blacks—Social conditions. | LCSH: Blacks—Race identity. | LCSH: Race awareness. | LCSH: Race discrimination. | LCSH: Racism. | LCSH: Race relations.
Classification: LCC HT1581 .W55 2021 | DDC 305.896—dc23
Text design: Lisa Jager adapted for ebook
Cover design: Lisa Jager
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For my father
who will likely agree
and for Phanuel
who is free
to disagree
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1
More Than Half of Americans Can’t Swim
Disorientation
Ten Bullets on Whiteness
Part 2
Four to Eighteen Days
Between Us
Sighting
The Only
Part 3
The Drive Home
Two Eyes, a Nose, and a Mouth
Life Certificate
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
MORE THAN HALF OF AMERICANS CAN’T SWIM
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
—AUDRE LORDE
SWIMMING
My resolution this year is to learn how to swim. It was my resolution last year. And the year before. And, well, let’s stop there. I imagine myself falling out of a burning airplane into the ocean like an action hero. I crash into the water, conscious for a hopeful moment, before floundering and drowning. The scenario is illogical, but I have my reasons.
I also have several reasons for why it is taking me so long to learn.
All the pools that I’ve entered have been unpleasantly cold and I don’t like the sensation of cold water on my body, especially my back. I don’t like the sound of underwater in my ears. You can feel the current of conversations around race, particularly in America. You’re entering an environment that has cast you as rebellious, violent, and troublemaking, if Black, and as blameworthy, racist, and heartless, if white. None of this feels good washing over your head.
I haven’t learned how to swim because of a story, internalized from childhood, that my aunt told of a Black boy in England who was struggling in a pool. He could have drowned. And the swimming instructor said, Leave him. N don’t float anyhow. I imagine the instructor turning away to deal with the white students while the Black child splashed and gulped. You already have an internal story that makes you reluctant or fearful to approach the subject of race. If you’re Black, you expect any attempt to be met with pity or demands for proof. You’ve learned early that any mention of a white person in a racial situation that affects you is akin to an accusation. So you bear the microaggressions. If white, maybe you witnessed another white person get eviscerated for a joke or watching out for the welfare of the neighbourhood. So you’re just going to avoid Black people. If you see one leaning against a car, you’re not going to call the police (that’s probably for the best). You’re not going to say anything whatsoever about race, because you’re not stupid.
The thought of learning to swim among six-year-olds with water wings could be an amusing future anecdote, but I’d rather not endure the present awkwardness. I should know how to swim by now. So pride gets in the way. This type of pride is buoyed by shame rather than deflated by it. You should know more about race, but you’re embarrassed to be counted among the ignorant, so you don’t ask. Of course, there are adult swimming classes. My racialized friend attended the first session of one where the entire class comprised three shirtless racialized men. It was like Swimming for Immigrants, he said. You don’t want to be in the company of people like you.
Let’s say I survive the classes and learn how to swim. Once the lessons are over, where will I go swimming? Am I going to doggy-paddle in some public pool with Olympians zooming and sharking around me? Who’s eager to get into emotionally murky waters with people who’ve been swimming a long time?
I’m afraid of the deep end. I wouldn’t mind staying in the shallow end where I could put my feet down. Maybe I just need to learn how to float. If the plane crashes and I survive the impact, I could float on the water until help comes. When I got tired, I’d hold on to buoyant debris, like Kate Winslet in Titanic. You can keep your head above water with a few popular opinions. You don’t need to look into the faces of slaves in photographs. You get it. Slavery bad, equality good. Respect Black people.
If you’re Black, you believe that your experience excuses you from understanding exactly what happened back then. You’re Black and that’s enough. This one’s tricky. Your experience is important, yes, but it’s not everything. When you position yourself in history, you enter into a community of people with similar experiences and you observe how the racial climate changes over time. For white people, it’s worth learning some history and theory and more: it’s worth having experiences of disorientation and discomfort, as a means of empathy and as a way of accessing courage, which only grows from challenge and exercise.
I have a sensitive bladder. I am concerned that in a moment of stress I might piss in the pool and get banned forever. For starters, don’t piss in the pool. There are places for that. Don’t contaminate discussions by trolling around and advocating on behalf of the devil. Not pissing in the pool is for your own good too. There are Internet forums full of piss. I doubt you want to swim in the putrid opinions of narrow-minded folks. If that’s what you want, you probably shouldn’t be swimming. You probably should find a community of kinky people and have them piss on you.
Although I’ve wanted to swim for an embarrassingly long time, I have no ambitions to be a lifeguard. In fact, if you told me that I should learn to swim so that I could save other people, I’d say, Great, but what’s in it for me? So much for the kindness of my heart. Of course, you’re more likely to leave comfortable ignorance behind if there is a benefit to you and not just a benefit to other people. What does that say about you, though?
Our benefits are inextricable. It’s benefit enough that I can be with you on land or water. No saving needs to happen. In water, we each look a little different because we’re both affected by the same element. The journey out of ignorance takes us into—forgive the mushy term—self-discovery and into a deeper empathetic relation to the prevailing issues of our
time.
* * *
—
I don’t know where the scenario of my plunging into the ocean and needing to swim to safety came from.
It is estimated that at least two million Black people died while crossing the Atlantic ocean on slave ships. Some jumped, choosing to drown rather than to be enslaved.
A POLITICAL PERSON
I do not consider myself a political person in any sense of the word. I turn away from CNN maps on election night. I care about race, but I don’t march in the streets with homemade signs. I’ve been to one protest, out of curiosity more than conviction. In truth, I care too much about the subject to see it batted between acquaintances as only a subject of conversation.
Despite this apolitical stance, offensive especially to people who view all politics as inescapable, I’ve known which opinions to hold, how to shade them depending on the company around me. I haven’t always believed these opinions, I’ve accepted them. Accepting conflict and conflicting perspectives seems a precondition for getting political.
How does one engage with the explosive world of race and privilege?
As a Black man, I could claim expertise. Race is one of the few places where white people actually defer to Black people without challenge. White people think race lives in Black bodies. They don’t see whiteness as having meaningful contributions to make to racial conversations. The belief that race lives only in certain bodies is a powerful acknowledgement that the structures we live in are racist. Knowing this dynamic (and hesitant to take on the extra work of carrying race for white people), I’ve protected my little life for the most part, though I sometimes subject my experiences to the glare of theory and terms, to the words microaggression and anti-racist. I categorize my experiences, but then I open my arms and they come waddling back to me, shedding labels, dishevelled and unruly. I am not the Blaxpert. By renouncing expertise, I am not turning my experience over to other people. Blackness is not for white anthropologists or diversity trainers to determine.
And why do you need an expert? Why do you need a race guru? You have a mirror. Why do you look at a photo of a cover model to make sense of your own face?
I know a fair bit, but never enough to seize authority. My dissatisfaction with my knowledge, coupled with my tepid emotions, occasionally nauseates me. Would I not be a better human if I were informed and angry? Then I could be righteous. I should be vocal. More than vocal. Loud. I have received the message that to be Black these days is to be perpetually outraged and distressed, fed up, tired. To be anything apart from that is treacherous and out of touch.
If you’re like me, you resist people who pressure you to see the world as they do, to care about what they do, to prioritize what they prioritize. I see that as a kind of interpersonal fascism. What they believe, care about, prioritize, might well be important, in which case I will make my way to that side; my resistance is less to the truth of what they say than to their methods of force, shame, mandatory acceptance. Stop behaving like bad religious proselytizers. Chill. I’ll decide when I have the info, not on your schedule, not on your terms, not even if you believe everything is political. Grand, absolute statements are also totalitarian.
SILENCE
Take, for example, this Instagram post that a friend forwarded to me.
The post is a multi-part polemic that lambastes the passive, cat-clicking social media user: “Fear of ‘getting political’ on your social media is, at its core, racist.” A little later, the point gets reiterated as an equation: “To sit in silence is to let people die.”
This post was liked by 416,267 people, but the comments were mostly negative: “This is a pile of bollocks if ever I’ve read any”; “bro, then im racist af.”
When you see Instagram posts like this, you find yourself implicated in a noisy political landscape. So where’s your statement? Huh? What are your politics? What is your plan for action? Where will you post it? Are you angry at something? Have you found someone to hate?
In a culture that demands statements from corporations and pressures individuals to lay their politics bare on inhospitable platforms, many of us have had to rethink how we translate our personal, inarticulate convictions for public inspection. These public declarations are difficult for people who are inclined to privacy and even more complicated if you’re Black. As a Black person, one grows wary of the discrepancy between what people claim to believe and how they actually respond to one’s existence. By the time you reach middle age, quite battered by the accumulation of false claims, you find it hard to trust and forgive, to accept a hopeful prognosis because of a promise.
When the Instagram post elsewhere declares, “A refusal to post is, at its core, a refusal to give up your comfort. A refusal to give up your power as a privileged individual,” I realize as usual that this post is not meant for me. It suggests that privilege keeps one calm, not the years spent developing composure under a discriminatory system. It fails to see how, for many Black people, the time that the world is prepared to listen does not coincide with the time that we wanted to speak. You can listen to remixes of our equity movements from the 1860s, the 1950s, the 1960s—from any decade to the present. The recent statements, militant in tone, decontextualized by virtue of their platforms, give the impression of being revolutionary. They draw up lists of alliances and enemies. Tell me whether you agree with me or not. Agree with me or else.
I am troubled by the extremity of rhetoric, not just in this post but in the discourse around race in general. Eurocentric → white supremacist. Microaggression → racial abuse. Silence→complicity. Or in the words of the Original Poster’s equation: “To sit in silence is to let people die.” Extreme.
I do not post a comment. I do not share the story.
* * *
—
I think about race a lot—every day, several times a day. But that internal activity rarely gets externalized. Sure, there’s the fear that I’ll say the wrong thing, meaning in my case that I’ll repeat some uninterrogated white ideology and a sister with big Africa earrings will call me the white man’s whip. Or I’ll say something about racist institutions and hurt the white people who do nothing but lend me books. Race is not easy to talk about.
Once, I was so frustrated that I screamed in my car while speeding along the highway. But I can’t go around screaming to express myself.
On the other extreme, as I mentioned before, I don’t want to position myself as an expert where I open my palm and up pops a hologram of a plantation like in a sci-fi movie so I can explain it from all angles, then systematically present intellectual arguments to pummel white people into shame. I’ve seen people do it. That’s more of a performance than a conversation. Black people in the audience shout, “Preach,” and white people leave the auditorium satisfactorily flagellated. Being on either side of chastisement doesn’t appeal to me at all.
Neither do I want to perform vulnerability or prove that I am human by supplying countless anecdotes of the racial injuries I have sustained. Here is a lifetime of hurt, grant me membership into humankind. Make me one of you. That’s not the level of conversation I’d like to have in this century. A contemporary exchange should be premised on the understanding that Black humans are wired like all humans to bruise from injustice, from affronts to our dignity, our good intentions, our reputation.
As a fourth option, I could talk about race like a comic does. Employing a defence mechanism against injury, I’d turn everything into a joke. A funny thing happened to me the other day. Can you believe that white guy? But I am not the butt of a joke.
For white people, your entrance to conversations on race is likewise restricted. Your speaking position is predetermined as racist or woke or well-meaning or clueless or nervous or ignorant. Given the options for Black and white people alike, we often opt for silence. Because the subject matter is already scripted and directed for me, I find myself disapproving of how I will s
ay what I have not yet said.
The question returns: How does one engage with the explosive world of race and privilege? I started writing this book because I wanted to get all of my ideas down in one place. I was talking to myself, and the simmering, disorganized mess internally was not much different from the mess in the world, though without the cruelty.
I have made a contract with myself to speak the truth, to speak only as myself, and to take the risk of speaking.
If I limit myself to saying only the things I believe are true, then I enter conversations with an ethical commitment to truth. This way my convictions will be tested before I share them and I will leave conversations with my integrity intact. If I am unsure, if I am under-informed, or ignorant, I will admit it. The common alternative to speaking examined truths is regurgitating received, broken-telephone-game ideas about race.
Speaking as myself means speaking out of my experience and knowledge. Both of these are expandable, one with openness, the other with effort. I cannot reasonably be called on to represent the wide range of Black experience, which is not to say that I will neglect the concerns of people who are being overlooked. As far as possible, I’d prefer to make direct links between the people asking and the people with answers. Incarcerated men are available for comment on the system that incarcerated them. Why don’t people ask them? Speaking as myself also means that I will use my own vocabulary and my comfortable emotional registers. I’m not an opera singer.
The third part of my contract, taking risks, makes me more courageous to enter a war against tyranny. I’m framing it as a war so that I can find for myself what is worth fighting for. The long, arbitrary subjugation of one group of people so that other people could shore up privilege is worth having some thoughts on. I accept that people will misinterpret or disagree with my positions. These disagreements ought to test and tune my own thinking, rather than make me defensive and inhospitable. Thinking around race needs to be elastic and responsive, because racism travels faster than our ability to predict or detect it.