by Ian Williams
Here’s a kind of risky thing to say because it’s unformed and could so easily be misinterpreted. Imagine if we all had, as with a sexual orientation, a racial orientation. I don’t mean an attraction to a certain race; I mean something more like a racial awareness/orientation that unfolds and finds expression over time. It would mean white folks don’t get to be normative and invisible. In another meaning, orientation would suggest an exposure to the history of race and the ways it continues to operate. It also invokes the fact that we have all been oriented or socialized toward a preferred race, whiteness, whether we are white or not. It’s a bit silly, I know, I know. But I would like to explore that kind of thing outside my head without a guillotine hovering.
BEING WRONG
The guillotine these days is for people who have the “wrong” truth, who cause offence when speaking as themselves, and who take a risk in breaking silence. Anyone, really.
Consider David Foster Wallace. If he were alive today, his head would be in a basket. I like this scenario from “Authority and American Usage,” an essay he wrote about the dictionary, because some people would see his interaction with a Black student as a virtuosic model and others as a train wreck. Wallace is speaking in his role as a professor. We think of professors as enlightened and of universities as progressive spaces. Here we have an intelligent, ethically rigorous white man who was nonetheless imperfect. With respect to race and Black interiority, he was ignorant at best or dismissive at worst.
Good Cop David sits down “certain black students who were (a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility.” Bad Cop Wallace enters: “let me spell something out in my official teacher-voice.” He asks the Black student a patronizing question that cuts to the heart of ignorance: “How much of this stuff do you already know?” He portrays the student as fluent in Standard Black English but ignorant that SWE is required of her. By SWE, he means Standard Written English, but he admits it could just as easily be called Standard White English.
Good Cop David commiserates that other profs “won’t let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair.” He sets himself up as the alternative. Then, whammo, Bad Cop returns: “I’m not going to let you write in SBE either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE.” And again, the emphasis falls on his power: “In class—in my English class—you will have to master and write in Standard Written English,” and here comes the full force of whiteness aware of itself, “which we might just as well call ‘Standard White English’ because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people.”
At this point, I imagine the Black student is totally disoriented by the white-supremacist turn in the conversation. Should she resist his reasoning? Can one report star professor David Foster Wallace? To whom? Is it even possible to get an A in this course anymore, knowing that this man has marked her as delinquent? Has the withdrawal deadline passed? Will it be dark outside when she leaves his office, and what’s the best-lit route to her dorm?
Suddenly, Good Cop David is back: “I’m respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth.”
Then Bad Cop Wallace pulls on his white hood: “In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is.”
Bad Cop Wallace goes on to pre-empt her reactions. If the Black student is pissed or thinks the system is racist, she can spend her whole life fighting against his convictions, but those arguments will have to be made in SWE “because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself.”
I will the Black student to lower her eyebrows and reposition her dropped jaw. Wallace is telling her that she can’t do jack about conformity to whiteness, and that “African Americans who’ve become successful and important in US culture know this.” Audre Lorde is willing the Black student to quote her: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
And here’s good cop and bad cop merged into one final chokehold: “And [STUDENT’S NAME] you’re going to learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you.”
Students were offended by his position, and one did file an official complaint. Colleagues told him that he was “racially insensitive.” He responded that “the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair.” Wallace has a point, of course. But what seems to be missing here is the awareness that his version of straight talk only amplifies and replicates systemic offences while the work of dismantling them continues to belong to the Black student, whose powerlessness he has repeatedly established.
Wallace presents a formidable argument for conformity. I think even a young James Baldwin or Audre Lorde, despite their potential, would find it challenging to respond in the moment. If young Lorde were sitting across from him, she could say, “Survival is not an academic skill.” She could say, “Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.” In other words, between SBE and SWE is a conversation about power. Why must the work fall on the Black student to close the breach between groups? Black people are tired of doing the work to undo racism, which is not a problem we created. Would it be any more work to appreciate SBE than it would be to appreciate Black music? But the fear of contamination keeps white people from engaging with Black expression until it becomes profitable economically or culturally.
I’d like to believe that if David Foster Wallace were alive today and paying attention to the current racial conversations in America, he’d have a significantly revised version of this speech. That it would have become a conversation, not a speech. Instead of expecting the student to step toward whiteness, he would step toward Blackness. I see in him, not here specifically but over the course of his work, the potential of white people to become less casual about the psychic violence they do to Black people. I know he’s dead and I know there’s no way to confirm his trajectory. Yet the evidence of his thoughtfulness and humility indicates a white man with capacity for growth. His curiosity and self-analysis prevent him from being wilfully ignorant. Can we forgive a person their ignorance? Can we take heart that dead white people might yet change their minds?
POSITIONS
More questions coming your way. Where do you stand on debates about Standard English, affirmative action, reparations? Should white people lead civil rights movements? Should they teach Black studies? Should we even use the term Black? Do we pursue justice peacefully or by any means necessary?
There’s no consensus among Black folk. Are you ready for this fact? Black people disagree with each other. Sometimes disagreements get ugly. Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois’s disagreements over Pan-Africanism degenerated into personal attacks. Du Bois, usually dignified and refined, called Garvey a “little, fat, black man; ugly.” Garvey clapped back with, “It is no wonder that DuBois seeks the company of white people, because he hates black as being ugly. That is why he likes to dance with white people, and dine with them, and sometimes sleep with them.” Du Bois responds: “Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world. He is either a lunatic or a traitor.”
Black-on-Black disagreement gets portrayed as degeneracy, but it is simply a consequence of free thought. Ideally, in cases where we disagree with others, we practise tolerance. Not the patronizing kind. True tolerance allows us to pause on other people’s opinions, to regard them as valid to their espousers, without embracing or dismissing them.
Moreover, one person can make compelling, conflicting arguments over a lifetime. Take the question of violence, for example. We like to believe Martin Luther King was born a pacifist, but at one point
he actually believed that “war, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system—Nazi, Fascist, or Communist.” King’s position evolved over time to the point where he believed “nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people.” He was not born with a fully formed moral intelligence: “Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously.” Even the great Martin Luther King had to start somewhere: he bought a “half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.”
My point here is not to tell you what position to hold but to suggest that positions are not fixed territory to defend forever. If you clicked Like on a post three years ago because the headline seemed logical, you are not required to stand by that tiny muscle spasm until death. Positions change as the context around them widens. Our moment unfortunately requires contextual coherence to the point of demanding consistency of character from everyone. As a society, we have been expecting more and more contextual knowledge from each other. Don’t use minority because it diminishes people of colour. The statue in our neighbourhood, do you know what that guy did?
Because we can’t realistically know everything, humility is the best companion to ignorance.
* * *
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My mother’s oldest friend from childhood lost her son in the ocean. A few months after getting married, the son went on vacation with his wife. She went out for a swim and was pulled far out from shore. He jumped in to save her. They both vanished from sight. Her body washed up later that day and his was discovered the following morning.
They both knew how to swim, yet they both drowned.
Until the final few drafts, this essay was called “Ignorance” because I thought knowledge could save us from drowning. But all the knowledge in the world seems to be no match for the current, the rough water in which we find ourselves. I think ignorance is adjacent to a bigger problem, the problem of the self and its corollaries. Selfishness, self-centredness, self-protection. Black people care about race because it affects us. White people don’t care about race until it affects them. Hope lies in caring for something beyond the self.
The man in the ocean knew how to swim and he drowned. But he died in love with his wife, opting to go down with her rather than stand on the shore in safety. Even when he was in the ocean, there must have been a point when he could have turned back and saved himself. I imagine his hand in those last moments above the surface, grasping air.
Or maybe he found what he went searching for. He reached his wife. Maybe he died with his wife in his arms.
DISORIENTATION
So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.
—KAZUO ISHIGURO, Never Let Me Go
1. DISORIENTING FAMILY
My brother married a white woman. My family is not sure how this came to pass, seeing as all his girlfriends to that point, as far as we knew, had been Black. As a teenager, he was adamant about going to a Black high school (Central Peel, nicknamed Central Africa). He listened to Big Daddy Kane, Nas, and Biggie Smalls on his Walkman so our mother couldn’t hear the swearing. He played basketball behind a Catholic school. He watched Fresh Prince and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. He wore his clothes baggy. His jeans sagged down his skinny butt. He kept his sneakers spotless with a toothbrush. Got a fade every two weeks at the cool barbershop, not the one for old men. He was casual about school, dropped courses, failed math once, took only what was essential to get into university. When the time came to apply and our mother pressed him to try for York University in Toronto, my brother laid down the ultimatum that he was going to a Black college in America or no college at all. All of which is to say that he was a textbook of Black suburban adolescence, with proper ratios of swagger and resistance. So the family was perplexed when he called us a couple of years into his working life to say that he was getting married to a white woman from Alabama.
Time passed. My brother and his wife had a daughter. They bought a house. They sold it. They relocated from Alabama to North Carolina, just outside Charlotte. They bought another house. They had a son.
Now you’re caught up.
One morning, my brother was driving his daughter to school. It was clear, as they drew near, that she had something on her mind. She told him that the day before, a girl had called her a n. What did the word signal about her? Why would this girl call her that? What should she do? The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting. Internally, my niece had been knocked off balance and wanted her dad to tell her whether the limp would be permanent.
* * *
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You’re hanging out in a hallway with a group of girls during recess. A few of you don’t have a phone, so you take turns passing around the phone of a rat-faced girl. No one really likes her, but she’s grown-up in a way that you all envy. And she has a phone. At the moment, you have hold of it, but she wants her phone back. You shoulder her so you can keep scrolling through video suggestions of dance routines. The other girls huddle around you, and the rat-faced girl, growing desperate to be at the centre, says, You’re such a n.
Now, your main pursuit for the last few minutes has been finding the best dance video for all the girls to imitate, but this new element makes everyone look up from the screen to the impending confrontation between you and this girl. The girl has somehow managed to dethrone you with that word. Her word, everyone seems to know, trumps rat face, which you’ve called her behind her back. You’re ten. What is happening? What does Ratface have over you suddenly? How can you rally the other girls again? Why wasn’t Becky a n when she pushed Ratface down?
You search for the difference between you and everyone else. You know all about differences. You bully and are bullied based on the differences between boy and girl, fat and thin, sickly and strong. You know about Black and white. But what’s new is that it has been singled out with such powerful, historical irrefutability. This has to have something to do with your dreadlocked father who drops you off. You are also aware that the rest of your concerns haven’t been diminished by the appearance of this new one. The bell will go and after recess you will have to convert an endless number of fractions to decimals. The day was supposed to be forgettable. Should you tell someone? You return to the sensation of the phone still in your hand. The sound of children’s voices reach you. Uniformed bodies storm the hallway.
* * *
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Disorientation refers to the effect of racial encounters on racialized people, the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s business.
It reminds you of your race, usually at a moment when your internal experience is not framed in racial terms, and reorders the pattern of your interactions around race.
It disrupts your reality. It is enacted on you—it interrupts. It stalls the forward momentum of your life. You can’t prepare for disorientation. Try walking around in an armoured suit.
Disorientation suggests to you that you are in the wrong time and place. When’s the wrong time? Now. A time warp deposits you in the past. Where’s the wrong place? Your car, a public park, coffee shops, the sidewalk, an elevator, your bed.
Sometimes the consequences are irritating. Sometimes they are deadly.
2. DISORIENTING CHILDHOOD
A quick survey of my bookshelf reveals that most Black autobiographical narratives describe a moment of disorientation. The Black epiphany, if you will, becomes linked to a moment of formative racialization.
The beginning of racialization for Venture Smith, author of one of the earliest slave narratives, comes as a literal ambush. A “violent blow on
the head.” A rope around his neck. A march toward the sea.
In 1757, writer Olaudah Equiano beholds a slave ship and white people for the first time. He is so disoriented that he thinks he has entered a spiritual dimension: “I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.” His words for disorientation are astonishment and terror, feelings that later settle into horror and anguish. His disorientation at seeing Black people chained together on the ship, at seeing the system of whiteness at work, is so overpowering that he faints “motionless on the deck.”
As a little boy in nineteenth-century New England, W.E.B. Du Bois is disoriented when a tall white girl rejects his calling card: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” For Du Bois, that moment of disorientation is sudden, clarifying, a “revelation [that] first burst upon one, all in a day.”
James Baldwin realizes at the age of five or six that “the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” Describing that “great shock” in a speech later in life, he argues that we enter the world with a sense of equality until a moment or period of disorientation intervenes.