by Ian Williams
In West Baltimore, in 1986, a kid pulls a gun on Ta-Nehisi Coates. He goes home and realizes that other kids, those on TV, those in the suburbs, do not fear for their bodies. “I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.” His epiphany is of “a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty.”
In third grade, around the end of the 1980s, Ibram X. Kendi comes to understand that injustice or unfairness is not, in fact, arbitrary. He notices his white teacher ignore the hand of a shy Black girl, who has worked up the courage to participate, only to call on a favoured white student. He recalls his fury and her sadness. From the back of the class, to recover, he says, “I needed some time to think.”
In How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston surveys his friends to find out when they realized they were Black and what Blackness meant, an experiment I don’t need to repeat. One woman, Jacquetta Szathmari, recalls that one day at day camp, as she was about to dive into the water, a white kid said that the grease in her hair would ruin Chesapeake Bay. You can hear how stunned she was in the moment: “I was like, ‘Wow, okay, that’s racism, and that’s what it’s going to mean for a little while for me to be black.’ ” More pointedly: “That’s when I realized that maybe being black could suck a little bit.”
The present. A girl calls my niece a n.
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My niece had heard the word n before in the very car where she told my brother about the incident. My brother enjoys his music. The word is integral to rap. It’s used in many ways. His daughter had asked about it. Why they keep saying that? My brother, I imagine, unwilling to give up his music to the erosion of middle age, taught her about context—who says n and, somewhat confusingly, why she shouldn’t.
My brother and I knew the word n before it was ever used on us. (Because of his children, I won’t tell you how it was used on him.) In Trinidad, where we were born, children make choices by singing:
Eeenie, meenie, minie, mo.
Catch a n by the toe.
When he ready, let him go.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo.
In Canada, kids sang a sanitized version involving a tiger. When we first heard it, my brother and I looked at each other, surprised by their naïveté.
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In all of the above cases of disorientation, differences are amplified.
In all cases, the disorientation that accompanies racial experiences marks an emerging awareness of white dominance, and a place for the Black person in the hierarchy of whiteness.
In all cases, this awareness comes suddenly, at a time when one is unprepared to think of oneself in racial terms.
In all cases, disorientation is the reaction to a somewhat violent action. It’s the violence of being born. Racialized people are born again into a system we do not choose to inherit. But, inevitably, we must be born.
No doubt, children often have an understanding of difference and race before a direct encounter with it. These moments of disorientation are not simply the introduction of a concept, but recruit people into participating in the ordering system of whiteness, with or without their consent. Whether these experiences are, in fact, the first or the fiftieth incident is not important. The important thing is how significant such a childhood experience can be for restructuring a person’s understanding of the world.
White kids don’t have those racially disorienting moments, at least not in the same way. If they are mocked for freckles or red hair or a piggish nose, it’s not racialized. It comes with an understanding of a rather benign difference amplified, but without systemic backing.
For Black children, early moments of disorientation are rarely linked to, Oh, what lovely braids you have. Race is rarely introduced in a framework that is positive, affirmative, empowering, almost never superior—unless by one’s parents.
For Du Bois and Kendi, disorientation came as refusals to be acknowledged. For Smith, Equiano, and Coates, it came from being in sudden physical danger. For my niece, it came verbally at school when she was called n. For a lot of us, our first hierarchical introduction to race, our “blow on the head,” is linked to that word. I’m going to say it and only this once. Nigger.
3. N
I have no way of conducting this study, but I suspect that most Black people have been called n at some point in their lives.
Most recently, in Colorado, I was called a n by a homeless Indigenous man because I didn’t give him money. I remember the 7-Eleven clearly, the corner, the direction I was walking, like the scene of an accident.
Years before, I went to a conference in San Antonio. There must have been a biker convention in town at the same time because I saw many large white men wearing altogether too much black leather in the lobby. After checking in, I entered an elevator with two such men. The doors closed and they continued a story about something, I don’t remember what. I only remember that n was thrown around altogether too much by one man. The other man’s job was mostly to snicker. They were at the back. I was facing the door with my luggage, counting the floors. It couldn’t have been a long time. At my floor, the doors opened and I got out. They continued their ascent.
On that same trip to San Antonio, when I was walking from my hotel to the conference venue, a similar thing happened. Behind me were two men, again talking about some n that I hoped wasn’t me. No matter how I adjusted my gait, they seemed neither to speed up and pass nor to drop back and fall out of earshot. I remember there was a chain fence on my left, like for construction, and traffic on my right, and of course the men behind me. The only way I could escape was by moving forward. I definitely couldn’t even look back to acknowledge them or to investigate. I think I turned a corner as soon as I could, taking myself off route. I remember the feeling—as if I was suddenly in a dream—of being pursued by two men and the word n, which was not intended for me any more than a stray bullet is intended for its victim.
Now, on the surface, it seems like nothing big happened in San Antonio. If I told this story to a white friend, they’d acknowledge it, then brush it away with, What a bunch of racist idiots, and that would be that. They weren’t speaking to you. But my Black friends can extract from these incidents degrees of violence—that the words were intended to be overheard by me, that I was no match for the two men if I dared protest, that the men in the elevator had seen me punch in my floor number and turn in the direction of my room. Black people know that in a strange town where you need to buy meals and move around alone, you begin to question your right to take up space, that your vigilance increases, that you should probably call someone back home and tell them what happened, just in case. And they understand too that you have a conference paper to give the next day in a room where you’re likely to be the only Black person. Your obligations to the world don’t stop despite its hostility to you.
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James Baldwin writes about an experience in a Swiss village, where children shout Neger! Neger! at him as he walks down the street. Again, disorientation for him registers as shock: “It must be admitted that in the beginning I was far too shocked to have any real reaction.” In the wake, he tries to be pleasant, posits excuses for the children, blames their ignorance, their curiosity, bleaches their motives. His benevolence to these children does not stop despite the pain they cause him.
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While my instincts tell me that most Black people have these kinds of verbally violent experiences, I want to know how many white people have used the word. And how. Did they call someone a n while in a city, out of earshot from their home? In the car while driving? At home, after a long day?
I’m extrapolating backward from the girl who called my niece a n to the household where she learned the word. I doubt she came from a family of KKK Grand Wizards. Maybe the word was thrown around i
n reference to a client or a colleague while venting the soap opera of the day at dinner. Maybe it was said about a friend’s Black boyfriend. The kid picked it up when her parents didn’t think she was listening. She also picked up how to leverage the word for one’s power and another person’s humiliation.
4. DISORIENTING ADULTHOOD
Of course, disorientation isn’t limited to the word n, neither is it restricted to childhood. For Black people, disorientation persists beyond an initial epiphany. Baldwin notes its progress over time: “The disaffection, the demoralization, and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin, begins there [in childhood] and accelerates—accelerates throughout a whole lifetime—to the present when you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen.” Every racial encounter in the course of one’s day is a psychic ambush, the evidence of which, until recently, is collected as accumulated experience rather than an archive of recordings for authentication by evidence seekers.
To re-establish equilibrium after the disorienting effects of racism, Black people develop a variety of strategies, some admittedly defensive. I’ve found myself evaluating racist incidents on a kind of scale, so I can decide which ones to drop, which to pursue. I sometimes sort anti-Black racism into major aggressions (violence, murder, vandalism), moderate aggressions (traffic stops, suspicious looks, a slur), and microaggressions (jokes, mispronunciations). A moderate event can escalate into a major event; a major event can echo years later as a microaggression. I don’t mean these categories prescriptively at all, like zones on a fixed trauma scale. I’m just confessing how I’ve needed to get through some days.
Or I parse incidents somewhat grammatically. Sometimes I am the direct object of an aggression (Colorado) and sometimes I am the indirect object (San Antonio). And sometimes the distance is more distant, such as when I hear reports of racism from others. If, when a friend applies for a mortgage, a bank asks him to supply elaborate records of his finances “to make sure the money’s clean,” I might classify that as a moderate aggression of which I am the indirect object since it did not happen to me (though, truthfully, something similar did). Then I can consider what kind of action is appropriate. Should one stomach it? Determine whether this is the policy for everyone who applies for a mortgage? Find another lender?
Christina Sharpe writes about anti-Black racism as the weather or climate of our interactions. Whether we are in the rain or watching it through a window, we are always affected by racial weather. Learning about the death of a Black man to whom one bears no familial or personal relation can sink weeks of one’s life into grief. I was on a Zoom panel around the time of one such murder. It was my birthday. The panel went fine. Actually, if I’m honest, it was painful. After the event, I immediately took off my sweaty shirt and lay on the couch. My partner took a photo of me, from the other side of the birthday flowers, slipping into a grave. Regardless of the magnitude of the event or its intended target or the metaphors we use to contain it, we can’t stop such an incident from having a highly disruptive effect on our emotions.
I can no more stop the disorienting effects of such events than I can opt out of weather or grammar. It’s not that I find race in everything but that race finds me.
Some racial information comes my way every day. If I go a day without seeing a Black person, I question the city, my circle, my engagement with the world. I eat a piece of chocolate and remember a YouTube video where a Chinese woman asks a Black man, When you eat chocolate, how do you know where to stop? I see a white man with a sharp fade—when did that become stylish for them? If someone (white) on the next tennis court only addresses my partner but not me for the hour, I get thrown a little. I’m cleaning my condo for a viewing and wonder if the potential buyers will question the number of books by Black people on my shelves. Will they find one of my curled hairs on the tile and choose not to buy my condo?
Weather blows in from social media. A Brown Muslim brother posts about anti-Black racism in caps. Google tries to be helpful by sending me news notifications. Interracial dating ads pop up in the margin. I’m getting rained on.
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Do white people experience racial disorientation?
My agent sent me a blog post by a white woman who got pulled over five times in one year while driving with her poodle. The first time, the officer unbuckled the holster of his gun as he approached her car. He shone his flashlight at her, at the dog, inspected her licence, and notified her that he pulled her over because she was going three miles below the speed limit and was impeding traffic. No ticket. Four times, she was accused of the same violation: impeding traffic. No ticket. Because this kept happening, she got her speedometer checked. It was in working order. The fifth time, she was driving home from her sister’s house and a cop trailed her for a mile before pulling her over, although she was careful to obey the speed limit. Two officers approached. The one on the passenger side reached for his gun. They did the usual—took her licence, shone their flashlights around, then told her she was going below the speed limit. The white woman did not get a ticket in any of these cases. Then, while she was having lunch with her father, a former neighbour interrupted the meal to tell her, “There’s a Black man stealing your van right now.” The pieces clicked. Her poodle. Silhouette. Afro. All the cops thought she had been driving with a Black man.
Since her poodle died, she has not been pulled over once.
Each time it happened, she was disoriented. She described the disorientation as “frustrating.” She couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Disorientation is emotional: “As a white woman, getting stopped by the police is scary.” Disorientation is physical: “It makes my heart race and my stomach hurt. I’m sure a black person’s fear and rage is a hundred times greater.” Disorientation is mental: “There is the thought, ‘What if it’s not the real cops?’ ”
When I last checked, the post had 440 comments, with a smattering of white defensiveness. “This story sounds completely made up.” Another poster: “If African American people do not want to be profiled, then clean up your image.” Another: “This one person’s lived experience is not statistically relevant. Anecdotal evidence may or may not be an outlier.” I’ll get to evidence in a minute.
So, do white people get racially disoriented? It’s not usually a case of mistaking a poodle for a husband. It’s a case of racializing them. Calling them white. When they perceive their world slipping or their character being maligned at a time when they don’t expect it, they become disoriented. You’ve heard of the diversity workshop exercise of separating a room by eye colour, then treating the people with blue eyes harshly, relocating them to a corner, ignoring them. This exercise successfully makes a point about the arbitrariness of race and discrimination because of the disorientation it produces in people who are not used to being disadvantaged arbitrarily, people who are not accustomed to being unlucky.
Our present moment—of pandemic, of racial justice protests—is a collective disorientation that challenges our prior assumptions about normalcy, safety, and the status quo. White people are finally disoriented by the ubiquity of evidence and cases of violence against Black people. These cases proliferate. But white people are also disoriented by how rapidly things seem to be changing. A white person had a job, said something racist, and poof, the job was gone. That kind of disorientation is the crumbling of dominance, a kind of earthquake that leads to vertigo and collapse.
5. DISORIENTING EVIDENCE
Remember the last comment I mentioned from the poodle story: “This one person’s lived experience is not statistically relevant. Anecdotal evidence may or may not be an outlier.” The issue here is what constitutes valid evidence of racism.
Let’s use an example from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.
You’re at the drugstore and a white man darts in front of you with his items. The cashier i
nforms him that you were next. He turns around, surprised.
I didn’t see you, he says.
You politely suggest that he must be in a hurry.
No, he says. I just didn’t see you.
Is this experience racist? It’s pretty easy to dismiss, no? The man says he didn’t see you. Done. Why go and make the incident out to be a microaggression?
To understand how difficult that question is for Black people to answer, try switching the terms. Imagine that you’re explaining to a skeptical friend that you think Leslie is interested in you. She messages you a couple of times each week. You had coffee once. She’s recently out of a relationship. She told you that. The evidence, even put together, seems thin. You can’t cite gut feeling in a discussion of evidence, nor can you reference another time something like that kinda maybe sorta happened to you.
The difficulty of proving that an incident is racist, much like proving the whiff of romance as substantial, is the pliability of evidence. Of course there are other explanations. The man who darts in front of you has reduced peripheral vision from advancing cataracts. Finding irrefutable evidence is like observing subatomic behaviour: the minute you observe the electron, it has shifted elsewhere. So I understand when some Black people say they’re no longer going to talk about race with white people. They’ve had too many reasonable, Enlightenment-era conversations where they respect the wanton interpretations of others while being forced to defend their own. It seems to me that empathy is only possible if people are willing to suspend doubt, even temporarily.
Another issue with evidence is that the person in power determines whether it’s valid or not. In 1798, Venture Smith’s record of his life, his own life, had to be validated by certificate by five white men. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley required three prefaces, including an attestation signed by the governor of Massachusetts and seventeen white men, to prove that she indeed authored the work she claimed she did. Equiano’s claim to be born in Africa is called into question because a white scholar trusts a birth certificate from Carolina over Equiano’s word. We know from the birther conspiracy surrounding Obama’s first campaign just how little Black people are trusted to be guardians of their own histories. The point here is that the evidence of Black people requires corroboration by white people to be believed by white people.