Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  It’s an obvious no; but even the obvious is inside history, so, yes too. I wonder if the question she should be asking is if a carefree love can come out of a shared interest in white rage and white violence against black people inside a democratic structure that constructs, sponsors, and supports this behavior. I can’t be an expert in my own subjugation and it’s certainly not where I find pleasure. We could talk about that perhaps. Then I think maybe bringing up my husband’s whiteness was a way of giving him back whatever he might lose if I died or departed. Perhaps it was a way to say, you win. You will win. Cancer is me losing and even if I find the joke in it all it is still me losing. You won. Can’t you see that? But no one wins when it’s cancer or time they’re bargaining with.

  Had the counselor asked me what I felt was the most hurtful thing I’d said to my husband, I wouldn’t say what he said since my statement just seemed like a truth we’d all seen play itself out in other marriages around us. But as I scan my memory, it was in fact the only thing I’d said that pointed directly to his whiteness. Considering the fact that I know white people don’t like to be called white, I wonder if I said it to hurt my husband, since so many words in those months seemed like they were tossed out as fighting words. Though admittedly at the time I was the least equipped person to judge my own subtext, however much I looked at it, my claim continued to feel like the truth of the matter.

  Centered in hurt and history, Beyoncé’s Lemonade addresses infidelity, four hundred years of racism and its effects on devastated black families, none of which were wholly our issues but I still find it consoling. Perhaps it’s because the “visual album” also addresses black love, or is it just love? Beyoncé zoomed us out in order to see how all of history was against the success of her marriage and she isn’t wrong. My own interracial marriage also existed inside a racist America whose ways make life more difficult. Many times driving in New York City and New Jersey (we lived in the South only one year), we were pulled over by police and asked how we knew each other; there are all the places my husband walks into while I’m stopped at the door; and there are the white women who understood our relationship to be anything but a marriage as they step between us to flirt. We laughed about these moments in real time, but it was not this kind of laughter I was after.

  Our laughter came out of moments when the world, its structures, did all the talking. This laughter was reactive and served as a nod to idiocy and violence. It was a laughter that understood, even as we felt the blows landing. It was a laughter of “what can you do?” and “oh my God.” We laughed at what we saw, what we knew, what we experienced, and hardly did we speak beyond it. Our lives, our marriage, our collaborations are built in this world.

  Was there a possibility of a love and a laughter that lived outside the structure that brought us together? Who could I tell that though I would never walk away from my life, sometimes I have wanted to? There is a pain—so utter—It swallows substance up—Who could I tell and have the telling not be a threat or an expressed desire to be punished? So memory can step around—across—upon it—Who could I tell where the telling itself would be a space to inhabit and perhaps, maybe, even joke about one stormy night? Now this would be a good day to leave, the imagined one would say. This would be a love that is not defended, that had a deadpan humor about tomorrows. What would that feel like in any America?

  In this America we had yet to achieve the laughter that came up out of our own conversations, our own crazy logic, our own wishful wants, that finds its place in reality though it is not any reality you can have without knowing a person really or at least trying to comprehend the individual pathways we each build so we can hold ourselves together. The poet Erica Hunt describes love as “a close reading” that “help[s] me invent myself more—in the future.” It’s the most workable definition I’ve found to date.

  People feel hurt when you point out the reality that forms experience because the reality is not their emotional experience, the counselor reminded us that day. The structures that inform our lives are the predetermined architecture we live in or against. But I am beginning to know that feelings can change structures. If many white men can have much of what they want, including potential anonymous women of any age they have yet to meet, in a society set up to support them with images of officers and gentlemen and Don Drapers, that does not mean, the counselor implied, my husband wouldn’t be devastated by my absence.

  And if the black woman is the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person in America, as Malcolm X told us before he was assassinated, and as Beyoncé reminded us in her “visual album” Lemonade, that didn’t mean I would perish if my life lacked humor, as it did while I was dying. There is something to be said for staying alongside in our sobering reality. Some realities aren’t funny. They are made up of truths more vital than laughable no matter how much or how little time you have.2

  NOTES

  1. Text I tell her rather dramatically that the Internet of health statistics claimed I should be dead…

  Notes and Sources See the CDC report Breast Cancer Rates among Black Women and White Women:

  “Black women and white women get breast cancer at about the same rate, but black women die from breast cancer at a higher rate than white women.

  “Compared with white women, black women had lower rates of getting breast cancer (incidence rates) and higher rates of dying from breast cancer (death rates) between 1999 and 2013. During this period, breast cancer incidence went down among white women, and went up slightly among black women. Now, breast cancer incidence is about the same for women of both races.

  “Deaths from breast cancer are going down among both black and white women, especially among younger black women. But breast cancer death rates are 40% higher among black women than white women.”

  2. While [we] do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.

  Abraham Lincoln

  outstretched

  We must travel through a cloudy veil to arrive at a human object. Whiteness is in the way of seeing. We can barely hold on to what’s being approached. I think about what it means to soften an image, as in its memory, as in its future memory. The filter covers our pupils and acts as a kind of cataract even as our black circular openings open to the light. Vision is blurred and all statements are projections, guesses, educated and not. The more one looks, the more the eyes attempt to focus, to lock down a narrative. It’s a strain to formulate a declarative sentence. But now a woman appears as if an apparition took hold. There is a black woman at the center of things who lives amidst the whiteness. The photograph’s title, Woman with Arms Outstretched, asks us to look closely at what she is doing. The language of the title, “outstretched,” seems an overstatement, an interesting one—optimistic in its reach for the future, a time ahead of her. What is she evidence of? Do time’s constraints turn out to be human constraints? Once I confused the passage of time with change. It was a careless use of language’s unfreedoms. The rhetoric of whiteness spawned brutal confusion. Even now, years later, years away, in the world of the image, one waits. The woman’s arms seem slightly activated at her sides. Their movement is caught by the image. Does the photograph reflect the moment before the action realized by the title’s claim? What can one know from either the photographed moment or its title? I am beginning to wonder if outstretched is a way to call forward a yearning. Her arms open to arrival. What is it she sees coming? Longing floods the whiteness. The photograph captures an urban American landscape containing a black woman, “edited out of our seeing,” as the photographer Paul Graham describes her. The photograph belongs to his series American Night. Maybe the yearning I at
tach to the image originates with the white photographer. Perhaps the white haze is his own attempt to see what the American landscape holds just out of his sight, for white men, for white people. All people? Graham says you have to choose to overcome your own blindness as he slows down the process of seeing by overexposing the image. He wishes to communicate the difficulty of knowing through seeing. Is the woman in the scene walking her dog? The dog is a bag. I can make out the handles. She has placed it on the ground to free up her hands. She’s prepared to wait. Once she stops being the object of the photographer’s gaze, she could do something else. Or, she is forever outdoors in the imaginary of our democracy, locked forever on the street confirming the white photographer’s vision of blackness. Or, in the moment after the shutter closes, does the bus arrive? The grass on which she stands is not a destination. It is not nature. It is a patch of dry grass, a median strip, between infrastructures, between lanes of traffic, between nowhere and here, between him and her, between him and me, between me and you. It’s a racialized enclosure. A necropastoral. This term is not in the dictionary. Where did I first hear it? It too does not exist and yet it was said and is now being repeated.1 I was born. In a slave narrative that means nothing. Meaningless. I was born and in the midst of this photograph I am now being repeated so that the photographer can see what whiteness has erased and is erasing and will erase because white life enacts the problem of erasure. There are other words too: hoses, dogs, genocide, incarceration, assassination, wall, immigration, Can I help you? Why are you here? Do you live here? Can I see your ID? Is this your house? Is she your wife? Inside the shape of the woman is there a woman? As I am being human am I a human being? Arms outstretched? My ass. My stance as life stretches out into seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years, decades. Once it was 1619. The month was August. I sat staring into an image unfolding. Life. A film of whiteness. That’s when the alarm in my house went off. I followed the sound to the Atlantic.

  NOTES

  1. Text A necropastoral. This term is not in the dictionary. Where did I first hear it? It too does not exist and yet it was said and is now being repeated.

  Fact Check Yes, it’s not in the dictionary but defined by Joyelle McSweeney below.

  Notes and Sources “What Is the Necropastoral?” by Joyelle McSweeney: “I first wrote about the Necropastoral in January of 2011. The Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect. It does not subscribe to humanism but is interested in non-human modalities, like those of bugs, viruses, weeds and mold.”

  daughter

  Because I want the world for my daughter, and I do mean the world, I have my most corrupt thought of the year. It’s time for the fall parent-teacher meetings at her predominantly white high school, and I think, if her white father goes on his own, her teachers’ unconscious racial bias won’t be triggered by me to land on her. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

  Eleven people have just been shot in a synagogue by a white terrorist. “You will not replace us, Jews will not replace us” was the chant that filled the streets in Charlottesville two summers before. “Very fine people on both sides” was how the nationalist-identified president saw it. Two black people have been shot in Kroger’s after a white nationalist can’t get inside a black church. Black church after black church is being burned down, this after nine people were gunned down in Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by a white supremacist described as having “sad eyes,” pipe bombs have been mailed by a domestic terrorist to the offices of major media and Democratic political figures, and, and, and. After a flurry of hate mail, an alarm system has just been installed at my home that both reassures me and makes me feel like I live in a fort inside a civil war. A friend who has dropped by just as the mailperson arrives tells me not to open the packages inside the house. Because I want this world for my daughter?

  Another white friend tells me she has to defend me all the time to her white friends who think I’m a radical. Why? For calling white people white? For not wanting unarmed black people to be gunned down in our streets or black girls to be flung across classrooms and thrown to the ground by officers? (Most, so far, by white men in the documented cases.) What does that even mean? I ask her. Don’t defend me. Not for being human. Not for wanting others to be able to just live their lives. Not for wanting us to simply be able to live.

  The desire to stay home from the parent-teacher conference makes a kind of sense even as the thought unsettles me, begins me stumbling around in my head, but either way, it couldn’t prevent me from going to meet my daughter’s teachers. As we step into the gymnasium at the school, my white husband mentions he doesn’t see any teachers of color. Since I haven’t shared my version of this thought with him, his anxiety might or might not have anything to do with me.

  “ANYONE TELLING ANYTHING IS TELLING THAT THING,” states the Eve Fowler print hanging in our home. It’s there as a reminder. What thing is my husband telling? If he stayed with his articulated thought long enough, would he end up in the same fucked-up place with me staying at home so I don’t trigger the white teachers’ racial bias? Would he wish me to leave because I am under-represented? Is he feeling overrepresented? What is that feeling? Is he flooded by his own whiteness? Or is he simply in solution mode? Whatever the case, he’s also having feelings. Is he feeling anxious about the world or this particular place? Both?

  Oh God. We count only two black teachers. Our daughter is in neither of their classes. We know our daughter loves her classes and speaks highly of her teachers. OK. OK. As we sit across from her white teachers, I smile and nod but really only want to ask them if they actively think about their unconscious inevitable racism and implicit bias, which is unavoidable given our world, the very world I want for my daughter.1 It’s a mouthful. I could choke on it.

  Each of her teachers wishes to know if we have any questions. Only one question lives and breathes between us. Only one question pulls at me like a child wanting my attention. Reassure me. Do it. Come on. Do it. Knowing that the DNA of whiteness includes defending itself from my knowledge of our shared history to the point of becoming ahistorical and framing everything economically or universally as if that erases racism, what would, what could they say? I know I am white and your daughter is of mixed race and you are black. If we started there, then what? I know and sometimes I think … What do you think? More importantly, what do you think when you are not thinking?

  Looking around, I wonder about all the white parents surrounding me. Are any of them anxious that these white teachers are overrepresenting the race of their child and therefore affirming white dominance and white hierarchical thinking? Are any concerned that these white teachers, with their overwhelming representation of whiteness, are confirming the racist structures we are all subject to? What is my aim here?

  I don’t know if my daughter is negotiating the same moments I did as a high school student.2 How could she? She is not me. For all that I have said, for all that she has read, how is it going for her in real time? Why haven’t I warmed up to the systemic structures affirming my own nonworth? What would I need to see? What would I need to feel in order to trust that my daughter will be given the space she needs to just be as she sits in their classrooms?

  What would it take for me to feel somewhat at ease? A group of white parents approaching me and my husband to express anxiety about the lack of diversity among the faculty? A group of faculty approaching us to say we know what this looks like? Maybe I truly want to believe I don’t know the answers since I don’t know the answers. Maybe I want to believe somewhere in this vast gymnasium there is a crack—a crack in my own imaginative possibilities. I want the world for m
y daughter.

  My own high school and college days were peppered with teachers who went out of their way to help me. All of them were white in the private and Catholic schools I attended. It just takes one is the anecdotal logic or the circumstantial luck. But for every teacher I remember who was supportive, I can remember two or three who were socialized not to see me. As a teenager I didn’t take their behavior personally. They were a thing to watch. Even back then, regarding the ones who ignored my hand in the air and for whom I disappeared, I passively understood their disregard or indifference as “white people stuff,” instinctive rather than responsive.

  I ask a white friend with three mixed-race children, now grown, if she’d worried about their treatment at school. She says she really only worried if the teacher would “get” her child. “Does the teacher understand my particular child is what I thought about,” she explained. For high school she’d attended Miss Porter’s School for girls, and back then she hadn’t thought about any teacher’s relationship to their whiteness. With her own children, though they are black-identified, she didn’t worry about their schools’ predominantly white staff and student body. Thinking back, she remembers being asked by a teacher, how old were her kids when she adopted them? The thought of a black father did not enter the white teacher’s imagination. Her son remembers another teacher who asked his mom, how can this be your son if he doesn’t have your blond hair? I guess I was naive, she adds as an afterthought.

  This idea of a shared anxiety with other white parents regarding the lack of diversity at my daughter’s school seems an idle thought. I am trying it on though I know many of my white friends are only now grappling with what comes along with their whiteness in the face of a nationalist presidency, the least of which is what it means to have been brought up by white people who were brought up by white people who were brought up by white people who were brought up by slave owners, or not. This is why no one should have been surprised by the District 3 public school debate on the Upper West Side and in South Harlem, where “woke” white parents who are now living in the gentrified district resisted the integration of the public middle schools that are now predominantly white.3 Many white parents were outraged at the thought of making 25 percent of school seats open to children scoring below standards on proficiency tests who qualified for free and reduced-cost lunch, a move that would make the student body more diverse. Their anxiety that their child might no longer have a seat in the school manifested in incredulous rage that was shared with the world by the school principal defending integration. His surprise at their behavior surprises me. What population did he think he was serving?