Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  How did these guys find each other? Did one of them use the N-word at an all-white gathering and watch to see who laughed and who turned away? And then they spent time planning an act whose sole goal was to deeply offend fellow students? And maybe I was sitting in a class with one of these guys the next day. And right now, they are walking around, doing things with their kids, going to work. Do they look back with regret at doing that, now that they are older and wiser, or do they still relish that racist act? Are they cheering on the white nationalist movement?

  The next week there was a march on campus to protest the cross burning. I actually think the administration was very disturbed by the crime and handled it well. But it still remained that there were students on campus who spent time and effort planning a cross burning.

  As I read my friend’s response, I wonder if she really wonders if the perpetrators “look back with regret.” This idea that racism is solely a dynamic of youth and ignorance seems its own form of American optimism.4 She wonders if they are “cheering on the white nationalist movement” rather than if they are white nationalists.

  I am surprised at my own melancholic reactions to these final thoughts of hers. This unwillingness to know how deep-seated and deeply felt racism remains is strangely disheartening and distantly alarming. Even here. Even her. I don’t want these thoughts to intrude on a friendship I value. Even here. Even her. Then I recall Homi Bhabha from The Location of Culture, in conversation with Toni Morrison: “Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.” Her unwillingness to entertain the notion that the cross burners are the white nationalists of the present is a way not to see “the trauma of the present” as in a continuum from the past into the future. According to the police reports from the cross burning, former students were persons of interest. What are they doing now? Are they now part of our justice system?

  My friend is not alone in her willingness to give the men a pass. The FBI investigation of the college event concluded that the cross burning had probably been a prank, according to a press report at the time. In any case, whoever burned the cross or whoever was inspired by those that burned the cross continued to harass students connected to the Black Student Union for weeks after the event. According to police records, there were reports of threats generated by someone who was probably inside the college community (given that specific black students were targeted as well as the white president, who was seen as having brought them there). One student received a letter that stated, “You God damned stinkin’, Filthy, black skinned Monkies do Not belong among a white human society. You shit colored Animals will eventually be phased out. In plain English—Eliminated.”

  The question of what to do with these realities when many black people, graduating from this and other schools with similar occurrences, go on to achieve successful lives, at times coupled with economic wealth, remains for some an oxymoron. Understanding what is possible on the part of liberal whites means understanding that black personal achievement does not negate the continued assault of white terrorism. When Hillary Clinton refused to pull out of the 2008 Democratic primary despite no apparent way forward, because as she said “we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June [1968] in California,” she was in fact pointing to the unspoken reality that President Obama’s achievements did not safeguard him from white terrorism. Though all should have been appalled at Clinton’s utterance because, intended or not, it seemed “a wing and a prayer,” she was not un-American in signaling the possibility. Murdered, assassinated, incarcerated, or abandoned black people are an acceptable loss for many white Americans.5 And though more blacks are killed in neighborhood crimes, those killed or incarcerated by whites often seem targeted simply because of the color of their skin, since the outcome of those interactions often results in anything from over-sentencing to death. The indifference is impenetrable and reliable and distributed across centuries, and I am stupidly hurt when my friends can’t see that. Perhaps that’s my nonwhite fragility.

  NOTES

  1. Text Could our closeness in college be attributed in part to an understanding of what remains possible given our history?

  Notes and Sources The photograph is of the 1925 Klan march in Washington. The Washington Post offered two retrospectives in 1982 and 2018. The Klan apparently attempted to reproduce the march a number of times, including in 1982. A few details about the original march from the 1982 retrospective: “According to The Post articles, the largest state delegations came not from the South but from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Acting Police Supt. Charles A. Evans … estimated the crowd at between 30,000 and 35,000.” (Higher estimates noted; see the Atlantic article cited below.) “The Klansmen came by more than 18 special trains…. The rhetoric of the parade, according to the pictures and news accounts of the time, was focused primarily not on race but on ‘Americanism’ and the cultural fears of a people who saw themselves imperiled by immigration…. Anti-Catholic sentiment was particularly high.”

  See also Joshua Rothman, “When Bigotry Paraded through the Streets,” the Atlantic: “On August 8, 1925, more than 50,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan paraded through Washington, DC.”

  2. Text I wonder if white people don’t develop friendships with people of color, especially blacks, because they don’t want to be implicated in or confronted by white violence against black people. Imagine going to a black friend’s house and sitting down to dinner with a tall glass of lead-tainted water.

  Fact Check Maybe.

  Notes and Sources In 2017 a state agency called the Michigan Commission on Civil Rights concluded that systemic racism played a key role in crisis and its subsequent poor management: “The people of Flint have been subjected to unprecedented harm and hardship, much of it caused by structural and systemic discrimination and racism that have corroded your city, your institutions, and your water pipes, for generations.”

  A recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Inequality in Consumption of Goods and Services Adds to Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure,” found that black people and nonwhite Hispanics disproportionately breathe air polluted by non-Hispanic white people: “Blacks are more exposed than whites/others to pollution from every emitter group. The same holds for Hispanics, with the exceptions of PM2.5 originating from agriculture, from coal electric utilities, and from residential wood combustion, for which they are exposed to 11%, 40%, and 14% less, respectively, than whites/others. Those three types of emissions are concentrated in regions of the United States with relatively low Hispanic populations. Whites/others consume more—and cause more exposure—than blacks and Hispanics across all seven end-use categories” (Christopher W. Tessum et al.).

  3. Text I’m sure it was far more upsetting to the black students.

  Notes and Sources The “Unite the Right” march was organized in response to the growing calls to remove the Confederate statue in the town. That statue was put up in the city of Charlottesville in 1924 (a year before the Klan march in Washington). In February 2016, the city voted to remove it from Lee Park and rename the park. They were sued by organizations called the “Monument Fund” and the “Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans,” among others. The “Unite the Right” rally was held on August 12, 2017, in response to the statue’s planned removal.

  4. Text This idea that racism is solely a dynamic of youth and ignorance seems its own form of American optimism.

  Notes and Sources The GQ profile by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on Dylann Roof describes his online community: “They are young, they are white, and they often brag about their arsenals of guns, because these are the guns that will save them in the coming race war. They are armed to the teeth, and almost always painfully undereducated or somewhat educated but extremely socially awkward. That is, until their eyes are opened to the fact that within the world of white supremacy they can
find friends.”

  5. Text Though all should have been appalled at Clinton’s utterance because, intended or not, it seemed “a wing and a prayer,” she was not un-American in signaling the possibility. Murdered, assassinated, incarcerated, or abandoned black people are an acceptable loss for many white Americans.

  Notes and Sources Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: “I was raised in a society that taught me that there was no loss in the absence of people of color—that their absence was a good and desirable thing to be sought and maintained—while simultaneously denying the fact. This attitude has shaped every aspect of my self-identity; my interests and investments, what I care about or don’t care about, what I see or don’t see, what I am drawn to and what I am repelled by, what I can take for granted, where I can go, how others respond to me, and what I can ignore.”

  James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: “A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State…. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob. It is not a spontaneous idea. It does not come from the people, who knew better … this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of Property was more important—more real—than the possibilities of the human being.”

  study on white male privilege

  I am attempting to understand why telling a white male that he has benefited from “white male privilege” feels abusive to him. I listen again to the video from a training seminar where police are discussing the treatment of transgender people. The discussion is led by a US Department of Justice representative. The statistic that leads up to the phrase “white male privilege” being uttered noted the percentage of transgender people likely to be victims of police violence.1

  DATA

  PLAINFIELD, INDIANA, POLICE CAPTAIN SCOTT ARNDT (responding to statistics of violence against trans people presented by instructor): That’s not even accurate, because if you can’t have a basis for where the number comes from or what the situation is that puts them in that situation—I mean, are they more likely to be in this situation than somebody who’s not transgender?

  INSTRUCTOR: Yes.

  CAPT. SCOTT ARNDT (interrupting): Which I don’t know what that is—I’m just saying my life has never been part of police violence. Most of the people that I know have never been—accused the police of violence. So I guess I don’t get where that statistic comes from.

  PLAINFIELD POLICE CAPTAIN CARRI WEBER (from audience, off camera): ’Cause of your white male privilege, so you wouldn’t know.

  CAPT. SCOTT ARNDT: I’m sorry?

  CAPT. WEBER: Your white male privilege.

  INSTRUCTOR: Let’s bring it down a notch.

  FACILITATOR: Let’s keep it safe and professional. That’s my [he is interrupted here and then continues] role and I don’t want to focus on the statistics, because quite frankly—

  CAPT. SCOTT ARNDT (interrupting): Chief, you gonna let [unintelligible] get away with that? Seriously? I’m asking a legitimate question here, and I’m getting [unintelligible] white privilege? Are you serious? [yelling] I find that extremely offensive.

  [There is an additional back-and-forth between these two comments.]

  FACILITATOR: We’re not talking about white privilege here. We’re trying to focus on a different demographic. I’m gonna keep this professional, and I apologize if anyone is offended.

  END OF DATA

  RESULTS

  In the Scott Arndt video of the actual incident, Arndt states that he heard the phrase “white male privilege” as “extremely offensive.” In the complaint he filed, he states that he was “racially and sexistly slurred.” The white female police captain Weber, who used the phrase, was put on paid administrative leave. A closed executive session ultimately issued her a letter of reprimand and reinstated her.

  When the white male officer hears the phrase “white male privilege” used to describe him, he demonstrates white male rage. He was punished with a two-day suspension without pay. Though the rage is questioned, no one explicitly associates it with white male privilege; hence the letter of reprimand in Weber’s file. Surely, Arndt must understand himself as white and male, so perhaps it’s the noun “privilege” that enrages him? But a “racial slur” means you refer to his whiteness in an offensive way. The association of whiteness with privilege therefore must offend.

  Does he know that privilege, a word first used in the twelfth century, referred to a “bill of law in favor of or against an individual”? That the laws favor him as a white male must remain a known unknown. He cannot bear to know it and know that he accommodates and makes visible all that has been redirected toward him. He cannot bear the burden of what was taken to be given to him. He cannot know himself as the embodied space of privilege even as he becomes its evidence. He will not know himself as the favored even as he destroys others in order not to know. Even as person after person lives dependent on him, waiting for him, looking to him to know what he cannot—or is it will not?—know.

  NOTES

  1. Text The statistic that leads up to the phrase “white male privilege” being uttered noted the percentage of transgender people likely to be victims of police violence.

  Notes and Sources A 2011 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force shows: “More than one-fifth (22%) of transgender people who had interacted with police reported police harassment, and 6% of transgender individuals reported that they experienced bias-motivated assault by officers. Black transgender people reported much higher rates of biased harassment and assault (38% and 15%).”

  tall

  On my way to retrieve my coat I’m paused in the hallway in someone else’s home when a man approaches to tell me he thinks his greatest privilege is his height. There’s a politics around who is tallest, and right now he’s passively blocking passage, so yes. But greatest, no. Predictably, I say, I think your whiteness is your greatest privilege. To this, he pivots and reports that, unlike other whites who have confessed to him they are scared of blacks, he is comfortable around black people because he played basketball. He doesn’t say with black men because that’s implied. For no good reason, except perhaps inside the inane logic of if you like something so much, you might as well marry it, I ask him, are you married to a black woman? What? He says, no, she’s Jewish. After a pause, he adds, she’s white. I don’t ask him about his closest friends, his colleagues, his neighbors, his wife’s friends, his institutions, our institutions, structural racism, weaponized racism, ignorant racism, internalized racism, unconscious bias—I just decide, since nothing keeps happening, no new social interaction, no new utterances from me or him, both of us in default fantasies, I just decide to stop tilting my head to look up. I have again reached the end of waiting. What is it the theorist Saidiya Hartman said? “Educating white people about racism has failed.” Or, was it that “hallways are liminal zones where we shouldn’t fail to see what’s possible.” Either way, and still, all the way home, the tall man’s image stands before me, ineluctable. And then the Hartman quote I am searching for arrives: “One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense for black folk. How does one narrate that?” Her question is the hoop that encircles.

  social contract

  I’m at a dinner where the “whys and wherefores” of the 2016 presidential election come up, because they do, and one guest, it turns out, is writing a book. In the description of the book the role of racism is barely mentioned. Hold up. It’s my belief antiblack and anti-Latinx racism couched in the terms “Obamacare” and “immigration” and “the wall”1 was the mighty engine that brought our current president to power, the very president who refers to hims
elf as a nationalist.2 The generic and deracialized “many factors” are the rhetorical tide I swim upstream against, as if George Wallace hadn’t attributed his political success to the articulation of racist rhetoric.3 Despite his declared neutral feelings about black people, Wallace ran on “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and promised to protect the Anglo-Saxon Southland. What exactly has changed?

  There was no way to predict that white Democrats who had voted for President Obama would vote in key states for a fascist regime, is the persistent retort. Our resident expert added that he didn’t have a crystal ball, as if unarmed dead black people weren’t lying in our American streets or white people weren’t calling the police on black people without cause, with full knowledge of all the ways that could go wrong and end in the loss of a life. And as if our forty-fifth president before his official run hadn’t been vocal about the lie that voters had been duped by a president who wasn’t born in America.

  My dogged insistence meant I was sailing closer and closer to the trope of the angry black woman. I wasn’t completely right—there were the Russians, the Electoral College, and misogyny—but I needed these people to understand I would rather be wrong, would gladly join them in the perception of an unpredictable world if I could. Perhaps.

  I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room. All kinds of things happen as the night unfolds. But sometimes I become caught by the idea that repetition occurs if the wheels keep spinning. Repetition is insistence and one can collude only so much. Sometimes I just want to throw myself inside the gears. Sometimes, as James Baldwin said, I want to change one word or a single sentence. It’s harder than you would think because white people don’t really want change if it means they need to think differently than they do about who they are.4 We have a precedent in Eartha Kitt, who after confronting Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam at a luncheon at the White House was blacklisted. Democrats all. Whiteness wants the kind of progress that reflects what it values, a reflection of itself. Voter suppression is about racism; immigration issues and DACA are informed by racism. I am saying this and I am saying that, and, as if I have suddenly become too much, a metaphorical white hand reaches out to pull me back into the fold from the perilous edge of angry black womanhood.