Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  2. Text It’s no wonder that in the race to whiteness certain Asians and Latinx and black people have been, in my fantasy of them, breathless to distance themselves from blackness.

  Fact Check Maybe. The broader context might complicate this claim. See examples below.

  Notes and Sources Ellen D. Wu’s widely cited history, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, argues that the Asian American assimilation is best understood as a process inseparable from a white supremacist social structure rather than a product of Asian American desire alone: “Before the 1940s and 1950s, whites had deemed ethnic Japanese and Chinese unassimilable aliens unfit for membership in the nation. Americans had subjected so-called Orientals to the regime of Asiatic Exclusion, marking them as definitively not-white, and systematically shutting them out of civic participation through such measures as bars to naturalization, occupational discrimination, and residential segregation. Beginning in World War II, however, the United States’ geopolitical ambitions triggered seismic changes in popular notions of nationhood and belonging…. By the mid-1960s … a new stereotype of Asian Americans as the model minority [had been invented]—a racial group distinct from the white majority, but lauded as well assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically nonthreatening, and definitively not-black.” See also her Washington Post interview: “The model minority myth as we see it today was mainly an unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asian Americans to be accepted and recognized as human beings.”

  A 2016 Pew Research study, How U.S. Afro-Latinos Report Their Race, found that only 18 percent of self-identified Afro-Latinos also identify as black.

  See also Allyson Hobbs’s book The Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

  3. Text Though assimilation into whiteness is very possible for some who identify as Latinx, many who self-identify as white are not treated or seen as white.

  Notes and Sources In her book Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race, Wendy Roth analyzes the ways Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants assimilate into the US racial social structure based on their skin color. She argues, “The racial strategies that these migrants adopt—assimilation, code switching, and situational passing—are ultimately private solutions for dealing with racial barriers. They allow some light-skinned Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to step across the color line either momentarily or permanently, but they leave that color line in place behind them. Those with medium and dark skin are unable to cross into Whiteness, even momentarily. While adopting the cultural behavior of the dominant White group may improve their socioeconomic opportunities, they remain racialized as Latinos—a classification that brings some advantages in terms of affirmative-action considerations, but also many barriers. The private solutions associated with racial strategies may be helpful to some individuals, but public solutions are what break down racial barriers for all.”

  4. Text Indigenous communities from places such as Mexico and the Central American countries are hardly accounted for.

  Notes and Sources The United States census forces those with Latinx indigenous identity into a race/ethnicity framework that is not necessarily relevant to their lived experience. A New York Times article, “Hispanics Identifying Themselves as Indians,” by Geoffrey Decker, although dated, gives a good overview of the constraints that Latinx of indigenous origin face when filling out the American census form: “The American Indian totals are still a small fraction of the overall Hispanic population of the United States, which eclipsed 50 million this year. But the blip in the census data represents raised awareness among native Latinos who believe their heritage stretches farther back than the nationalities available on the census form.”

  5. Text With only 18 percent of Afro-Latinx people identifying as black, many Latinx don’t see themselves in either American whiteness or American blackness because they have cultures with specific histories and historical figures who aren’t included in the American narrative.

  Notes and Sources See Pew data below.

  See also “Socially Desirable Reporting and the Expression of Biological Concepts of Race” by Ann Morning, Hanna Brückner, and Alondra Nelson, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.

  6. Notes and Sources Elizabeth Martínez, in discussion with Angela Y. Davis, “Coalition Building among People of Color,” University of California-Santa Cruz Center for Cultural Studies: “There are various forms of working together. A coalition is one, a network is another, an alliance is yet another. And they are not the same; some of them are short-term, and some are long-term. A network is not the same as a coalition. A network is a more permanent, ongoing thing. I think you have to look at what the demands are, and ask: What kind of coming together do we need to win these demands? And if you know the administration will pick your groups off one by one, then the largest umbrella you can possibly get is probably the best one. Some of the answers to your question are tactical and depend upon the circumstances. But the general idea is no competition of hierarchies should prevail. No ‘Oppression Olympics’!”

  boys will be boys

  The gate agent announces we are ready to board. A man looks around. A woman comes running. She gets in line behind the man who has been tracking her. He seems to see only her as he asks sharply, “Are you stupid?”

  The word “stupid” performs a rhetorical abuse that brings all surrounding eyes to the couple. Between them the word is absorbed without so much as a glance. They’re both white and the woman is out of a Ralph Lauren ad: dyed blond hair, Gucci loafers, capri pants, a sweater set. The clothes are meant to signal race through class. We have seen versions of this woman many times before even as the “timeless” appears dated. The man is over six feet tall and well groomed in khakis, which were originally associated with middle-class white suburbia of the 1950s.1 He can be read as middle to upper class, but who knows?

  The woman’s lack of response to the man’s question might be a form of protection for either herself or the man. Maybe she doesn’t want to call attention to an unfortunate if ordinary moment between them. Maybe the question seems a minor infraction given what else remains possible. Maybe she agrees with his assessment of her behavior. It’s anyone’s guess.

  Standing behind this couple is another white woman. This woman throws the man a look that earns his attention. Those of us watching see her do it; we see him respond. He says something inaudible to her. She, like the man’s partner, doesn’t respond.

  I’m still questioning what I heard as I settle in my seat. I fell into the moment and turned to the couple only after hearing the man’s tone of voice. Weirdly, I’m casting around for words that rhyme with stupid. Cupid. Suited. Polluted. Excluded. Just then the woman with the expressive eyes walks by. I ask her if the man actually said, “Are you stupid?” Oh, yes, he did, she answers before moving on. We are all headed to the Southwest. The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings dominate the national conversation and psyche.

  Normally, I would never say a particular white man stands in for white men, because I know better. I have watched white people reduce black people not to a single black person but to a single imagined black person, imagined animal, imagined thing, imagined ignoramus, imagined depravity, imagined criminality, imagined aggressor, superpredator, imagined whore, imagined poverty queen, imagined baby maker, imagined inferior being in need of everything belonging to white people including air and water while stealing everything belonging to white people including air and water and on and on toward an imagined no one.2 All this wouldn’t matter if this same category of white people weren’t strategizing tests, writing exams, grading exams, funding schools, granting bank loans, selling property, making laws, suppressing voters, determining sentences, evaluating pain, teaching classes, creating and perpetuating master narratives, hiring, firing, demoting, killing imagined me.3

  Institutional whiteness has stereotyped blackness and used this particular image to murder by. Given that process, if systemic
change is what is wanted, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as the poet Audre Lorde took the time to tell us. Consequently, I am vigilant that this white man not stand in for white men. I am trying to keep him as someone singular whom I have not encountered in this iteration of my nonspaces in a long while. Were it not for our president, Supreme Court justice Kavanaugh, and the #Me Too movement, I might not, even associatively, be wary of attaching this abusive language to patterns demonstrated by those representing institutional power; but such is the moment.

  Are you stupid? It’s not a question I’m used to hearing from grown people directed at other grown people—at least not in the publics I inhabit. All of us, standing around this man, were being asked to hold and normalize the abuse being hurled at this particular white woman by this particular white man. During the four-hour flight, despite my best efforts my mind toggles between Kavanaugh and the man. I think of synonyms for the word stupid, like the word idiot.

  The Greek term idiōtēs means “private person, layman, ignorant person,” from idios, meaning “own, private.” I’m thinking maybe the couple felt their interaction was private, though they were in public. On some level this seems true for all conversations in public spaces.

  Over the intercom system one flight attendent asks if there is a doctor on the flight. Someone is sick in a seat toward the back of the plane. A doctor rushes by with an oxygen mask and a blood pressure strap. Whatever happens happens behind me. I’m watching the flight attendent’s face to monitor her concern. She continues offering drinks and joking with the passengers. From her perspective, whatever is happening is not dire. She can hold it without modifying her routine.

  When we land in Phoenix, we are asked to stay seated until the passenger who fell ill leaves the plane. The EMTs board and exit almost immediately with the white woman who gave the man the look. She walks through the opened door, but not before pausing to say to me, “This is embarrassing.” “Just take care,” I say, though I can’t help but wonder if she’s OK. I want to know what the white man said to her. Watching her exit, I wonder if her encounter with him is tied to her illness. Something became unbearable. Is coincidence a thing? How did he respond to her? I will never know.

  As soon as I deplane, I phone a white female friend who was at the Capitol supporting Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of abusive behavior, the woman who said in her testimony, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter … at my expense.” Why does that detail come back to me? I don’t know. Something feels lost … something with a beating heart.

  My friend answers her cell with the first question: Are you okay? Me, I’m fine, I say before telling her about the couple and the woman on the plane. I ask if women are less tolerant of abusive behavior by men in our current political climate. She says many women at the protest were wearing “WOMEN FOR KAVANAUGH” T-shirts. Sometimes they had signs calling for “Due Process” and “Protect Our Sons.” She tells me that in televised interview after interview women and mothers are saying, “Boys will be boys.”

  How their sons have morphed into Kavanaugh defies a certain logic but, whatever. Don’t they have daughters? I ask. Don’t they matter? I ask these questions even as I know that what matters is the wealth, power, and access that proximity affords, whether actual or aspirational, in the office or at the altar. Not to mention—whose boys get to be boys?4 I begin to think isn’t this too simple even as I know on a certain level the apparent simplicity of it is what keeps the power dynamics in place, and whiteness in power.

  NOTES

  1. Text They’re both white and the woman is out of a Ralph Lauren ad: dyed blond hair, Gucci loafers, capri pants, a sweater set. The clothes are meant to signal race through class. We have seen versions of this woman many times before even as the “timeless” appears dated. The man is over six feet tall and well groomed in khakis…

  Notes and Sources Tom Reichert and Tray LaCaze analyzed 237 Ralph Lauren ads in GQ from January 1980 to December 2000, coding them as “country club” if they depicted “scenes and models that exhibited an association with wealth, influence, and luxury featuring models shown in upscale dress or clean-cut appearances participating or observing polo, yachting, sailing, equestrian activities, and formal functions.” There is ample evidence that Ralph Lauren’s class politics were central to the brand in its conception (see also Ralph Lauren, a book-length history in Lauren’s own words). Classic advertisements that speak to Ralph Lauren’s role in shaping the image of upper-class style in the United States include the advertisements for a nouveau riche revival of the Hamptons in the 1980s and an ad campaign for the scent “Safari” set in what one author calls vaguely imperial settings.

  From G. Bruce Boyer’s 1987 New York Times article, “Khaki”: “Outside of India, the first troops officially to adopt khaki (from the Hindi word khak, meaning ‘dust-colored’) were the 74th Foot, a Scottish regiment that wore khaki tunics with their tartan trousers during the South African Kaffir War (1851-53)…. Khaki also owes its civilian uses to soldiers: After World War II, veterans returning to college brought their khakis to campus…. Combined with penny loafers, an oxford button-down shirt and a crew-neck sweater, khakis achieved a certain style…. By the advent of the Ivy League styles of the 1950’s, khaki was a standard color for everything from dress shirts and ties to watchbands, buckskin shoes and surcingle belts.”

  2. Text I have watched white people reduce black people not to a single black person but to a single imagined black person…

  Notes and Sources In 1996, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “superpredator” in a speech. A year earlier, the academic John J. Dilulio wrote an article (“rant” may be a more accurate phrase) using the term in the Weekly Standard, predicting, along with other commenters, a massive increase in juvenile crime (interestingly, Dilulio describes going to the White House and speaking with President Clinton in the essay). He developed the superpredator idea into a theory in the book Body Count: Moral Poverty—and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs. Soon after these incidents, criminal sentencing laws for juvenile crime became much harsher throughout the country. According to the New York Times, the concept of superpredator “energized a movement, as one state after another enacted laws making it possible to try children as young as 13 or 14 as adults…. Many hundreds of juveniles were sent to prison for life.” For a more recent analysis of this kind of logic see Alex Vitale’s New York Times article, “The New ‘Superpredator’ Myth.” See also the congressional hearing in the mid-’90s in which Dilulio is testifying on the prison system to, among others, Senator Biden.

  3. Text All this wouldn’t matter if this same category of white people weren’t grading tests, funding schools, granting bank loans…

  Notes and Sources Most American teachers are white. According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ data for 2015-2016, 81 percent of public school teachers and 71 percent of public charter school teachers are white at the primary and secondary levels. At the postsecondary level, the most recent available government data are that 76 percent of full-time faculty whose race is known are white. On funding schools, see the work of Nikole Hannah Jones, including “Segregation Now” for ProPublica, “The Resegregation of Jefferson County” for the New York Times, and “The Problem We All Live With” on This American Life. On making bank loans: According to 2018 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, credit counselors and loan officers are 85.5% white. On hiring, firing, and demoting: A 2006 study by the Institute of Research on Labor and Employment found that having a white manager rather than a black one decreased the chance a black employee would be promoted and increased the chance he or she would be fired: “This study analyzes panel data from a large national retailer with hundreds of stores located throughout the United States. The dataset contains the firm’s daily personnel records on more than 1,500 store managers and more than 100,000 employees for a 30-month period from 1996 to 1998.�
�� On killing: Recent examples of white people who have killed black people and described their victims in nonhuman terms include Darren Wilson, who said, referring to Michael Brown, “When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan…. And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”

  4. Text Not to mention—whose boys get to be boys?

  Notes and Sources The US Government Accountability Office published Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities in 2018. According to the GAO’s analysis, in the 2013-14 school year, “black students accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school.” The Sentencing Project reported that “in 2001, black children were four times more likely to be incarcerated than white children.” But in 2015, black children were five times more likely than white children to be incarcerated. According to a report by the National Association of Social Workers, The Color of Juvenile Transfer, “Black youth are approximately 14% of the total youth population, but 47.3% of the youth who are transferred to adult court by juvenile court judges who believe the youth cannot benefit from the services of their court. Black youth are 53.1% of youth transferred for person offenses despite the fact that black and white youth make up an equal percentage of youth charged with person offenses, 40.1% and 40.5% respectively, in 2015.” A 2014 study by five psychologists, The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children, found “converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children.” Individual high-profile cases of boys being violently accosted or arrested for no cause include: