by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
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I read several hundred pages of Little House on the Prairie to my five-year-old son one day last winter when he was home sick from school. Near the end of the book, when the Ingalls family is reckoning with the fact that they built their little house illegally on Indian territory, and just after an alliance between tribes has been broken by a disagreement over whether to attack the settlers, Laura watches the Osage abandoning their annual buffalo hunt and leaving Kansas. Her family will leave, too. At this point, my son asked me to stop reading. “Is it too sad?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just don’t need to know any more.” After a few moments of silence, he added, “I wish I was French.”
The Indians in Little House are French speaking, so I understood that my son was saying he wanted to be an Indian. “I wish all that didn’t happen,” he said. And then, “But I want to stay here—I love this place. I don’t want to leave.” He began to cry, and I realized that when I told him Little House was about the place where we live, meaning the Midwest, he thought I meant it was about the town where we live and the house we had just bought. Our house is not that little house, but we do live on the wrong side of what used to be an Indian boundary negotiated by a treaty that was undone after the 1830 Indian Removal Act. We live in Evanston, Illinois, named after John Evans, who founded the university where I teach and defended the Sand Creek massacre as necessary to the settling of the West. What my son was expressing—that he wants the comfort of what he has but that he is uncomfortable with how he came to have it—is one of the conundrums of whiteness.
“Tell me again about the liar who lied about a lie,” my son said recently. It took me a moment to register that he meant Rachel Dolezal. He had heard me talking about her with Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White. I had said, “She might be a liar, but she’s a liar who lied about a lie. The original fraud was not hers.” Because I was talking to Noel, who sent me to James Baldwin’s essay “On Being White . . . And Other Lies” when I was in college, I didn’t have to clarify that the lie I was referring to was the idea that there is any such thing as a Caucasian race. Dolezal’s parents had insisted to reporters that she was “Caucasian” by birth, though she is not from the Caucasus region of Europe, meaning contemporary Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Outside of that context, the term Caucasian is a flimsy and fairly meaningless product of the eighteenth-century pseudoscience that helped invent a white race.
Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. “There is, in fact, no white community,” as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.
When he was four, my son brought home a library book about the slaves who built the White House. I didn’t tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “the down payment” on this country’s independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, “this country’s second mortgage.” Nonetheless, my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited. “I don’t want to be on this team,” he said, with his head in his hands. “You might be stuck on this team,” I told him, “but you don’t have to play by its rules.”
Even as I said this, I knew that he would be encouraged, at every juncture in his life, to believe wholeheartedly in the power of his own hard work and deservedness, to ignore inequity, to accept that his sense of security mattered more than other people’s freedom, and to agree, against all evidence, that a system that afforded him better housing, better education, better work, and better pay than other people was inherently fair.
My son’s first week in kindergarten was devoted entirely to learning rules. At his school, obedience is rewarded with fake money that can be used, at the end of the week, to buy worthless toys that break immediately. “Welcome to capitalism,” I thought when I learned of this system, which produced, that week, a yo-yo that remained stuck at the bottom of its string. The principal asked all the parents to submit a signed form acknowledging that they had discussed the Code of Conduct with their children, but I didn’t sign the form. Instead, my son and I discussed the civil rights movement and I reminded him that not all rules are good rules and that unjust rules must be broken. This was, I now see, a somewhat unhinged response to the first week of kindergarten. I know that schools need rules, and I, myself, am a teacher who makes rules, but I still want my son to know the difference between compliance and complicity.
For me, whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem. Becoming black is not the answer to the problem of whiteness, though I sympathize with the impulse, as does Noel. “Imagine the loneliness of those who, born to a group they regard as unjust and oppressive and not wanting to be part of that group, are left on their own to figure their way out,” Noel wrote recently in his own narrative of “Passing,” the story of how he left a lower-middle-class family and a college education to work in factories for the next twenty-three years.
I met Noel after he left the factories for Harvard, when he was the editor, with John Garvey, of a journal called Race Traitor. In it, I read about groups of volunteers who worked in shifts using video cameras to record police misconduct in their cities. I read about the school board member who challenged the selection practices that had produced, in a district where only 22 percent of the students were white, a gifted program where 81 percent of the students were white. Race Traitor articulated for me the possibility that a person who looks white can refuse to act white, meaning refuse to collude with the injustices of the law enforcement system and the educational system, among other things. This is what Noel called “new abolitionism.” John Brown was his model and the institution he was intent on abolishing was whiteness.
It was because I read Race Traitor in my twenties that I stopped, in my thirties, when I saw a black man being handcuffed by his car on an empty stretch of road next to a cemetery in Chicago. I was carrying my son, who was two, on the back of my bicycle. “What do you want?” the police officer yelled at me, already irritated, as soon as I stopped. “I’m just watching,” I said. “Just being a witness.” I didn’t yet own a phone that could record video. He took a few threatening steps toward me, yelling about what the fuck I thought I would do differently in his situation if I was so fucking smart. My son was scared and began to cry. The officer kept barking at me. When my son broke into a loud wail, I memorized the number on the back of the police van and left. I now wonder what I was going to do with that number—report the police to the police? By the time I got back to my apartment my hands were still shaking, I had forgotten the number, and I was dismayed with myself.
Refusing to collude in injustice is, I’ve found, easier said than done. Collusion is written onto our way of life, and nearly every interaction between white people is an invitation to collusion. Being white is easy, in that nobody is expected to think about being white, but this is exactly what makes me uneasy about it. Without thinking, I would say that believing I am white doesn’t cost me anything, that it’s pure profit, but I suspect that isn’t true. I suspect whiteness is costing me, as Baldwin would say, my moral life.
And whiteness is costing me my community. It is the wedge driven between me and my neighbors, between me and other mothers, between me and other workers. I know there’s more, too—I have written and erased a hundred sentences here, trying and failing to articulate something that I can sense but not yet speak. Like a bad loan, the kind in which the payments increase over time, the price of whiteness re
mains hidden behind its promises.
“Her choice to give up whiteness was a privilege,” Michael Jeffries wrote of Dolezal in the Boston Globe. “If giving up whiteness is a privilege,” Noel quipped to me, “what do you call hanging on to it?” As Dolezal surrendered her position in the NAACP and lost her teaching job, I thought of the white police officers who had killed unarmed black men and kept their jobs. That the penalty for disowning whiteness appears to be more severe than the penalty for killing a black person says something about what our culture holds dear.
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The moral concept of Schuld (“guilt”), Nietzsche observes, “descends from the very material concept of Schulden (‘debts’).” Material debt predates moral debt. The point he is making is that guilt has its source not in some innate sense of justice, not in God, but in something as base as commerce. Nietzsche has the kind of disdain for guilt that many people now reserve for “white guilt” in particular.
Even before I started reading Nietzsche, I had the uncomfortable suspicion that my good life, my house and my garden and the “good” public school my son attends, might not be entirely good. Even as I painted my walls and planted my tomatoes and attended parent-teacher conferences last year, I was pestered by the possibility that all this was built on a bedrock of evil, and that evil was running through our groundwater. But I didn’t think in exactly those terms because the word evil is not usually part of my vocabulary—I picked it up from Nietzsche.
Evil is how slaves describe their masters. In Nietzsche’s telling, Roman nobles called their way of life good, while their Jewish slaves called the same way of life evil. The invention of the concept of evil was, according to Nietzsche, a kind of power grab. It was an attempt by the powerless to undermine the powerful. More power to them, I think. But Nietzsche and I disagree on this, among other things. Like many white people, he regards guilt as a means of manipulation, a killjoy. Those who resent the powerful, he writes, use guilt to undermine their power and rob them of their pleasure in life. And this, I believe, is what makes guilt potentially redemptive.
Guilt is what makes a good life built on evil no longer good. I have a memory of the writer Sherman Alexie cautioning me against this way of thinking. I remember him saying something like, “White people do crazy shit when they feel guilty.” That I can’t dispute. Guilty white people try to save other people who don’t want or need to be saved, they make grandiose empty gestures, they sling blame, they police the speech of other white people, and they dedicate themselves to the fruitless project of their own exoneration. But I’m not sure any of that is worse than the crazy shit white people do in denial. Especially when that denial depends on a constant erasure of both the past and the present.
Once you’ve been living in a house for a while, you tend to begin to believe that it’s yours even though you don’t own it yet. When those of us who are convinced of our own whiteness deny our debt, this may be the inevitable result of having lived for so long in a house bought on credit but never paid off. We ourselves have never owned slaves, we insist, and we never say nigger. “It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill,” Coates writes, “and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear.”
A guilty white person is usually imagined as someone made impotent by guilt, someone rendered powerless. But why not imagine guilt as a prod, a goad, as an impetus to action? Isn’t guilt an essential cog in the machinery of the conscience? When I search back through my correspondence with Sherman Alexie, I can’t find him saying anything about white people doing crazy shit, but I do find him insisting that we can’t afford to disempower white people because we need them to empower the rest of us. White people, he proposes, have the political power to make change exactly because they are white.
I once feared buying a house because I didn’t want to be owned. I had saved money with no purpose in mind other than the freedom to do whatever I wanted. Now I’m bound to this house, though I’m still free to lose it if I choose. But that isn’t the version of freedom that interests me at the moment. I’m more compelled by a freedom that would allow me to deserve what I have. Call it liberation, maybe. If debt can be repaid incrementally, resulting eventually in ownership, perhaps so can guilt.
What is the condition of white life? We are moral debtors who act as material creditors. Our banks make bad loans. Our police, like Nietzsche’s creditors, act out their power on black bodies. And, as I see in my own language, we confuse whiteness with ownership—for most of us, the police aren’t “ours” any more than the banks are. When we buy into whiteness, we entertain the delusion that we’re business partners with power, not its minions. And we forget our debt to ourselves.
LEANDER
Joyce Carol Oates
THAT EVENING A lone white woman appeared diffidently at the rear of the small redbrick Hope Baptist Church on Armory Street, Hammond, New York. She took a seat in the last pew, near the center aisle and the front door. No one was near: no one glanced in her direction, at first.
Already there were forty or more people at the front of the church talking together with much animation. Everyone seemed to know everyone else: of course. The lone white woman understood that she was (perhaps) a curiosity to them: not only a white woman in a company of (mostly? entirely?) black- and brown-skinned persons but a woman with a very white skin, a porcelain sort of pallor that suggested recent illness, and stark-white hair to her shoulders, of a length uncommon in women her age. And though this woman was dressed inconspicuously in dark clothing it was evident that her clothes were not inexpensive, and that her manner lacked the ease and camaraderie of whites accustomed to black activist occasions. This white-skinned woman smiled in greeting to anyone who acknowledged her but her smile was overeager, uncertain.
She’d rehearsed the way in which she would identify herself should anyone ask. I am Jessalyn, I am interested in SaveOurLives and would like to help any way that I can. I—
It would be a relief to her, yet a disappointment, when no one approached to ask her name.
Alone in the last pew of the little church the woman listened to a sequence of impassioned speeches from the pulpit. She was shocked, appalled: she’d had no idea that so many unarmed and defenseless individuals in inner-city Hammond, ranging in age from an eight-year-old boy to an eighty-six-year-old woman, had been shot by Hammond police officers within the past decade. So many deaths, so many shootings and woundings, and not a single conviction of any Hammond police officer! In fact, not a single indictment.
Not a single apology from the Hammond Police Department.
The minister of Hope Church spoke, gravely and with dignity. The head of a New York State youth training program spoke, vehemently. A young black lawyer spoke, his voice quavering with emotion. Mothers spoke, holding pictures of their murdered children. Some were tearful and tremulous and some were angry and resolute. Some could barely speak above a whisper and others raised their voices as if keening. Young dark-skinned men and boys had been assaulted by Hammond police in the greatest numbers but no one was exempt from police violence—women, girls, the elderly, and even the disabled—a nineteen-year-old Iraqi war veteran in a wheelchair, shot dead by police officers for seeming to “brandish” a weapon; a twelve-year-old boy Tasered into unconsciousness by police officers for “suspicious behavior”—fleeing a police cruiser that braked to a stop in the street.
Jessalyn listened with mounting despair. She would have liked to add her voice to these voices but she could not bring herself to speak.
Such sorrow in this gathering, she dared not appropriate it as anything of her own. Driving into the inner city, as it’s euphemistically called, exiting the expressway into a neighborhood of old, crumbling brownstones and row houses, driving cautiously along narrow potholed streets lined with derelict vehicles, she’d felt like one descending in a bathosphere, into a twilit world in no way contiguous with her own aff
luent, suburban world at the periphery of the city. (Yes, she’d locked the doors of her car before exiting the expressway. If another had been present she’d have made an embarrassing remark, an awkward excuse—but she would have locked the doors nonetheless.)
Eyes on her were curious, inquisitive; not hostile if not (evidently) friendly. The tall grave minister smiled in her direction but rather stiffly, guardedly. White lady? Why’s she here?
As it turned out there were several white- or very light-skinned individuals at the meeting. One of these was lanky limbed with hair tied back in a slovenly ponytail—for a moment Jessalyn thought this might be someone she knew, a friend of her son’s. (It wasn’t.) Another was a tall gray-mustached man in a Stetson hat, wearing a dark-rose embroidered shirt and a black string tie—gentlemanly, Hispanic, of her approximate age.
But the tall mustached man was involved in an intense conversation with several others and took no notice of the (white) woman at the rear of the church.
A sharp-voiced white woman sporting a mane of ashy-blond hair, in gaudy quiltlike clothes, actually turned to stare at Jessalyn, and to glare at her; here was a middle-aged Caucasian hippie-activist, contemptuous of the diffident white woman of a very different, genteel background.
Her friend at the gathering was a massive black woman with a stern face, who also turned to stare at Jessalyn. This woman had spoken at the pulpit in a fierce voice denouncing the “tradition” of white racism and white indifference to black victims dating back to pre–Civil War times.
Jessalyn had never seen so large a woman, and she had never seen anyone stare at her with such hostility. The woman was in her midforties, perhaps, weighing as much as three hundred pounds; she was at least six feet tall, and wore a sacklike article of clothing that fell loosely over her bulk; her legs were columnar, and her arms were masses of slack, pocked flesh. Her face was massive as well, yet sharper boned, like a carved totem, and her eyes were accusing. “Yes? Ma’am? What you wantin’ with us, ma’am?”—she called to Jessalyn in a mocking voice loud and assured as a bugle.