Every day after school I anticipated him, even though he did not always show up in the ways I expected. But I was prepared, mentally and physically. I realize now that his power lay partly in his omnipresence—ever present in my mind even when he wasn’t there in the flesh. And long after the bruises from the bully had healed, I was left living in a world where I expected violence, where the anticipation of trauma served as a survival mechanism. It was a world that looked subtly different from the one that I used to inhabit, a world without agency.
The bully aims to become the center of your everything. For me, the block was no longer the block where my grandmother lived, but the block with the bully. His trauma trapped me in the present where time, space, and my sense of self all folded in on themselves.
There were many days when I just wanted to get home. I didn’t want to fight, I didn’t want to run, I didn’t want to find another way. I wanted to see my grandmother, my grandfather, my father. I wanted things to be normal. I now realize that the bully wants his tyranny to become the norm. And when he succeeds, he creates a burden that incessantly grinds on your spirit. It threatens your joy; it steals your innocence. The threat and the fear and the burden transform you. In the most literal sense, it changes the way that everyone in its orbit interacts with one another.
In the face of the bully, there are seemingly only two options: to challenge him or to accept him. I never understood the notion of “fight or flight” in this context, because “flight” would only be a temporary reprieve and not an actual stance. I couldn’t avoid the street forever, and I shouldn’t have had to. “Fight” feels like an equally false option—overcoming the bully should not rest on adopting his tactics. When we accept these options, we run, we fight, we push back, because it seems like these are the only things we can do. In a world of incessant battles and their accompanying exhaustion, survival can become the overriding theme in how we think about living, and fear something that we unconsciously accept.
And sometimes, even as we challenge the bully, we come to accept him as just a part of our world.
Bullies don’t just happen, they are enabled. There were bystanders who lived on my grandmother’s block who chose to do nothing every single day. I think those people simply thought of bullying as another feature of childhood, a condition of growing up—just “kids being kids” or “boys being boys.” They didn’t suppose that simple child’s play could have any lasting negative consequences, and thus did not consider themselves responsible for ending it. So they chose a third option that, in some ways, was the most dangerous: they chose to ignore him, to pretend that he and his tyranny were not what they were. And then there was the bully’s family. They loved and cared for him but never corrected his behavior. Indeed, they never held a mirror up to show him what he was becoming.
When the world around you seems to accept bullying as normal, it’s hard to imagine a world without it. And if the burden is inevitable, why fight against it?
* * *
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I AM NO LONGER on the walk home, but I still know the bully.
We would recognize him today as much as Bull Connor and Jim Crow, the poll tax, police violence, the Black Codes, and redlining were recognized in their own time. The bully is the ideology of white supremacy. It is the notion that the lives of white people are inherently worth more than those of anyone else.
In many ways, we live in one of the bully’s golden ages, a time when the mere mention of white supremacy is an anachronism. Absent the hoods and burning crosses, we presume the bully dead. But he’s still operating in the shadows; he’s just working through insidious means. The fact that many people refuse to acknowledge him means that we cannot dismantle what he has wrought. And in our blindness we’ve created a host of studies to explain away his legacy. In the meantime, he is at work. When we see 21 percent of kids of color in poverty, that is white supremacy at work. When we see a president refusing to allow immigrants from majority people-of-color countries into this country, that is white supremacy at work. Defunding public education, gerrymandering, and scaling back the Voting Rights Act are all manifestations of this ideology.
While we are able to share the pain that we experience, to organize, and to act in ways and with speed not heretofore possible, many of the tools that we now have at our disposal have simultaneously been turned against us. The platform that facilitated community building in Ferguson and beyond is now the preferred venue for our president to lie and mislead the public. We now know that our election was manipulated through the abuse of social media information on Facebook and the like. So though the tactics of the bully are tried and true, there is an unprecedented sophistication to the bullies of our time.
* * *
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I KNOW THE WORLD better since that year that I lived at my grandmother’s house. I know that there’s no avoiding the bully—not when you move off that street, or exit that grade, or graduate from that school. In truth, the bully only becomes more vicious, more insidious, more institutionalized as time passes.
Paradoxically, many white people have been the collateral damage of policies enacted to uphold white supremacy. And thus we are all of us at risk. It’s the trick of the bully that some of us may not realize the risk. Indeed, there are those who don’t realize that the bully is coming for them too; they have not yet learned the fear. But white supremacy is about the fleecing of power to gain more power. So while the bully may not be after you today, he will surely target your car or hop over your fence in due time—because the bully is aiming to amass power, regardless of its victims.
In the face of this ever-present threat, silence is tempting. Indeed, responding can be tiring and it may even seem futile in the midst of the onslaught. You just want the pain to end. Or to acknowledge the risk and walk confidently down the street despite it. While understandable, silence too easily becomes acceptance. But neither offers us a path to address the bully. The bully will take your lunch money, then tell you to go buy lunch; steal your car, then give you a driver’s license. The bully likes to perform innocence when confronted, suggesting that we can all just move on, but we know this is one of his tricks.
To acknowledge the existence of the bully and his accompanying risks is not the same as accepting him as a permanent feature of our world. I know that if we accept trauma and fear, it wins.
Bullies don’t just go away. Their legacies don’t just disappear. The bully must be confronted intentionally, his impact named and addressed. Even so, it seems there’s no clear consensus on how to deal with the bully on our blocks. Do we confront him? Match violence with violence? Do we ignore him, or try to kill him with kindness? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to handling the bully, no one-size-fits-all strategy. But the right strategy has to be rooted in a context bigger than the immediate one, has to be rooted in more than aiming to end the presence of the bully himself. We must focus on the type of world we want to live in and devise a plan for getting there, as opposed to devising a strategy centered on opposition.
Still, there may yet be a general blueprint for beating the bully. He is effective on the street because he knows the street. He knows which neighbors turn a blind eye. He knows what sections of the street have the lowest traffic and are farthest from the objecting gaze of concerned neighbors. The bully picks his spots. So we need to identify and name the things that enable him, in order to address them head-on and remove them from the playing field. Then we need to expose the bully and all the ways he is able to perpetrate his actions, stripping him of the agency that he seeks to strip from us.
We need to remind the peers of the bully that they benefit from bullying even if they are not themselves the transgressors. Indeed, they benefit from it, but they are tarnished by it. To chip away at the humanity of select groups is to chip away at humanity itself.
As long as the trauma, the pain he causes, is present, the work of exposing the bully will
be present. We identify what props him up and we remove it: If he is propped up by the death of a people, then empowering and rescuing become part of that exposure. If he is propped up by artificial division or the propagation of false information, then partnering together and focusing on truth are part of that exposure. If he is propped up by his effort to pull us apart, to widen the gap between winners and losers, then standing in solidarity with the disenfranchised and oppressed becomes part of that exposure. If he is propped up by a shift in the focus of the work, then reminding ourselves of our main objectives becomes part of that exposure.
When we think about engaging and defeating the bully, we must remember that it isn’t just about getting home, it’s about thriving, and that our goal is not to switch places with the bully, but to end bullying.
This is by no means an easy task. The presence of the bully is difficult to overcome and the residue is difficult to shake. I stress the importance of imagining our ideal world because we naturally gravitate toward methods for achieving our desired outcomes. Indeed, we focus on tactics—how do we beat the bully?—but we don’t always remember to prepare for the day when the bully is no more. We will need a vision for that time too. If we don’t have a vision for our desired future, how can we plan to achieve it? If you cannot imagine it, you cannot fight for it. When we confront the bully, we are confronting our fear and reclaiming our imagination. There are those who cannot imagine a block without a bully. We must all imagine the block without a bully, otherwise we cannot get there.
When I am most in fear of succumbing to the bully, of allowing him to redefine my space, my world, I am reminded that the street existed before the bully did. We were free before we were enslaved. We are born to love before we know pain.
When I was nine, I didn’t know how to challenge the bully. I thought I was alone. The task of conquering my fear, of exposing him, loomed so large in my mind’s eye that I was overcome by it. If I hadn’t gone to Ferguson and stood toe to toe with other protesters on the streets calling for justice, naming our bully, and saying enough is enough, I’m not sure I’d have the courage to confront him today.
In each generation there is a moment when young and old, inspired or disillusioned, come together around a shared hope, imagine the world as it can be, and have the opportunity to bring that world into existence. Our moment is now.
FIVE
The Choreography of Whiteness
The world does not need white people to civilize others. The real White People’s Burden is to civilize ourselves.
—ROBERT JENSEN
I had to learn that white people could be wrong.
In the summer months leading up to sixth grade, we made our way back to the old burnt-down house. But we weren’t to be there for long; my father had other plans. For the better part of a year, he’d been picking up extra shifts stocking shelves at a local corner store called Rudy’s. He’d been working and saving with the hopes of giving us the life that he never had. And before long, we were packing up and moving on. The new house was in Catonsville, one block over from the Baltimore City line, on a street called Delrey Avenue. Though my father’s name is Calvin, he’s gone by Ray his entire life. My sister, TeRay, and I were much less enthusiastic about living on a street called Delrey—especially me—but our father took the likeness as an affirmation. And thus Ray, TeRay, and DeRay would live on Delrey.
We split our life between weekends at my grandmother’s house in a predominantly black part of the city, and school days in the county, where our community was almost entirely white. That school was the first place I’d ever consistently been in a setting with white people. I’ll never forget the first time I saw white parents walk into school demanding that classes and schedules be changed for their children. Or when they challenged the teachers on their children’s grades and chose entire course trajectories for them, insisting on AP and honors classes, re-ordering their children’s schedules, and requesting unit plans. I never saw that at my old schools. It wasn’t that those parents didn’t care about their children, but rather that they didn’t expect to be able to make demands on how the academic program was configured.
I couldn’t imagine my father doing that. He graduated from high school and did not attend college, and to him attending school was a privilege and teachers were sacred. My father did not conceive of the school system as something to be navigated, as it was for the white parents, but instead considered it a gift that we should have been grateful to participate in. As a single father, he was trying to make a way for us that he had only previously dreamt of. I mean, he saved and borrowed so that we could go to schools that he thought would put us on a better educational trajectory. Before I saw him do it, I never knew that people actually made decisions about buying homes because of the local schools. I thought that was just something I saw on TV. But he held education in the highest regard, to the point of actually being deferential to the school staff. I remember one day he told me that he would always believe the teacher if they called to report me for misbehaving. “But what if they hit me?” I asked. He replied something along the lines of, “I hope that doesn’t happen, because I’m going to believe them.” I think there was only a bit of a joke in that. He simply hadn’t been raised to challenge authority.
I’ll never forget the day one of my teachers said something that was wrong—she made a mistake—and it was the first time I had ever seen a white person be wrong. I don’t even remember the details of her mistake, but I remember realizing that she was wrong, and I can still see her correcting herself. It’s weird to say it now, but as a kid I didn’t know that white people could be wrong. I certainly hadn’t seen a wrong white person on TV.
I grew up watching whiteness work, watching it dance and adapt itself around me, demanding that I dance and adapt to it, shaping how the world sees it and therefore how people make decisions and think about possibilities.
I understood whiteness before I had the language to describe it.
I had to learn the difference between whiteness and white people, and how to talk about that difference. The former, an enforced power dynamic that confers power exclusively on white people, is sustained by building and manipulating systems and structures. This dynamic situates white people as normal and nonwhite people or people of color as a deviation from the norm. White people are both the primary beneficiaries and the carriers of whiteness, regardless of any individual person’s intent. The distinction between whiteness and white people is important, because whiteness is an idea made flesh, an idea that has become so potent and ingrained that, to some, uprooting it seems almost impossible. But it is an idea nonetheless, and one that has changed over time. To be white, or considered white, is really just another way of saying who can leverage the power of whiteness without repercussion. And whiteness is rooted in domination.
If whiteness is considered the standard, it is also believed to be primordial. Indeed, to some, it is organic, pure, and uncorrupted, and thus superior. Notably, it is this belief that created the other contours of race, that made race become a game of winners and losers, of haves and have-nots. It made flesh carry an idea of worthiness, of deservedness, of value. Racism, then, is rooted in whiteness.
And racism manifests in two ways: through white supremacy, and through antiblackness.
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to people of color, and it is perpetuated not simply by individual beliefs but by institutions that codify and thus reinforce it. Conversely, antiblackness is the set of beliefs, practices, and actions that harm, discard, or exploit people of color, with especial severity for black people. The distinction is significant, because white people are traditionally the only white supremacists, but other people of color can participate in antiblackness. The Ku Klux Klan and the alt-right are prime examples of white supremacy as they clearly express a belief in “white nationalism” and a “white state.” Both are possible only with the subjugation o
f nonwhite folks. On the flip side, colorism, the preference among people of color toward lighter skin over darker skin, is an example of antiblackness. It is possible for people to think of blackness as wholly negative and not simultaneously think that whiteness is superior, though antiblackness is heavily influenced by the ideology that white supremacy has created.
* * *
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WHAT DOES IT MEAN that whiteness is an idea and a set of values and not a natural law, as some would like to believe? Indeed, that it is an idea with consequences? We talk about whiteness as an idea with consequences so that we can see how the idea itself leads to actions, and then we can develop a plan for mitigating those actions. Because white is defined as normal or standard, the people who benefit from it (i.e., white people) often struggle to see it operating, because to them it is simply the natural order of the world. Whiteness is seemingly so ubiquitous that it appears to be invisible. This is why understanding white privilege is important. It is the act of seeing the seemingly invisible.
It is the work of white people to undo whiteness. As the writer Michael Harriot has noted, “White people who are quiet about racism might not plant the seed, but their silence is sunlight.”* I do not say this to suggest that people of color have no role; we do. But we will never undo an idea so insidious alone. It begins with white people unpacking and acknowledging that the system is designed for and benefits them in ways that are solely based on their whiteness and not on any attribute that they possess as individuals—this is what we call white privilege.
Whiteness is not a hardwired, immutable, intractable part of the world we live in, even if or when it feels like it is. I grew up explaining it, responding to it, and believing in its myths. I had to learn to believe in something else. Learning that white people could be wrong was just the beginning for me, the beginning of seeing a world beyond whiteness as standard. It is a different type of work to survive whiteness, to grow up in its context, and to learn to make meaning independent of it. To challenge it, to escape its grasp, and to love oneself in spite of it—this is the work of people of color.
On the Other Side of Freedom Page 6