Читать книгу White Like Me - Tim Wise - Страница 7
ОглавлениеAWAKENINGS
FOR WHITES, THE process of racial identity development is typically far slower than for people of color. As the dominant group in the United States, whites too often have the luxury of remaining behind a veil of ignorance for years, while people of color begin noticing the different ways in which they are viewed and treated early on. Recent studies suggest that even by the age of eight, and certainly by ten, black children are cognizant of the negative stereotypes commonly held about their group. Folks of color know they are the other, and pretty soon they learn what that means. What’s more, people of color not only recognize their otherness , but are also inundated by whiteness, by the norm. Sort of like that kid in the movie The Sixth Sense who sees dead people, to be black or brown is to see white people often. It’s hard to work around us.
But for whites, we often don’t see people of color. To be white in this country has long been to be in a position where, if you wanted to, you could construct a life that would be more or less all-white. Although the demographic changes underway in the nation—which by 2040 will render the United States about half white and half of color—are making it more difficult to maintain racially homogenous spaces, in many parts of the country white youth grow up with very little connection to anyone who isn’t white.
Even in 2011, I meet white folks all around the country who never really knew any person of color until they came to college; in some cases, they had hardly even seen people of color (other than on television) until then. Though perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, in part it does because such insularity is so foreign to my own experience.
Fact is, I remember the first time I ever saw a black person too—I mean really saw them, and intuited that there was something different about our respective skin colors. But that memory is not a college memory or a teenage memory; rather, it is my very first memory from my childhood.
I must have been about two, so it would have been perhaps the fall of 1970, or maybe the spring of 1971. I was in the living room of our apartment, gazing as I often did out of the sliding glass door to the porch, when about two hundred feet away, cutting across the rectangular lawn used as common recreation space by residents of the complex (which I would in years to come all but commandeer as my personal baseball diamond), came striding a tall, middle-aged black man in some kind of a uniform.
The man, I would come to learn, was named Tommy, and he was one of the maintenance crew at the Royal Arms. It is testimony to how entrenched racism was at that time and place that this man, who was at least in his fifties by then, would never be known to me or my parents by anything other than his first name. Even as a mere infant I would be allowed the privilege of addressing this grown black man with a family and full life history only as Tommy, as if we were equals, or perhaps “Mister Tommy,” as my mother would instruct, since at least that sounded more respectful. But about him, I would need know nothing else.
As I gazed out the window my attention was riveted to him and the darkness of his skin. He was quite dark, though not really black of course, which led me to ask my mother who the brown man was.
Without hesitation she said it was Mr. Tommy, and that he wasn’t brown, but black. Having developed a penchant for argument, even at two, I naturally insisted that he most certainly was not black. He was brown. I knew the names of all the crayons in my Crayola box, and knew that this man certainly didn’t look like the crayon called “black.” Burnt umber maybe, brown most definitely, but black? No way.
My mother acknowledged the accuracy of my overly literalistic position, but stuck to her guns on the matter, explaining something rather profound in the process, the profundity of which it took many years for me to appreciate. “Tim,” she explained, “Mister Tommy may look brown, but people who look the way Mister Tommy does prefer to be called black.”
And that was the end of the argument. Even at two, it seemed only proper that if someone wanted to call themselves black they had every right to do so, whether or not the label fit the actual color of their skin. Mine, after all, wasn’t really “white” either, and so it was really none of my business.
This may not seem important, but think how meaningful it can be to learn early on that people have a right to self-determination, to define their own reality, to claim their own identity—and that you have no right to impose your judgment of them, on them. When it comes to race, that’s not a lesson that most whites learn at the age of two or ever. Historically, white Americans have always felt the right to define black and brown folks’ realities for them: insisting that enslaved persons were happy on the plantation and felt just like family, or that indigenous persons were the uncivilized ones, while those who would seek to conquer and destroy them were the practitioners of enlightenment.
At the level of labels, racism has long operated to impose white reality onto others. Whites found the assertion of blackness (and especially as a positive, even “beautiful” thing in the 1960s and 1970s) threatening because it was an internally derived title unlike “colored,” or “Negro,” terms which had been foisted upon black bodies by the white and European tradition. Likewise, many whites today react hostilely to the use of the term “African American” because it came from within the black community, and as such, stands as a challenge to white linguistic authority.
When whites tell black folks, as we often do, that they should “just be Americans,” and “drop the whole hyphen thing,” we’re forgetting that it’s hard to just be an American when you’ve rarely been treated like a full and equal member of the family. More to the point, it isn’t our hyphen to drop. But it’s always hard to explain such matters to those who have taken for granted, because we could, that we had the right to set the parameters of national identity, or to tell other people’s stories as if they were our own. It’s been that way for a while and explains much about the way we misteach history.
So at roughly the same time as I was being instructed by my mother on the finer points of linguistic self-determination, I was also beginning to read. I read my first book without help on May 5, 1971, at the age of two years, seven months, and one day. That’s the good and reasonably impressive (if still somewhat freakish) news. The bad news is that the book was Meet Andrew Jackson, an eighty seven-page tribute to the nation’s seventh president, intended to make children proud of the nation in which they live, and of this, one of that nation’s early leaders. Given that my mother had been quick to prohibit books like Little Black Sambo from coming into our home because of the racial stereotypes in which the story trafficked, it was somewhat surprising that she would indulge such a volume as this one, but she did, and I consumed it voraciously.
Therein, I learned that Jackson’s mom had admonished him never to lie or “take what is not your own” (an instruction he felt free to ignore as he got older, at least as it applied to indigenous peoples or the Africans whom he took as property), and that when Jackson headed West as a young man, he encountered Indians who “did not want white people in their hunting grounds,” and “often killed white travelers.” This part was true of course, if a bit incomplete: people whose land has been invaded and is in the process of being stolen often become agitated and sometimes even kill those who are trying to destroy them. Imagine.
On page 46, I read that although “some people in the North were saying it was not right to own slaves . . . Jackson felt the way most other Southerners did. He felt it was right to own slaves. He called his slaves his ‘family.”’ Well then, who are we to question his definition of that term? Ten pages later, I learned that Jackson fought the Creek Indians to preserve America and save innocent lives, though oddly there was no mention that in order to get an accurate count of the dead they slaughtered at Horseshoe Bend, soldiers in Jackson’s command cut off the tips of Creek noses and sliced strips of flesh from their bodies for use as bridal reins for their horses—surely an accidental editorial oversight.
At the end of the book, after recounting Jackson’s rise to the presidency, Meet Andrew Jackson concludes by noting that when Jackson died, his slaves cried and “sang a sad old song.” To insert such a flourish as this, though it probably struck me as touching at the time, is utterly vulgar, and suggests as well as anything what is wrong with the way children in the United States learn our nation’s history. There is no scholarly record of sad songs being sung by slaves as Jackson lay dying. This kind of detail, even were it true—and it almost certainly is not—has no probative value when it comes to letting us know who Andrew Jackson was. It exists for the same reason the old fairy tale about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and telling his dad because he “couldn’t tell a lie,” exists—because no fabrication is too extreme in the service of national self-love. Anything that makes us feel proud can be said, facts notwithstanding. Anything that reminds us of the not-sonoble pursuits of our forefathers or national heroes, on the other hand, gets dumped down the memory hole. And if you bring those kinds of things up, you’ll be accused of hating America.
The way in which we place rogues like Andrew Jackson on a pedestal, while telling people of color to “get over it” (meaning the past) whenever slavery or Indian genocide is brought up, has always struck me as the most precious of ironies. We want folks of color to move past the past, even as we very much seek to dwell in that place a while. We dwell there every July 4, every Columbus Day, every time a child is given a book like Meet Andrew Jackson to read. We love the past so long as it venerates us. We want to be stuck there, and many would even like to return. Some say as much, as with the Tea Party folks who not only announce that they “want their country back,” but even dress up in tricorn hats, Revolutionary War costumes, and powdered wigs for their rallies. It is only when those who were the targets for destruction challenge the dominant narrative that the past becomes conveniently irrelevant, a trifle not worth dwelling upon.
GOOD OR BAD, the past is a fact, and it often holds the keys to who we are in the present, and who we’re likely to become in the future. This was certainly the case for me.
By 1971, it was time for me to begin preschool. Although I’m certain there were any number of programs in Green Hills or thereabouts in which I could have been enrolled, my mother made the decision (very much against the objections of certain friends and family) that I should attend the early childhood program at Tennessee State University (TSU), which is Nashville’s historically black land-grant college. Her reasons for the decision were mixed. On the one hand, she knew that upon beginning school I would be in an integrated environment—something she had never had the benefit of experiencing—and she wanted me to know what it was like to occasionally find myself in a space where I might not be the taken-for-granted norm. On the other hand, I’ve long suspected that it was also something she did to tweak her family and mark her own independence from the much more provincial life she had led growing up.
TSU, the name of which had recently been changed from Tennessee A&I, is located in North Nashville, just off the foot of Jefferson Street—the epicenter of Nashville’s black community. Although the Jefferson Street corridor had been recently devastated by the construction of Interstate 40 right through the middle of it—a part of “urban renewal” that occurred nationwide and contributed to the destruction of up to one-fifth of all black housing in the country by 1969—the city’s black residents were rightly proud of the area and constantly fought to return it to its former glory. My grandfather had grown up on Jefferson Street as a teen, since the black community was one of the few places Jews could live unless they were of substantial means. Of course, he hadn’t gone to school there. During the days of segregation, he would be sent to the white school downtown, Hume-Fogg, even though his neighborhood school was Pearl, one of the academic jewels among southern black high schools at the time.
Not to romanticize the days of segregation of course, but under conditions of formal oppression, black business districts like Jefferson Street had often managed to carve out a thriving subculture of black success. Forced to turn inward, African Americans across the nation spent their money with black businesses, and the children in the schools knew that the teachers and administrators loved them—they were, after all, their neighbors. While integration was clearly necessary to open up the opportunity structure that had previously been closed off, it also led to the firing of thousands of black teachers across the South, who were no longer wanted in the newly consolidated schools into which blacks would be placed (but as clear minorities in most cases). Integration would be of limited success because whites had been ill-prepared to open up the gates of access and opportunity wide enough for any but a few to squeeze through. Those few managed to leave the old neighborhoods and take their money with them, but the rest were left behind, access to suburban life limited, their own spaces transformed by interstates, office buildings, and parking lots, in the name of progress.
Just a mile or so from Fisk—the city’s historically black private college—TSU was seen as the university for working class African Americans, and more to the point for local black folks, while Fisk (long associated with alum W.E.B. DuBois’s “talented tenth” concept) attracted more of a national and international student clientele. At the time of my enrollment at TSU, the college was embroiled in a struggle with state officials who had been seeking to establish a branch campus of the University of Tennessee in downtown Nashville. Concerned that such a school would allow whites to avoid the mostly black campus by attending a predominantly white state institution in town, and thereby siphon resources from TSU to the newly-created UT-Nashville, TSU officials were battling valiantly to remain the flagship of public education in the city.
As a student in TSU’s early childhood program, my classmates would be principally the children of faculty or families living in close proximity to the college, which is to say, they would be mostly black. Indeed, I would be one of only three students in the classroom who weren’t black, out of a class of roughly twenty kids. Although several of the teachers who ran the program were white, the ones I remember most vividly were African American women. They seemed quite clearly to own the space. It was their domain and we all respected it.
I can’t remember much about my time at TSU, although I can vividly recall the layout of the class, the playground, and the drive to and from our Green Hills home each morning and afternoon to get back and forth. But despite the vagueness of my TSU memories, I can’t help but think that the experience had a profound impact on my life, especially as I would come to understand and relate to the subject of race. On the one hand, being subordinated to black authority at an early age was a blessing. In a society that has long encouraged whites to disregard black wisdom, for a white child to learn at the age of three to listen to black women and do what they ask of you, and to believe that they know of what they speak, can be more than a minor life lesson. It would mean that a little more than twenty years later, listening to African American women in public housing in New Orleans tell me about their lives and struggles, I would not be the white guy who looked them square in the face and inquired as to whether it might be possible that they had lost their minds. I would not be the white guy who would assume they were exaggerating, making things up, or fabricating the difficulties of their daily routine. I would go back to that early imprinting, and remember that people know their lives better than I do, including those whom the society has ignored for so long.
Attending preschool at TSU also meant that I would be socialized in a non-dominant setting, my peers mostly African American children. Because I had bonded with black kids early on, once I entered elementary school it would be hard not to notice the way that we were so often separated in the classroom, by tracking that placed the white children in more advanced tracks, by unequal discipline, and by a different way in which the teachers would relate to us. At Burton Elementary, with the exception of the African American teachers, most of the educators would have had very little experience teaching black children, and in some cases, very little interest in doing so. At one point in my first grade year the teacher would actually pawn off the task to my mother, who had no teaching background, but who knew that unless she intervened to work with the African American students they would receive very little instruction in the classroom.
While few white children at such an age would have noticed the racial separation going on, I couldn’t help but see it. These were my friends, a few of whom I had been at TSU with. Even the black kids I hadn’t known before were the ones with whom I would identify, thanks to my TSU experience. Although I hardly had a word to describe what was going on, I knew that whatever it was came at a cost to me; it was separating me from the people in whom I’d had some investment. Although the injury was far more profound to them—after all, the institutional racism at the heart of that unequal treatment wasn’t aimed in my direction, but theirs—I was nonetheless the collateral damage. My mother had never tried to push me into whiteness or put me into a socially-determined space. But what she would not do, the schools would strive for, from the very beginning.
WHATEVER RACIAL SEPARATION the school system sought to reimpose, even in a post-segregation era, it was something against which I struggled for years. I had a few white friends, but very few. Albert Jones, who is still my best friend to this day, was among the only white classmates with whom I bonded at that time. Frankly, even that might have been a case of mistaken identity. Though white, his dad worked at TSU in the School of Education, so even he had a connection to the black community that made him different. But other than Albert, pretty much all of my friends at Burton were black.
Yet, as I would discover, interpersonal connections to racial others say little about whether or not one is having experiences similar to those others. Even when a white person is closely tied to African Americans, that white person is often living in an entirely different world from that of their friends, though we rarely realize it.
It would be early 1977, in third grade, that I received one of my earliest lessons about race, even if the meaning of that lesson wouldn’t sink in for several years. The persons who served as my instructors that day were not teachers, but two friends, Bobby Orr and Vincent Perry, whose understanding of the dynamics of race—their blackness and my whiteness—was so deep that they were able to afford me the lesson during something as meaningless as afternoon recess.
It was a brisk winter day, and Bobby, Vince, and I were tossing a football back and forth. One of us would get between the other two, who stood at a distance of maybe ten yards from each other, and try to intercept the ball as it flew through the air from one passer to the next. Football had really never been my game. Though I was athletic and obsessed with sports, I was also pretty small as a kid; as such, I saw little point in a game that involved running into people and being tackled. I preferred baseball, but since baseball season was several months away, the only options that day during P.E. class were kickball or football. Normally, I would have chosen kickball, but when Bobby and Vince asked me to play with them I had said yes. Because we were so often separated in the classroom, I treasured whatever time I could carve out with my black friends.
Our game began innocently enough, with Bobby in the middle, usually picking off passes between Vince and me. Next it was Vince’s turn, and he too picked off several of the passes between Bobby and me, though the zip with which Bobby delivered them often made the ball bounce off of Vince’s hands, too hot to handle.
When it came time for me to be in the middle, I frankly had little expectation about how many passes I could intercept. My size alone virtually ensured that if Vince and Bobby wanted to, they could simply lob the ball over my head, and so long as they did it high enough and fast enough, there would be very little opportunity for me to pull the ball down. But strangely, I caught every one. Each time they would pass just a bit beyond my reach and I would jump to one side or the other, hauling their efforts into my breast, never dropping a single one or allowing even one pass in thirty to make it past me.
At first, I reveled in what I assumed must be my newfound speed and agility. What’s more, I beamed with childish pride at the smiles on their faces, assuming that Bobby and Vince were impressed with my effort; and I continued to interpret this series of events as evidence of my own abilities, even as they both began to repeat the same refrain after every pass, beginning with about the tenth throw of the series. As the ball left Bobby’s throwing hand and whizzed toward its destination in Vince’s outstretched arms, only to be thwarted in its journey time and again by my leaping effort, they would repeat, one and then the other, the same exclamation.
“My nigger Tim!”
Pop! The ball would once again reverberated as it hit my hands and was pulled in for another interception.
“My nigger Tim!”
I would toss it back, and we would repeat the dance, Bobby moving left, Vince right, me following their steps and taking cues from their body language as to where the ball would be going next.
Pop! Another catch.
“My nigger Tim!”
After the first dozen times they said this, each time with more emphasis and a bit of a chuckle, I began to sense that something was going on, the meaning of which I didn’t quite understand. A strange feeling began to creep over me, punctuated by a voice in the back of my head saying something about being suckered. Not to mention, I instinctively felt odd about being called a “nigger” (and note, it was indeed that derivation of the term, and not the more relaxed, even amiable “nigga” which was being deployed), because it was a word I would never use, and which I knew to be a slur of the most vile nature, and also, let’s face it, because I was white, and had never been called that before.
Though I remained uncomfortable with the exchange for several minutes after it ended, I quickly put it behind me as the bell rang, recess ended, and we headed back to class, laughing and talking about something unrelated to the psychodrama that had been played out on the ball field. If I ever thought of the event in the days afterward, I likely contented myself with the thought that although their word choice seemed odd, they were only signifying that I was one of the club so to speak and had proven myself to them. Well, I was right about one thing: they were definitely “signifying”—a term for the cultural practice of well-crafted verbal put-downs that have long been a form of street poetry in the black communities of this nation.
As it turns out, it would be almost twenty years before I finally understood the meaning of this day’s events, and that understanding would come while watching television. It was there that I saw a black comedian doing a bit about making some white guy “his nigger,” and getting him to do whatever he, the black comic, wanted: to jump when he said jump, to come running when he was told to come running, to step ’n fetch’ it, so to speak. So there it was. On that afternoon so many years before, Bobby and Vince had been able to flip the script on the racial dynamic that would, every other day, serve as the background noise for their lives. On that day they were able to make me not only a nigger, but their nigger. The irony couldn’t have been more perfect, nor the satisfaction, I suppose, in having exacted a small measure of payback, not of me, per se, since at that age I had surely done little to deserve it, but of my people, writ large. It was harmless, and for them it had been fun: a cat and mouse routine with the white boy who doesn’t realize he’s being used, and not just used, but used in the way some folks had long been used, and were still being used every day. Today Tim, you the nigger. Today, you will be the one who gets to jump and run, and huff and puff. Today we laugh, and not with you, but at you. We like you and all that, but today, you belong to us.
As I thought about it, however, I was overcome with a profound sadness, and not because I had been tricked or played for a fool; that’s happened lots of times, usually at the hands of other white folks. I was saddened by what I realized in that moment, which was very simply this: even at the age of nine, Bobby and Vince had known what it meant to be someone’s nigger. They knew more than how to say the word, they knew how to use it, when to use it, how to contextualize it, and fashion it into a weapon. And the only way they could have known any of this is because they had either been told of its history and meaning, had been called it before, or had seen or heard a loved one called it before, none of which options were a lot better than the others.
Even as the school system we shared was every day treating Bobby and Vince as that thing they now called me—disciplining them more harshly or placing them in remedial level groups no matter their abilities—on the playground they could turn it around and claim for themselves the power to define reality, my reality, and thereby gain a brief respite from what was happening in class. Yet the joke was on them in the end. Because once recess was over, and the ball was back in the hands of the teachers, there were none prepared to make me the nigger.
It had been white privilege and black oppression that had made the joke funny in the first place, or even decipherable; and it would likewise be white privilege and black oppression that would make it irrelevant and even a bit pathetic. But folks take their victories where they can find them. And some of us find them more often than others.
I WAS NEVER a very good student. No matter my reading level or general ability, I had a hard time applying myself to subject matter that I didn’t find interesting. In effect, I treated school like a set of noisecanceling headphones, letting in the sounds I was interested in hearing while shutting out the rest. By middle school I was struggling academically, finding myself bored and looking desperately for something else to occupy my time. Given the home in which I lived, it was hardly surprising that I would settle on theatre. Growing up in a home where my father was always on stage, even when he wasn’t, had provided me with a keen sense of timing, of delivery, of what was funny and what wasn’t, of how to move onstage, of how to “do nothing well,” as Lorelle Reeves, my theatre teacher in high school, would put it.
I grew up memorizing lines to plays I would never perform, simply because my dad had saved all the scripts from shows he had done in the past. They were crammed into a small, brown-lacquered paperback book cabinet that hung in the living room of our apartment—one after another, with tattered and dog-eared pages, compliments of Samuel French, the company that owned distribution rights for most of the stage play scripts in the United States. I would pick them up and read them out loud in my room, creating different voices for different characters. The plays dealt with adult themes, many of which I didn’t understand, but which I pretended to, just in case anyone ever needed a ten-year-old to play the part of Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park.
At Stokes School, in fifth grade, I would finally have the chance to take a theatre class as an elective. The teacher, Susan Moore, was among the most eccentric persons I’ve ever met. Had I been older, I may well have appreciated her eccentricity; but at the age of ten, eccentric is just another word for weird, and weird is how we students viewed her. All we knew was that she was an odd, fat lady (we weren’t too sensitive on issues of body type, as I’m sure won’t surprise you) with a dozen cats, whose clothes always smelled like cat litter and whose car smelled worse. One of my friends, Bobby Bell, who was not in the drama club but once got a ride from Ms. Moore, dubbed her wheels the “douche ’n’ push,” which we all thought was hilarious, even though I doubt any of us really knew what a douche was. In fact, once I learned the meaning of the word, calling her car a douche ’n’ push seemed less funny than gross.
We didn’t study much in terms of theatre technique. For good or bad, Susan thought it best to just throw us into the process of doing theatre, learning as we went. So she would pick a play and we would work on it for the better part of a year: reading it, learning it, and then finally producing and performing it. The good thing about this process was that it led to fairly sophisticated outcomes, at least for fifth and sixth graders. When you have ten- and eleven-year-olds pulling off Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and never dropping a line, you know you’re doing something special. As the male lead in that production, I can attest to feeling significantly older and wiser than my years for having done it, for having successfully taken on a Shakespearian farce at such an age.
On the downside, unless you got one of the coveted roles in the play chosen for that year by Ms. Moore, your participation in the theatre group would be circumscribed. Occasionally, she would create a few characters and script a few lines for them, so that as many kids as possible could get a chance to be onstage, but this hardly flattened the hierarchy of the club. There were the actors and there was everyone else: the students who would work the lights, pull the curtains, or just hang out and perhaps help the actors run lines, or maybe just quit theatre altogether and find something else to do.
Having an actor for a father pretty well assured me of a prominent role in whatever production was chosen as our annual play. Ms. Moore could presume my talent, and although that talent may have been genuine, there were certainly no cold readings or auditions. A few of us would pretty much rotate: I would be the male lead in one play, and in the next production that honor would go to Albert. The female leads would also pretty much rotate between two of the girls in our class, Stacey Wright and Shannon Holladay. It was a fairly closed circle.
In sixth grade we would switch from Shakespeare to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which, given that it’s a musical and neither Albert nor I could sing, should have guaranteed that it would be our turn to pull curtains or some such thing. But despite our lack of ability, we were cast as Charlie and Linus, respectively. In my case, Ms. Moore actually agreed to take the song “My Blanket and Me” out of the play altogether, because I made clear that I was terrified to sing a solo in public.
My ability to force script changes was not about race of course, but my ability to be in the position I was, and therefore to make that kind of demand and gain the director’s acquiescence, most assuredly was about race, at least in part. Had I been anything but white, it would have been highly unlikely that I would have gotten the parts I landed in any of the productions done at that or any other school. These were roles written for white actors. Shakespeare’s work is not, to be sure, replete with black characters, and there are only so many times a school can do Othello. Likewise, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown was written before the introduction of the comic strip’s one black character, Franklin. Although Ms. Moore added a few lines to the script and had a black kid deliver them in the person of Franklin (and created an entirely new character for Carol Stuart, one of the few black students in the theatre class), this hardly altered the racial dynamic at work.
To be white at that school, as in many others, was to have a whole world of extracurricular opportunity opened to oneself—a world where if you were a mediocre student (as I was), you could still find a niche, an outlet for your talents, passions, and interests. To be of color at that same school was to ensure that no matter how good an actor or actress you were, or were capable of becoming, you were unlikely to be in a position to avail yourself of this same outlet for your creativity. Unless a theatre teacher is prepared to violate the aesthetic sensibilities of the audience, which is rare, and cast a person of color in a role traditionally played by a white person (like Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, or Snoopy even), black, Latino, and Asian kids are just out of luck.
This, it should be noted, is no mere academic point. Theatre was a life raft for me in middle school, without which I might well have gone under altogether. My ability to access it, and the whiteness that granted me that ability, was no minor consideration. By the time middle school began, my home life was increasingly chaotic. My father’s drinking had gone well past heavy, on the way to serious alcoholism. Though he was still technically functional—and would remain so, more or less, right up until he got sober eighteen years later—his addiction propelled his internalized rage and sense of failure forward, which would explode time and again in our small apartment, always aimed directly at my mother. Though she absorbed the nightly verbal blows and tried her best to shield me from the damage, each fight, each hateful word, each guttural expression of unhinged contempt cut deeply into my sense of personal security.
I took to closing myself off in my room after school most days. When he was around, I would only come out to eat dinner, always making sure to be back in my own personal space shortly thereafter, as the drinking continued and the fights were sure to begin. Then, on those occasions when he would go out to a bar to drink more, I would force myself to stay up late until I could hear the hall door open at the far end of our apartment building, followed by the sound of his heavy drunken footsteps moving closer to our unit, and I could know that at least for that night he wasn’t going to kill himself while driving. I could go to sleep.
Things got so bad at one point that I began to keep track with hash marks on a page the number of days in a row that he had been drunk: twenty-one on the day I stopped counting. Though I longed for a closer relationship with my dad, I also breathed more easily whenever he was in a play out of town. By then I had learned that quiet loneliness is always preferable to amplified togetherness when the cacophony to which you’re being exposed reverberates with the blaring notes of marital discord.
Only by escaping into the world of acting (a strangely ironic choice, I realize) was I able to make it through those grades at all. It was my refuge. I could lock myself in my room with a play script, avoid my father, escape the smell of Canadian whiskey or bad vodka on his breath, and avoid the verbal battles that were the hallmark of his relationship with my mother. The only times I would come out of my room were in those moments when I honestly felt that if I didn’t he might kill her. Although my home was not one characterized by physical abuse—thankfully, my dad only struck my mom once (which of course was one time too many) by pushing her into a wall outside my room—when you’re ten and eleven your mind has a hard time processing the distinction between verbal and physical violence, and knowing where that line is, and just how much it might take for the abuser to cross the metaphorical Rubicon. During this period, although I never had friends over—mostly because I didn’t want them to see my father drunk—I also refused to go to their homes, at least not past dinner, feeling that I needed to be in the house as a way to deter my father from the inevitable leap to assault or even murder.
No matter the infrequency of physical abuse, in my mind the threat always seemed to hang like a thunder cloud over our home. At one point, I was so sure he would kill her that I began planning an escape route. If I could intervene and save her I would, but if it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to do much good, I knew how to get my bedroom window open fast, and exactly where I would run to get help, or to borrow the weapon with which I would end my father’s life.
That my dad was not going to kill my mother was hardly the point. When you hear him say that he’s going to—like the one time he said it with a steak knife held three inches from her face, while I watched from perhaps seven feet away—and you’re a child, you are in no position to deconstruct the context of his words. All you can do is spend precious moments of your youth trying to figure out ways to save your mom’s life, or at least your own, on that day when your father has one drink too many and burns dinner because he wasn’t paying close enough attention, or can’t find his keys and flies into a rage, and reaches into the utensil drawer—and not for a spoon or salad fork.
So when I say that theatre was a life raft, I am not engaging in idle hyperbole. I mean it literally. Without it, I would have had no escape. While my physical existence may have continued—after all, my father never killed anyone in the end, and had he meant to, it’s doubtful I could have dissuaded him with a sonnet—my already fragile emotional well-being would have likely taken a nosedive, with dire consequence in years to come. Theatre was how I released my frustrations; it was how I avoided falling into clinical depression; it was how I got my mind off other things, like killing my father before he could harm my mom, which I did contemplate in my more panicked moments.
Without theatre, which I could only access the way I did because I was white, it is a very open question how my life would have gone. If all the other variables had been the same, but I had been anything other than white, and thereby bereft of the diversion offered by acting, I feel confident that things would have gone differently than they did. As for my father, he should be grateful that we were white, and that I had an outlet.
NEXT TO THEATRE, my other obsession as a kid was sports. When I wasn’t working on lines for whatever play we were soon to be performing at school, I was likely to be practicing either basketball or baseball.
As for basketball, I had begun playing competitively at the age of nine. By my fifth grade year, 1979, I was playing for what was undoubtedly the most feared team of eleven-year-olds in the city. Comprised of twelve guys, nine of them black, we had the advantage of racist stereotypes working in our favor. Most of the teams we would play were made up of private school white boys who had barely even seen a black person, let alone played ball against one. Psychologically we had won before we even stepped on the court in most cases. The only times we lost were because the white boys’ coaches were smart enough to encourage their players to foul and force us to the line. Sadly, most of our guys could hit twenty-five-foot jumpers with no problem, but free throws from fifteen feet? Not so much.
Still, the racial lessons imparted by my basketball experience were profound. We would walk in the gym, part of the YMCA youth basketball program, in our black uniforms and our mostly black skin, and watch a bunch of pasty white boys damn near piss themselves. We’d win by scores of 40–8, 34–6, 52–9, and other absurd point spreads; and it wasn’t because we were that much better. Fact is, our field goal percentage wasn’t very high, but we’d always get multiple shots during each offensive possession because the other team was too afraid to fight for rebounds. It was as if they thought our guys might knife them if they even tried.
Because our opponents were so psyched out by the black players, they assumed they had little to fear from the few of us who were white. So whenever the other team got to the foul line, we would line up four black guys around the paint to rebound if they missed, and I would stand at the extreme other end of the court, literally on the opponent’s foul line, completely unguarded, because they weren’t afraid of the short white guy. Their players would miss their free throws, our guys would rebound, and throw the ball down court to me for an easy layup each time.
On the one hand, the stereotypes of black athleticism worked in our favor on the court, triggering in our opponents what psychologists like Claude Steele call “stereotype threat” on the part of the white players. According to this theory, which has been amply demonstrated in lab experiments and real world settings, when a person is part of a stigmatized group (thought to be less intelligent or less athletic, for instance), the fear of confirming the negative stereotype when forced to perform in a domain where that stereotype might be seen as relevant to performance, can drive down performance relative to ability. In other words, the anxiety spawned by fear of proving the negative stigma true can actually cause a person’s skills to suffer, whether on a basketball court or a standardized test.
In most situations, stereotype threat affects socially marginalized groups, since they typically face more stigmatizing stereotypes than dominant groups. So black students do worse in academic settings than their abilities might otherwise indicate because of the anxiety generated as they try not to confirm racist stereotypes about black intelligence; women and girls do worse on math exams because they fear validating common stereotypes about female math ability or the lack thereof; and the elderly do less well when told they’re taking a test of memory because of a fear that they may confirm negative beliefs about their abilities in that arena. But because of the widespread and anti-scientific belief that blacks are “natural athletes,” superior to whites especially at basketball, in this particular case the stereotype vulnerability fell on our white opponents. For a brief thirty-two minutes on the court, the script was flipped.
But thirty-two minutes does not a day make, let alone a lifetime—a point worth remembering, lest we assume a parity of disadvantage between whites and blacks, simply because in one arena like sports (and even then, just a few particular sports), blacks occasionally get the benefit of the doubt and are thought to be superior.
A few years ago, I received an e-mail from a very thoughtful private school mom in Minnesota, who had been asked to read the first edition of this book, along with other parents at the school her child attended. Much of it she liked, but she felt compelled to tell me of at least one instance of “black privilege” in the school, and how it was, to her mind, negatively impacting her white son. Her son, she explained, was an excellent football player—a running back as I recall—and faster than several of the black guys on the team. Nonetheless, the coach (who was white) gave him less playing time than her son’s black teammates. She attributed this to the coach’s inability to believe that a white guy could be as good a running back as a black guy. In other words, because of the black athlete stereotype, inferior black players were getting more opportunity than her son.
Now on the one hand, I’m a parent, so I know something about the way parents tend to view our children. To put it mildly, we are not always the most objective judges of our own kids’ talents: we tend to think their preschool scribbling is a sure sign of artistic genius, their first sentence evidence of pending literary fame, their ability to play a tune on the piano proof of their status as prodigies, and their successful completion of a pirouette sufficient confirmation that they’ll be dancing in the Joffrey in no time. So I take parental bragging about children with a grain of salt. I would hope others would do the same when I get to talking about mine; they’re great, mind you, but they’re just kids.
On the other hand, I was willing to indulge this mom’s accolades for her son. After all, she could be right—he really could be faster than the black guys—and if she was (in other words, if the coach really was making a racist decision in favor of the black players and against her white son), there was an interesting lesson to be learned; but it wasn’t the one she imagined.
Let’s assume the coaches on her son’s team really did misperceive the relative abilities of their players because of some pro-black stereotype when it came to speed or agility. Where would that thought have come from? How did it originate, and for what purpose? Well, of course, the racist stereotypes of black physicality and athletic prowess have long been constructed as the opposite of certain other abilities they are presumed to lack, namely, intellectual abilities. Interestingly then, whites, having been considered intellectually superior to blacks, which works to our benefit in the job market and schools, end up being seen as less athletic, because we have long viewed the two skill sets (sports and academics) as incompatible. Ironically, what this means is that the racist construction of an anti-black stereotype when it comes to intellect—which includes as a corollary the idea that blacks are better athletes, since brain power is believed to be inversely related to athleticism—can have a negative consequence for those whites who play sports. They end up the collateral damage of racism—not racism aimed at them, but a larger mindset of racism long aimed at the black and brown.
Which is to say that if we’d like to see white football players or basketball players given a fair shot to prove themselves, free from the inferiorizing assumptions that can attach to them because of a larger system of racist thought, we have to attack that larger structure. We can’t merely deal with one of its symptoms. In other words, young men like the son in this story will be viewed as equally capable running backs at precisely that moment his black teammates are likely to be seen as equally capable doctors or engineers, and not one second earlier.
BY MIDDLE SCHOOL, my closeness to my black friends had translated into a remarkable ability to code-switch, meaning an ability to shift between so-called “standard” English, and what some call “Black English,” and to do it naturally, fluidly, and without pretense. Although my parents never minded this, even when I would forget to switch back, thereby remaining in black cadence and dialect around the house, there were others who found it mightily disturbing. Teachers were none too happy with the way they would hear me speaking in the halls to my friends. It was one thing for an actual black person to speak that way, but for a white child to do so was one step over the racial line, and one about which they were hardly pleased.
Adding to the general unease that some white folks seemed to feel because of my growing proximity to blackness, there was my musical taste, which included a growing affinity for funk and hip-hop, the latter of which was just then beginning to emerge on the national scene. I had long had strangely eclectic musical tastes, so although I was a huge KISS fanatic, I went to bed every night listening to WVOL, Nashville’s so-called urban station, always making a point not to go to sleep until I had heard Parliament’s “Theme From the Black Hole,” or something, anything, by Kurtis Blow.
I had actually been the first person in my school, white or black, to memorize every word to the fourteen-minute version of “Rapper’s Delight” (the first major rap hit, though purists dispute the legitimacy of its pedigree and performers, the Sugar Hill Gang). My friends and I would have rap battles to see who could get through the latest song without forgetting any of the words. I usually won these rather handily.
But all this cross-cultural competence didn’t endear me to the white teachers, many of whom had been teaching long enough to remember (and prefer) the days when white faces were the only ones in front of them; and by God those white folks had known what it meant to be white—and what it surely didn’t mean was beatboxing.
One teacher in particular quite clearly despised me. Mrs. Crownover, who was my teacher for Language Arts (literature and English class), spoke to me in a voice that barely concealed her contempt, and looked at me with an expression similar to that which one makes around rotting food. When she gave me a D in the class for the second grading period of fifth grade, my mother was stunned. Given that it was a reading class and I had been reading since before I was three, it made little sense that I would have done so poorly. Frankly, I hadn’t been doing my best work. I found the class boring and her lessons tedious, so I knew I wouldn’t be getting a good grade; but a D seemed extreme, even with my lackadaisical effort.
When my mother went to meet with Mrs. Crownover to discuss my grade and find out if there was anything she needed to be worried about in terms of my own effort, focus, or reading skills, it became clear that the grade had been largely unrelated to my effort or ability; rather, it was principally connected to how she felt about my social circle. As Mrs. Crownover told my mom, “Any white parent who sends their child to public schools nowadays should have their heads examined.”
As it turns out, this would prove to be a not-so-incredibly bright career move on Mrs. Crownover’s part. Standing up for my friendships and her own principles, my mother took action, getting together with a few other parents and demanding a sit-down with the principal. Within a matter of weeks, Mrs. Crownover had mysteriously and quite unceremoniously disappeared, at first to be replaced by a series of substitute teachers, and finally, the next year, by someone else altogether. An extended sabbatical, and I believe an early retirement (though not early enough), was to be her much deserved fate.
On the one hand, an act of antiracist resistance such as this is worthy of praise. My mom did what she should have done, and what any white parent in that situation should do. But there is an interesting aspect to this story that is equally worthy of attention, and which demonstrates that even in our acts of allyship we sometimes miss the larger issues. Yes, my mother had resolved to get the individual racist teacher in this instance removed. So far so good. No longer would she be free to work out her own personal damage on children. There would be one less teacher at Stokes carrying around the deep-seated conviction that black children were inferior to the white children she apparently felt should have all fled to private schools at the first sign of integration.
But with that excision accomplished, there remained a far more dangerous institutional cancer operating in the heart of the school that I shared with those black friends of mine. When I returned to class after Mrs. Crownover’s removal, I was still attending a school system that was giving the message every day that blacks were inferior. The school had never needed this one teacher to impart that lesson; it was implicit in the way the school system had been tracking students for five years by then, placing blacks almost exclusively in remedial or standard level tracks while placing most all white students in advanced tracks, or so-called “enrichment” programs, as if those with privilege needed to be made richer in terms of our opportunities. And neither my mother nor I, with all those close friends, had said anything about that racism.
Even in sixth grade, when the racialized nature of tracking became blatant, I wouldn’t catch it. My primary teacher that year, Mrs. Belote, would literally wave her hand, about mid-way through fifth period, signaling to the white kids that it was time for our V.E. class (which stood for, I kid you not, “Very Exceptional”) down the hall. We would quietly rise and depart the integrated classroom like a receding tide of pink, leaving a room filled with black kids who couldn’t have missed what was happening, even though we did. We never thought about it once at the time, friendships or no.
In other words, even as my mother had stood up against the obvious bigot, she had dropped the ball, just like everyone else, when it came to confronting institutional racism. My closeness with black people hadn’t protected them from that system, and hadn’t allowed me to see what was happening, let alone resolve to fix it, at least not yet.
OF COURSE, THERE were a few exceptions to the racialized tracking scheme at Stokes and throughout the Nashville public schools. Typically there would be one or two black females in the enrichment classes but rarely ever a black male. One of the black females in particular is worth reflecting upon, as her experience demonstrates quite clearly the absurdity of racism as a national and even global phenomenon. During that fifth grade year, she was the one black student who was consistently placed in the advanced track. Her name was Rudo Nderere, and she and her family had recently come to the United States from Zimbabwe, arriving, if memory serves, before it actually became Zimbabwe—when it had still been Rhodesia, a racist, white supremacist and apartheid state, much like South Africa.
White teachers loved Rudo, and on several occasions I would hear them commenting upon how intelligent she was (which was true), and how articulate she was (also true), and how lovely her accent was (absolutely inarguable, as the Southern African accent is among the most pleasant in the world). But of course there were also native-born blacks in that school, and in those same teachers’ classrooms, who were every bit as brilliant and articulate. But the teachers rarely saw that, which is why their astonishment at Rudo’s articulateness was so implicitly racist: it suggested that such a characteristic was somehow foreign to black people, that the ability to speak well was a white trait that no black person had ever managed to possess before.
In any event, what was fascinating about the way Rudo was viewed in that Nashville middle school is how utterly different the perception of her—the very same her, with the same intelligence, accent, and ability to string words together in coherent sentences—would have been, and indeed had been in her native country. In Rhodesia, from which place she had just recently departed, she would have been seen as inferior, no matter her genius. She would have been a second-class citizen, her opportunities constrained, all because of color. But in America, she could be viewed as exotic, as different, as capable. She could be contrasted with local black folks who were perceived as less capable, as aggressive, as uninterested in education, as inferior.
Many years later I would realize the process at work here—the way that foreign-born blacks are often played off against native-born African Americans in a way that has everything to do with racism and white supremacy. Reading a story in my local paper about a white church in town that had been working with Sudanese refugees to help them find jobs, child care, and various social services, I was struck by one of the statements made by the church’s pastor. When asked why the church had gone to such lengths to help African migrants, but had never done similar outreach with local black families in need of the same opportunities, the pastor noted that in some ways it was probably because the Africans were so grateful to be here. They had chosen to come, after all. They had wanted to be like us, like Americans. Native-born black folks on the other hand had made no such choice, and they regularly contested the dominant narrative about what America means and has long meant. African Americans, in other words, were pushy and demanding, and felt entitled (imagine that) to the fruits of their prodigious labors throughout the generations. But African immigrants were joiners, wanting nothing more than the opportunity to partake in the American dream. They serve as validation for the greatness of the country; they give the lie to the notion that the U.S. is a place where racism still exists. After all, were it so, why would any of them move here? That Irish and Italian and Jewish migrants had long before come to America, despite the prejudices they knew they might well face in their adopted countries—in other words, they had come for economic opportunity, racial and ethnic bias notwithstanding, much as Africans sometimes do now—seems to escape us.
That one place may be preferable to another in terms of opportunity says little about whether that first place is as equitable as it should be. But for many white Americans, like those teachers at Stokes, the presence of someone like Rudo confirmed everything they needed to believe about their nation. She was like a soothing balm, allowing them not only to push away concerns about institutional racism, but also to avoid confronting their own biases, which played out against the other black students in their classes every day.
