White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (18 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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However we managed to get on the subject, it was obvious that my mom, angry at me for preparing to leave her nest, was going to use this issue—the one she knew would injure me because antiracism had been such an undercurrent in our home—as a way to lash out. The next thing I knew, she was spewing one after another nonsensical statement about lazy black women and their illegitimate children, and then launching into some extemporaneous diatribe about a particular black woman with whom she had worked (and with whom I always thought she’d gotten along pretty well), who in today’s white zinfandel-induced haze, had become incompetent, pushy, a bigot.
In other words, we had gone from talking about a Peace Fair to talking about welfare to talking about a colleague of hers in a matter of minutes, and now things were getting heated, and I was firing back, which is exactly what she wanted. I was watching her use racism in a way that would have sickened her in her sober moments, as a tool to express some totally unrelated angst—as a way to work out the existential crisis she was experiencing at that moment. It was ugly, and not really understanding what was going on—in fact at one point I contemplated that my mother was either having a total nervous breakdown, or had been a fraud all of my life when it came to race—I lit into her, and told her never to speak that way in front of me again.
It was finally at the point where she began to utter the word, the word that was the only word I knew, growing up, never to say, that I exploded, not allowing her to finish it.
“Goddamn nig”- she started.
“Shut the fuck UP!” I screamed.
And that’s when she swung at me, for the first time in my life, but slowly, not as though she really wanted to hit me. Her right arm came up in a sad and pitiful arc toward my cheek, palm open, her face contorted in pain—a pain deeper than any I had ever seen there, even as she had stood over my father’s hospital bed on the night of his suicide attempt. The look that night had been a look of exhaustion, of resignation to the not-so-fairy-tale ending of her none-toofairy-tale marriage. But this was not resignation I was seeing now. She was imploding, and in the process burning away all illusions. She was going to make me hurt, not physically—as she surely knew I would stop her arm long before her hand could make contact with the side of my head—but at the core of who I was, by making me question who
she
was.
And for that experience I thank her, because without it, I may never have really seen how distorted white people could be as a result of racism. My mom, after all, had been my model when it came to things political. She had been consistent, she had been clear, and she had never given me any reason to doubt her. But that confidence, that faith in her perfection was unhealthy; it was downright dangerous, because that is not the real world. That world of bedrock principle and never-wavering resistance in the face of social conditioning is not the world in which real people reside.
Racism, even if it is not your own but merely circulates in the air, changes you; it allows you to think and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be. My mother, by proving her own weakness and exhibiting her own conditioning, taught me that one can never be too careful, can never enjoy the luxury of being too smug, of believing oneself so together, so liberal, so down with the cause of liberation that it becomes impossible to be sucked in, to be transformed. We may only do it once, or perhaps twice, but it can happen. So long as that is true, we mustn’t romanticize our resistance, but fight to maintain its presence in our lives, knowing that it could easily vanish in a moment of weakness, anger, insecurity, or fear.
Those moments are the ones that matter, after all. People never hurt others in moments of strength and bravery, or when we’re feeling good about ourselves. If we spent all of our time in places such as that, then fighting for social justice would be redundant—we would simply
have
social justice and be done with it, and we could all go swimming, or dancing, or whatever people do. But it is because we spend so much of our time in that other place—a place of diminished capacity and wavering commitment—that we have to be careful. And it is for that reason that we need these reminders, however ugly, of our frailty. Knowing the horrors of which we’re capable is the only thing that might keep us mindful of what and who we’d prefer to be.
I ARRIVED IN
New Orleans with my parents and Monica in late August, though it felt more like early Hell, the mercury permanently stuck somewhere between ninety-five degrees and heat stroke. Worse still, the humidity was congealing into solid form, enveloping me like a tight-fitting coat of phlegm, and causing me to wonder whether this girl standing next to me on Bourbon Street, for whom I’d made the decision to come to Tulane, was really worth it. I was starting to have my doubts, allowing my mind to wander to thoughts of college up North, where it would be cooler. I’d be alone, but at least I wouldn’t be covered in sweat.
As we walked along the heavily-trafficked tourist corridor—part of the roughly eighty square block area that had been the core of the city at its founding in 1718 by Bienville, the French Governor of Louisiana—I had to admit to having never experienced anything like it. From the ubiquitous smell of booze and seafood to the strip clubs to the architecture, it was certainly unlike my home town—a city also known for music and entertainment, but of a decidedly different kind. Lower Broadway, in Nashville, was certainly seedy at the time, but the French Quarter, even at its seediest, had
style,
it had culture, it had, above all else,
history
. Though I didn’t yet know the racialized component of that history, I would learn soon enough. In fact, I would begin learning a little something about it that very day.
“Hey mister,” a young squeaky voice cried out from behind me and to the right. I spun around, not sure that the words had been meant for me—after all, I hardly thought of myself as a mister, being only seventeen—and saw a black kid, perhaps ten, hopping off his bike and coming towards me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “What’s up?”
“I betcha’ dollar I can tell you where you got ‘dem shoes,” the child answered.
“I’ll take that bet,” I replied, confident that there was no way this child in front of me could really know where I had purchased my footwear. Little did I know it at the time—I had, after all, been in the city for all of two hours—but I had just walked into the biggest trap in the history of traps. Being a big, bad
Tulane
student, however, I was cocky enough to assume that I had just won a dollar off some kid in the Quarter, not thinking for even a second that no one would have offered this bet if he didn’t already know that he had me from the get-go.
As it turns out, of course, and as I would soon learn, the young man had never actually claimed to know the point of origin of the shoes on my feet. He had merely offered to tell me where I “got ‘dem,” as in had them, at that particular moment, owing nothing whatsoever to the location of the department store in which they had been purchased, the name of which meant no more to him than my own, and neither of which he had any real desire to learn. This was business, after all, not personal.
He asked me to show him the money, which I did, at which point he sprang the trap. “You got your shoes on your feet, you got your feet on the street, on Bourbon Street, now give me a dollar.” It was a logic with which—once I learned the hyper-literal meaning of his initial challenge—I could hardly argue. I was indeed on Bourbon Street, between St. Peter and Iberville to be exact, my shoes planted firmly on my feet, my feet on the steaming, summer-scorched asphalt, damn near melting in the sun. I gave him the money gladly, and in the process learned more than the value of a dollar alone. Transaction completed, the wordsmith and street hustler, whose linguistic machinations had probably worked on a hundred tourists before, not to mention more than a few Tulane students and their parents, headed down the street in search of the next mark. It was a search that couldn’t have taken long, filled as the streets of the Quarter typically are, and mostly with persons whose gullibility rises in direct relation to their blood alcohol levels, the latter of which remain dangerously elevated most of the time. Taking money off persons such as this was quite literally what the metaphor writer must have had in mind when first coming up with the phrase
like candy from a baby
.
There’s something to be said, I thought to myself, about any place where poor folks, rather than just stealing your money, or simply begging for it, instead earn it by way of winning an entirely voluntary game of wits, outsmarting those who are typically far more educated and no doubt more socially respected than they. Street hustling of this sort—the kind that makes a riddle into a commercial transaction—is uniquely American in that regard, evidence of the ability of those who have been long neglected by the political and economic system to once and again turn the tables on those for whom the rules of the game were set up in the first place.
Of course, it’s made all the more sweet by the realization that the kids who pull these scams know full well that the only reason anyone falls for it,
and most everyone does at least once
, is precisely because they are black and poor, and therefore presumed to lack the brainpower to pull one over on those who are white, more affluent, and imbued with (at least in our own minds) superior intellects. Yet they do, over and again, demonstrating the limitations of scholarly competence, which ultimately shrivels up like a dead leaf in the face of a far deeper intellect possessed by children who are seen as uneducable by the larger society, which tells us little about those so doubted, but quite a bit about the society that doubts them.
WHEN I GOT
to Tulane, I considered myself a hip liberal, aware of racism and committed to fighting it. Within a few weeks of my arrival, however, I had largely missed the meaning of two different incidents—one fairly minor, the other pretty significant—and thereby missed an opportunity to respond in a forthright manner.
The first took place during freshman orientation, when all the bright seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who had come to Tulane sat in a hot auditorium and listened to the typical “welcome to our school” routine given to all students at all colleges in the country. There were the expected platitudes about the history of the university, and about the importance of adjusting to life away from home, and warnings about the pitfalls of going to school in New Orleans. Among these snares was the ubiquitous problem of heavy drinking. The drinking age had just been raised to twenty one, but most students (though not me) had birthdays that fell within the grandfathering period. We were also warned to stay away from certain neighborhoods and to travel in groups because not all of New Orleans was as safe as Uptown, where the university was located.
At first glance this may seem like nothing more than good advice, but to the extent the warnings were all regarding black and poor neighborhoods, it was highly racialized and selective in a way that prioritized the well-being of whites to the exclusion of persons of color, the latter of whom might well have been at risk in certain white spaces. This was made all the more obvious by the second thing that happened, within a month or so of the beginning of school: namely, the announcement by the sheriff of neighboring Jefferson Parish that he had instructed his deputies to stop any and all black males driving in the Parish in “rinkydink” automobiles after dark, on suspicion of being up to no good, as he put it.
At no point had Tulane officials suggested that students, even black ones, stay away from Jefferson Parish, even though it was understood to be less than hospitable to black folks. Sheriff Harry Lee—a Chinese American loved by good old boys from the white flight suburb in large part because of his anti-black biases—had been profiling African American males for a long time before he ever went public with his law enforcement techniques, and Tulane had thought nothing of it. School officials had sought to make sure we didn’t make the mistake of straying into the black and mostly poor parts of town, out of a concern that we might become victims of random street crime, but at no point did they warn students of color of the many areas in the metropolitan vicinity where they might have been endangered.

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