White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (22 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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During the Father’s Day visit, I brought him a folder with every article I’d ever written to that point from the school paper and the alternative zine I was writing for in New Orleans. He had been a journalist in college, and because he appreciated my politics, I figured it would mean a lot more to him than another pair of socks.
We had no idea that he wouldn’t be coming out of the hospital. Though he definitely wasn’t in good shape, there was nothing to indicate that this would be anything other than a routine operation. After handing him the folder with my essays, I expected him to put it aside and read it later, perhaps in a week or so, after returning from his surgery. But he read the entire thing, methodically consuming a few dozen short pieces, leaving my mom, Mabel (who we called Maw Maw), and me to visit with one another. It was as if he knew that if he didn’t read them then, he wouldn’t be getting the chance.
Looking back, I should have known something was up with him. A few weeks earlier I had stayed at Leo and Mabel’s house—I still liked to go and spend the night there sometimes when I was home from college, to take advantage of the peace and quiet—and had had a conversation with him unlike any I had ever had before. I remember him, for the first time, beginning to speak of his father. He was trying to tell me stories of what his dad had experienced in Russia, and about his journey to America (a story we only knew little bits and pieces of, principally the ones I shared earlier). But every time he started to tell a story, to actually provide me with a specific piece of information, his voice would trail off, and he would start again, usually in a different place, and on some totally different subject.
He repeated the process a few times until it became obvious that he wasn’t going to get much out. It wasn’t that his mind was going or his memories were fading. Though his body was at the end of a journey, his mind was strong. The problem was that he literally didn’t have any stories to tell, at least not complete ones. And the reason he didn’t have any stories was because tales about the old country and a connection to that immigrant past were often the first casualties of whiteness, the first things that had to be sacrificed on the altar of assimilation. To hold on to those stories, let alone to pass them down, would be to remain stuck, one was told; it would stifle one from becoming fully American (which meant white American at the time of entry for European ethnics). So one had to begin the process of transformation: Don’t seem too Jewish, don’t teach your children the language of their forbears, nor the customs, don’t talk about the old country. Put all that behind and become a new man—a white man. Only by giving up one’s past could a person like Jacob Wise win a future for his children, or so he was led to believe. Only in that way could he make others comfortable enough with his presence that they might welcome him and his brood into the American fold.
It had begun innocently enough, or so it seemed, there on Ellis Island, being told by some immigration official that they couldn’t understand the thick Yiddish coming off your tongue, and so it would be necessary to give you a new name, to simply make one up. What was that, after all, which you were garbling? Shuckleman, Sheckman, Shuckman, Shankman? Ah, to hell with it, your name is now Wise; not Weiss, but Wise, whitened and sanitized for your protection—with all due apologies to Alex Haley, a Jewish Toby.
Had the name been the only thing lost, perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. What’s in a name, after all? Well nothing except one’s past; nothing except the intergenerational fiber that had kept your people together for generations; nothing except the story of how you survived. Nothing but
that
.
So the process of whitening had begun and now it was culminating in the inability of my grandfather, Jacob’s son, to pass down any story, anything at all about his father, his mother, his grandparents, or the place from which we came. To know those stories would first have required that he had been taught them; and for him to be taught them would have required that Jacob had been willing to do so; and for his father to have been so willing would have meant that he had been able to resist the pull and lure of whiteness; and to do that had been unthinkable.
So my grandfather joined our ancestors, about whom neither I, nor oddly enough, even he, knew much of anything. With him went my connection to the past, leaving me—and now my daughters—with nothing other than one-half of a set of gold candlesticks, the only items smuggled out of Russia on that ship Papa boarded so many years ago. I don’t even know the story that goes with the candlestick, but sadly it is all I have left.
All, that is, except for my white skin. And though that skin provides me with innumerable benefits, it is hardly better than the candle in the candlestick at keeping me warm at night, because I know its true price; I know how much my family paid for it, and for my name. I know, because I saw in Paw Paw’s eyes that day, what the cost of white privilege had been for my people, what it had exacted of my kinfolk as they hit the reset button on the game of life and stifled their traditions and cultures so they might find a place in this land. I know the cost incurred and the penalty paid by those who had to give up who they were and become something they were not—white. I know because I saw the bill of sale, saw it in the silence between my grandfather and myself. It was a silence louder than any scream I had ever heard.
SENIOR YEAR BEGAN,
and as usual, I was distracted from my studies. As had been true my freshman year, I was once again in a long distance relationship—this time with a woman at Vanderbilt whom I’d met working at Greenpeace—and so every other weekend for the several months that our relationship lasted, I was back and forth to Nashville. Luckily, by this point I had enough credits under my belt to take a light load academically, including only three courses in my last semester, along with finishing up the honor’s thesis on the Mississippi civil rights movement. So even with the distractions, I managed to do alright.
When the year started off, I had planned to focus most of my activist attentions on reinvigorating the anti-apartheid movement that had faltered the year before. But even before a month had gone by, the campus was rocked by a racist scandal quite a bit closer to home. In mid-September, a cross was burned on the lawn of the Delta Tau Delta house. Apparently, the fraternity had been targeted because it had just extended a bid to a black student, Donnell Suares, for the first time in the chapter’s history. Someone, perhaps an alum, wasn’t too pleased about it.
When the campus paper broke the news (which had been covered up for roughly two weeks by the fraternity itself, and then by the administration once they learned of it), all hell broke loose. It was bad enough that a cross had been burned, but the fact that the Delts hadn’t seen fit to notify the proper authorities—a move that the head of campus security blamed for hampering the investigation—was damned near criminal. That the president’s office had further attempted to keep the incident underwraps, thereby losing the opportunity to make a clear public statement condemning the hate crime, only compounded the offense. The fraternity clearly failed to appreciate the magnitude of the incident. At a press conference called by myself and several members of the school’s black student group, Chet Givens, the frat’s president explained they had remained silent about the hate crime because they “didn’t believe it was racially-motivated or a campus issue.” Interestingly, one of the members of the fraternity who remained stone silent for the two weeks of the initial cover-up, was Andrew Breitbart, now one of the nation’s most notorious right-wing commentators. That Breitbart now claims to have been the person who pushed for Suares’ membership in the first place makes his silence and unwillingness to quit the group in the wake of their non-chalance even more pathetic. Some friend was Andrew.
As for the administration, protecting the public image of the school took priority over forceful action, much as it had three years prior, when the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity had marched through the middle of campus in blackface, taunting black students with lit torches in a mock Mardi Gras parade. At the time, the president’s office had said they were unable to punish anyone (despite the fact that the fraternity had been banned from campus and the torches were weapons being thrust in the faces of black students) because they couldn’t identify the perpetrators under all that greasepaint—an interesting twist on the “all blacks look alike” trope. The fact that the yearbook staff had no problem identifying each and every one of them a few months later, changed nothing.
In any event, and in keeping with the inventive ways in which white folks so often manage to deny the existence of racism even when its presence is obvious, there were many beyond merely Givens and the Delts who claimed the cross-burning might not be racially-motivated. Because the cross had only been two feet tall, they speculated, it might have had nothing to do with racism. Of course, because the way to discern the motives of people who burn crosses is always by use of a handy slide rule.
Though many of us blasted the administration’s handling of the incident and gave them a much needed public battering for it, nothing much happened. No one was ever caught or punished for the act, and thus, there was nothing to deter others from doing it again. As such, in January, three members of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity (the KAs), which celebrates the “Old South” and considers Robert E. Lee their spiritual founder, burned a cross in their own backyard. This time the story got out as soon as it happened, thanks to other members of the fraternity who hadn’t been involved in the incident and reported those who had.
But then too, the denial was creative. The frat boys who had burned the cross actually went so far as to say they had had no intention to do so, but were merely adding wood to a bonfire in their backyard when two pieces “happened to fall in a cross-like position” in the flames. It was all a big misunderstanding. Yes, we dress up in Confederate uniforms and march down St. Charles Avenue every year, all the way to Robert E. Lee circle, waving confederate flags, but we’re not
racists
, and that cross thing was just a coincidence. When it was pointed out that a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard sign had been tacked to the horizontal bar on the cross, that too was written off as coincidence, as one brother pointed out that he had no idea how that might have gotten there; after all, they would have to have gone to the black part of town to steal a sign like that, and that would have been too dangerous! Yes, it was sure good to know the KAs weren’t racists.
Interestingly, a valuable lesson emerged from the community discussion that followed the KA incident. At the outset of the evening, one young white man rose to ask a question, for which he apologized at the outset, so certain was he that it would prove offensive. He noted that he was a KA himself, and although he recognized why a burning cross was offensive to him as a Christian, he honestly had no idea why it was offensive to blacks. Could someone please explain it to him, he wanted to know?
At first everyone gasped, taken aback by such lack of awareness, and in a few cases, ready to pounce on the kid for his ignorance. But then it hit us: he really didn’t know. He wasn’t trying to minimize the severity of what his fraternity brothers had done. He simply had never been told anything about the history of that symbolism, its use by the Ku Klux Klan going back over one-hundred-and-twenty-years, and the way burning crosses had been utilized to terrorize black families in the South and elsewhere for generations.
That he didn’t know these things was hardly his fault. His schools had never seen fit to teach them, probably concerned that such lessons would detract from the far more palatable narrative of America’s greatness, exceptionalism, openness, and commitment to liberty for all. He had been lied to, as had the rest of us. The fact that a few of us had gotten the truth from parents or mentors was hardly something over which we had the right to be smug. It simply meant that we had an obligation to struggle with him, as we would want others to struggle with us in our own moments of ignorance. People like that young man couldn’t be written off, especially by other whites, content that our own radicalism somehow made us superior. He was one of us, after all. And there are plenty of times the rest of us hadn’t seen things clearly either, or wouldn’t in the future. As I would soon learn.

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