White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (24 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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Although we have to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we make, we must first acknowledge them. We must first face up to the fact that in our resistance we too often reinforce the hierarchical arrangements we strive to oppose. Only by being called out, as I was, can we learn this in most cases. Only by being exposed to our flaws, forced to deal with them and learn from them, can we move forward and strengthen our resistance in the future. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we who are white (and specifically white antiracists) will screw up more times than we care to count, more times than we expected, and just about as often as people of color already figured we would. Saying this does not diminish us, and it doesn’t mean that we have no important role to play in the destruction of white supremacy. It just means that privilege sometimes costs us the clarity of vision needed to see what we’re doing, and how even in our resistance, we sometimes play the collaborator.
LOUISIANA
GODDAM
*
 
*(WITH APOLOGIES TO NINA SIMONE)
 
 
 
 
 
IT WAS ONLY
during the waning days of the shanty siege that I firmly decided to return to New Orleans in the fall. I had been thrown for a loop by the young woman at the divestment debate, her question, and my miserable answer, bouncing around in my brain for days afterward. Although I had toyed with the idea of moving out West after taking time off that summer—to do what, I wasn’t sure—it was obvious that having done little to address racism in New Orleans, I had some work to do before I could move on.
For several years a group of about a dozen of us had been publishing an alternative paper called the
AVANT
, and during the two weeks we’d been camped in front of the administration building, we’d begun to discuss creating a press collective so that those of us interested in continuing it could live together and work on its production. With five people (initially) in the house—which was already being rented beginning in August by one of the
AVANT
principals, Don Morgan—rent would be cheap, and we’d all be able to get by with monies generated from ad sales, hopefully, plus whatever odd jobs we might pick up. Having no better plan and feeling as though I needed to return to the city to work on issues related to racism, I cast my lot with the press co-op and took claim to one of the rooms in the large house on Robert Street.
I spent the summer in Nashville at the old apartment, living on what little graduation money I had managed to get from my parents and grandparents. I also took the better part of a week in late June to travel to Kansas City and Louisville with Debbie, my girlfriend at the time, to see Grateful Dead concerts, which were a potpourri of white privilege if ever the word had meaning. Needless to say, if black concertgoers ever did as many drugs openly as Deadheads did, we’d need a lot more prisons to hold them all. But so long as you didn’t do anything violent or disruptive, you could pretty well get as high as you liked at a Dead show, confident that nothing would happen to you.
The trip was a fun diversion, but ultimately I was disenchanted with the largely apolitical and disconnected vibe of the whole Dead scene. Traveling the country selling tempeh and falafel in the parking lot of some stadium is not only
not
going to produce positive social change, it’s terribly self-indulgent. The people who spent years of their lives following the Dead around—though they might have thought they were doing something important and “alternative,” by dropping out of the rat race—were really only substituting a new kind of conformity, in which tie-dye took the place of slacks or business suits, but ultimately participants were no more truly individual than anywhere else in America. In many ways, this had long been the problem with hippies: most of them had always been more focused on living in countercultural ways rather than in organizing for social transformation. It had always been very ascetic, very self-referential, very much about “doing your own thing,” but not as often about liberation in the larger institutional sense. As for the Deadheads, it’s one thing to like the music, but to turn vagabondism into a lifestyle while the world is burning is simply an exercise in privilege and social irresponsibility.
Around mid-July, a few weeks before I was due to return to New Orleans, some disturbing news from Louisiana began to circulate, which called into even starker relief the difference between the real world and the world I’d left behind after the last Dead show in Louisville. According to polling data from around the state, ex-Klansman and lifelong white supremacist David Duke was gaining ground in his campaign for the U.S. Senate, having picked up a few points on the incumbent Democrat, J. Bennett Johnston. Because the conventional wisdom was that Duke “flew below radar”—since many who intended to vote for him might be hesitant to admit their plans to pollsters—even a poll showing him with one-quarter of the likely vote was disturbing. By now, he was pulling numbers close to a third.
When Duke had announced he was running for the Senate, few had taken him seriously. Although he had won a state legislative seat the year before, by 227 votes, most had seen that victory as a fluke, the result of a lackluster effort by media to expose his ongoing ties to extremists and his neo-Nazi philosophies.
Frankly, even I hadn’t fully appreciated the threat Duke posed. Back during the legislative race, in early 1989, I had gone to Duke’s campaign headquarters with the woman I was dating at the time to check out his operation. Georgia called his office and asked if we could come pick up some campaign materials. She told them we were Tulane students and were interested in getting some information to counter the liberalism on campus. They were all to happy to oblige, and said to come right away, as they’d be closing up soon.
David’s office was in the basement of his house, so when we arrived, we walked into his home and saw the volunteers—all female, and all blonde, except for one older woman who looked like someone’s grandma—answering phones, preparing mailers, and excited to see us. “We don’t get many inquiries from Jew-lane,” one said, thinking herself quite clever for having voiced a common anti-Semitic slur on the university, seeing as how it included a large Jewish student population.
As I looked around, trying to take in the scope of his operation, David burst through a curtain separating the main campaign office from what seemed like a smaller room—perhaps an alcove or a walkin closet—to the right of where we stood. I hadn’t expected him to be there (indeed, I had hoped he wouldn’t be), and was alarmed when he bounded towards us, hand extended, ever the campaigner. Though I had received some media attention for the anti-apartheid work the previous spring, most of it had been in the paper, rather than on television, so I wasn’t particularly worried about him recognizing me. Still, having to shake his hand—the hand of the nation’s most prominent Nazi—so as not to blow my cover was nauseating.
As we prepared to leave, loaded up with campaign materials, I looked over to a bookshelf in the office and saw five or six copies of the book “The Hitler We Loved and Why,” as well as copies of “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” which argues that the Holocaust of European Jewry never happened. The sightings confirmed everything I knew about Duke going into the headquarters, yet, for reasons I still can’t understand, I didn’t think to go public with what I’d seen (which would have made for a great story, and might have even derailed his legislative campaign). Later that year, when his Nazi book-selling operation would be exposed by Beth Rickey, a longtime Republican activist and committed Duke foe, I realized how stupid I’d been for not having gone public earlier. But at least the truth would eventually come out.
Among those who took Duke very seriously were Lance Hill and Larry Powell, the first of whom was a friend and a grad student at Tulane, and the latter of whom had been a history professor of mine. Lance had been on Duke’s case since before the state House race and had compiled an impressive array of research on David’s ongoing white supremacist activity, most notably, his leadership at the time of an outfit known as the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP). The group, which Duke had founded after leaving the Klan in 1980, fashioned itself the equivalent of the NAACP, but took all kinds of overtly racist positions, such as calling for eugenics programs to produce a master race of superior whites, advocating the creation of separate racial nations within the borders of the United States, and claiming that Jews were controlling the media so as to destroy the white race. Additionally, Duke sold merchandise from the back of the
NAAWP News,
including the books I’d seen on his office bookshelf, praising Adolf Hitler and suggesting that the Holocaust of European Jewry was a hoax.
All throughout the spring semester of my senior year, Larry had asked if I might be interested in coming back to town and working for the newly-formed Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, the group he, Lance, Beth Rickey, and a few others had formed as a PAC, specifically to defeat Duke in the fall. Initially not planning to return to town, and really not expecting Duke to do that well in the election, I had always passed. But now, sitting in my bedroom in Nashville, hearing the news about David’s building momentum, I began to think that I’d made a terrible mistake, just like the one I’d made after seeing the inside of his campaign headquarters and not taking him seriously enough to have called the press.
I got back to New Orleans in August, moving into the big yellow house at 1805 Robert Street, which (as I would later learn) was next door to the home to which Truman Capote had been brought from the hospital after his birth, and in which he had lived for a few years as a child. Truman’s old abode was in far better shape than ours. The house in which we would be living had been divided into two sides, each rented out separately, and each in equal states of disrepair. It was, simply put, a hovel. Many years later, after Hurricane Katrina, I would go back to see how it had held up and could discern very little difference between its condition after the flooding and that fifteen years before.
Within a few months the number of people living in the house would reach probably illegal (and surely unsanitary) levels, growing from five to ten, as several of us began moving in our significant others, or, in another case, taking in two high school seniors from the Catholic girls’ school down the road whose parents didn’t mind them living on their own. The only positive thing about this arrangement was how it kept costs down. With rent coming to five hundred and twenty-five a month, and all of us broke, we were willing to make it work. Fifty-two dollars and fifty cents per person was awfully good, even in 1990.
But as the people in the house changed, its mission as a press collective did too. We would only put out two more issues of the
AVANT
before closing it down for good in March 1991. By the time we had moved in, it seemed as though we all had different ideas about what we wanted to do, and the paper wasn’t high on anyone’s priority list. Most of the roommates were still in school, and by then, I was spending the bulk of my time at the Louisiana Coalition offices, doing what I could in the anti-Duke campaign.
The job that Larry had offered me before graduation was no longer available, it having been filled by Hari Osofsky, a Yale undergraduate who was home for the summer. Her task was to coordinate the anti-Duke network on Louisiana college campuses, which in places like New Orleans wasn’t all that complicated, but in northern Louisiana or at some of the smaller-town schools could prove daunting, given Duke’s support in such communities. I’d known Hari for a few years, so when I started volunteering at the Coalition offices, we worked well together. I knew that the more I ingratiated myself to Lance, and the harder I worked to assist the campaign, the better the chances were that once Hari returned to Yale (which would still be six weeks before election day), I would likely be picked as her replacement.
I basically lived at the Coalition headquarters, volunteering all day every day. Within a few weeks, even before Hari had left, Lance brought me onto the paid staff to work with her, and then ultimately to take over her position once she went back to New Haven. My salary was five dollars and fifty cents per hour, but Lance didn’t put me on a fixed number of hours; as such, since I was coming in early and staying late, finding plenty to do, I was able to rack up sixty to seventy hours weekly with no problem, which meant I was making over three hundred dollars a week—way more than I needed to live in the Robert Street house.
To be working in the campaign against Duke was exhilarating and occasionally scary. We would constantly have to monitor our mail, worried as we were that some of Duke’s supporters might send something other than a love letter or donation our way. As it turned out, we got plenty of angry diatribes, death threats, and envelopes filled with dead cockroaches and human feces (at least I
think
it was human), but thankfully, no bombs. Listening to the answering machine each morning was always entertaining. Who knew there were so many ways to call people “Jew bastards” and “nigger lovers?”
I had known of David Duke since I was nine. That was when I had first seen him on the
Phil Donahue Show
, at which point he was still the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the largest of the various Klan groups in the U.S. People had always commented on how attractive and well-spoken he was, but in retrospect, back in his Klan days, the only reason people could have felt that way is because they were comparing him to the toothless, semi-illiterate folks who had long been the image of the typical Klansman. The bar had been set pretty low. Frankly, his high-pitched nasally whine and his slickeddown mop of hair—along with a squirrelly moustache that looked like a ferret perched on his upper lip—had always made him appear as an underfed Adolf Hitler, which, come to think of it, is probably what he’d been going for.

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