White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (27 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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ALL THROUGHOUT THE
early-to-mid-1990s, New Orleans was known nationwide for its crime problem, and by then it had already been notorious for years for its overzealous police force. The combination of these two facts made it difficult sometimes to know who the good guys were. For people of color, calling on the police for help was a dicey proposition, mostly because they could never know whether help is what they’d receive as opposed to brutality and mistreatment.
One night while we were living on Robert Street, one of the roommates, Darryl Barthé, got to experience the brutality of the NOPD up close and personal. Darryl, who remains to this day one of the most no-bullshit people I’ve ever met—he says what’s on his mind and could give a rat’s ass if you like him or not—was and is a character, possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge about the city of New Orleans, and especially its color divide, not only between black and white but between Creoles, which he is, and everyone else. Darryl also is imbued with a classic punk-rock mentality, not only because it’s among the many styles of music he enjoys, but because it fits perfectly with his political sensibilities. He has always struck me as a combination of Jello Biafra (founding member of the iconic punk band Dead Kennedys) and Dr. Madd Vibe (lead singer of the ska/punk/funk group Fishbone), along with a little Bakunin and Huey Newton thrown in for good measure.
On his way back from a party near the Riverbend area (close to the top of Uptown), Darryl had the misfortune of walking while black, on an evening when apparently someone else, also black, had mugged some white folks. Turning from Freret Street onto Robert, and by this point only a few blocks from our house, Darryl found his path impeded by a police cruiser whose occupants hopped out and demanded that he tell them about “jumping the white people.” He replied that he had no idea what they were talking about and was just walking home. When Darryl proceeded to mumble something about the absurdity of the encounter, one of the officers grabbed him, prompting Darryl—who was fully aware of the reputation of the city’s police and rightly concerned about being manhandled—to attempt to push the cop off of him. Enraged by the act of defiance, the officer then fulfilled his expected and typecast role by slugging Darryl in the mouth, splitting his lip in the process.
The police then proceeded to shove Darryl into the car and drive to the corner of Freret and Calhoun streets, where another officer was speaking with a white female college student who had just been mugged. When the officers pulled Darryl from the car and asked if he was the one who had jumped her, the young woman insisted he was not. Unbowed, the police asked her three more times if she were sure, clearly disappointed by their bad collar and hoping to nail Darryl for the crime. She stood firm however and repeated that Darryl had not assaulted her. In truth, it would have been pretty hard for her to have forgotten Darryl had he been the one; after all, he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Fuck You” in bright red letters.
Rather than release him, though, the police proceeded to throw him back in the car and begin the drive downtown, where, they explained, he would be booked, presumably for the shove he’d administered to the cop who had sought to detain him for a crime he didn’t commit. On the way downtown, as the officers lectured Darryl about how his family clearly hadn’t raised him right, as evidenced by his lack of obeisance to the police, he proceeded to mention that his family included police officers and that his uncle had been Deputy Superintendent at one point and Chief Detective. Unconvinced, they asked for his uncle’s name, which he gladly provided, prompting the police to pull over, let Darryl know how lucky he was, and then put him out on the curb to walk back home.
Such treatment would not be that which I would receive at the hands of the New Orleans police, however, and the difference is worth commenting upon.
Around the same time, I too had encountered one of the city’s finest. It had been early on a Tuesday afternoon. Nicol was in class at Tulane, and I had kept the car that morning while she was on campus so I could run errands. After returning home for lunch, I headed back out onto the street to get in the car and drive to Newcomb Hall to pick her up, at which point I saw that I had locked my keys in the car.
Pissed but not panicked—I had, after all, learned how to get into locked cars with a coat hanger when I was sixteen, sacking groceries at a Nashville market where I’d often been called upon to help elderly ladies who’d made the same mistake—I ran up the stairs, grabbed a wire hanger, and headed back to the car to break in. Unfortunately, the 1988 Toyota Tercel is among the hardest cars on earth into which one may break, which is ironic, considering how few people could possibly want to steal one. No matter my truly veteran efforts to open the door, I was having no luck even after ten minutes.
It was then, as I was furiously bending the hanger back and forth, trying desperately to jam it between the metal door frame and the rubber insulation around the window, that a police car pulled up. The officer hopped out and approached me.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, more curious than accusatory.
“I locked myself out of my car and I’ve got to pick up my girlfriend in like five minutes,” I replied, exasperated with my shitty luck.
I fully expected the officer to ask me for identification or some kind of proof that this was my car, which only goes to show how little I understood about the value of white skin in the eyes of law enforcement.
“Well, I can tell you right now,” he interjected. “The problem is, you’re doing that all wrong.”
“Excuse me?” I replied, not having expected to be told by a police officer that I lacked the necessary acumen to break into a car the
right
way.
“Yeah, that’s no way to break into a car,” he insisted. “Here, let me show you how it’s done.”
And with that he went to his trunk and pulled out a slim jim, which is a long piece of flat metal that can pop a car door open by being shoved down behind the rubber seal around the bottom of the window until it meets an interior rod that controls the door function. Once it connects with the rod, a small hook on the end of the slim jim can pull up on the rod, thereby opening the door. The officer proceeded to demonstrate the proper method for breaking into a car, and seemed to take great glee at the opportunity to demonstrate his own technique for the maneuver. Sadly, he too would be unsuccessful, stymied as I had been by the superior workmanship of the Tercel.
Still unconcerned about my identity or legitimate claim on the vehicle, he suggested that I should throw a rock through the window. When I told him my girlfriend would be pretty pissed at me for doing that, he said I could always tell her someone had broken into the car. Breaking the glass might even be fun, he insisted, making me think that perhaps he was wanting to do the honors himself.
It is, of course, incomprehensible that had it been Darryl (or any black person in his twenties) who had locked himself out of his car and was trying to break in with a coat hanger, that anything about the encounter would have been the same. To think that an officer would have simply taken for granted that the vehicle belonged to the wouldbe black or brown break-in artist requires a level of naiveté almost too stunning to fully comprehend. For whites, innocence was presumed until proven otherwise, while for blacks, the presumption of guilt was the default position.
BY APRIL, NICOL
and I had moved, along with two other roommates, from our overcrowded house on Robert, into a smaller but much cleaner place on Dante Street. It was so clean, in fact, that Darryl took to derisively calling it the “aqua fresh condo.” Between SOS and the increasing volume of work with the Coalition as the Governor’s race began to heat up, I was staying plenty busy.
Duke picked up where he’d left off in the Senate race, rallying angry whites around such themes as welfare reform, affirmative action, and taxes, promising that if he were elected he would stand up for whites, whom he proclaimed to be the victims of “massive reverse discrimination.” Likewise, we at the Coalition swung into high gear, coordinating our second “campaign without a candidate” in two years. This goaround, the choice was going to be between Duke, incumbent Governor (Democrat-turned-Republican) Buddy Roemer, and former three-time Governor, Edwin Edwards. Once again, as Duke came on strong, the more moderate Republican faded. In the primary, Duke won a third of the vote, knocking off Roemer and setting up a runoff with Edwards.
Edwin Edwards had been a fixture on the state political scene for thirty years by 1991. A freewheeling Cajun from Southwestern Louisiana, Edwards had built a reputation as a man of the people, but also as a flamboyant womanizer, gambler, and occasional practitioner of goodold-fashioned corruption. Once famous for saying that when it came to unlawful campaign contributions, it was “illegal for them to give but not for me to receive,” he quipped now that the only way he would lose to David Duke was if he were found in bed with a “dead woman or a live boy.”
Knowing that there was no way to skirt Edwards’ checkered past, we decided to use it as part of the campaign strategy, developing bumper stickers that would become known around the country to people who were watching the race. They said simply, “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.” Soon, it became a battle on the roadways to see which side would claim the allegiance of the most automobiles. On the one side there were the Duke supporters with their blue and white DUKE stickers, and on the other, those of us with our red and white NO DUKES stickers (a play on the ‘No Nukes’ slogan of the ’70s and ’80s), or the black and white one liners about the importance of choosing corruption over its opponent, Nazism.
During the Governor’s race, Lance and I discussed the importance, ethically if not strategically, of more directly confronting Duke’s public policy narrative than we had in the previous campaign. Having already released the report on HB 1584 in June, in which we had sought to confront the widespread misperceptions about so-called welfare and the people who received it, it seemed like an important addition to the existing campaign narrative. And seeing how the unprincipled discussions of Duke’s taxes, draft dodging, and other minor matters had failed to move voters in the Senate race, those sideline distractions would not be making a comeback this time. Although much was made—especially by the Edwards campaign—about the likely economic disaster that would follow a Duke victory (thanks to corporate and tourist boycotts of the state), even that argument rested upon the notion that Duke’s racist extremism is what made him so eminently boycott-able. So even the economic argument rested, indirectly, on an antiracist foundation. It was still about the unacceptability of bigotry.
We took out full page ads in newspapers across the state challenging Duke’s politics of racial scapegoating, pushing back directly against his tendency to blame poor blacks for everything from high taxes to crime to white unemployment, and looking instead at the real sources of working- and middle-class insecurity: corporate tax giveaways, downsizing, deindustrialization, and budget cuts for education. Though it wasn’t to be the key element of our campaign, it was nice to be inserting a clearly progressive critique of mainstream conservatism into the mix, in ways we hadn’t before. For the sake of movement building, it’s critical to develop a counter-narrative, and not merely to rebut the narrative with which you find fault. This time around, we would do that in a much more concerted fashion.
Still, the focus was, as it needed to be, on Duke’s neo-Nazism. And shortly before the open primary in October, we would come across the kind of bombshell we’d been looking for the previous year, which would tie Duke, beyond any doubt, to a politics of Hitlerian ideology. It came in the form of a series of interviews with British researcher Evelyn Rich, who had met with Duke on several occasions in the mid-1980s while doing dissertation research on the white supremacist movement. Rich (who ironically would later marry one of the nation’s leading white nationalists, Jared Taylor) turned out to have done some of the best work for the Coalition, without even knowing she had done so.
Lance had found the recordings of Duke’s interviews with Rich, as well as some transcripts, and had me go through them piece by piece, over eight hours of recordings in all. There were gaps in the transcripts, often at key points of the dialogue, which Lance wanted me to fill. He hoped that we’d be able to pull enough extremist content from the tapes to use in the campaign. Sure enough, the recordings were filled with open admissions by Duke that his views had really never changed after leaving the Klan, as well as long, manic rants about Jews and their pernicious, conspiratorial designs on world domination. Listening to his hours-long rambling was like listening to the ravings of a woefully under-medicated psychotic, peppered as it was with references to Jewish responsibility for pornography, obscene poetry, race-mixing, drugs, suicide, and incest. And of course, Duke expounded at length in the interviews about his belief that the Nazi Holocaust had been entirely fabricated by a “Jewish writer in Hollywood.”

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