White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (36 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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Most racists are less vicious than Nazis, and at the same time, they’re considerably harder to deal with. It is precisely the way that gardenvariety racists don’t think of themselves as such that makes it tougher to address them, especially because, despite their lack of self-awareness when it comes to their biases, their willingness to deploy the same is legion.
Several years before I got on the road, I began to notice a disturbing tendency whenever issues of race would come up in a group of whites who really didn’t know each other that well, but who happened to be together at a party or other social event, or for that matter, in a pub. In these situations it seemed almost inevitable that someone in the group would take the opportunity to make some kind of overtly racist comment, or tell a racist joke, as if it were perfectly acceptable to do so, and as if no one else in the group would mind. “White bonding” was what I called it for lack of a better term.
At first I thought I was the only one having this experience so I kept it to myself, but then when I began to mention it to others, they talked of having the same thing happen to them. In fact, I would later learn that others whom I had never met were actually using the same term I had chosen to describe it—white bonding. Given the frequency with which it seemed to be happening, it became apparent that I would need to develop some kind of interruption strategy.
This became even clearer to me when I began lecturing around the country and was asked how best to respond to racist jokes or comments. Although it seemed like a relatively minor matter—especially when compared to the larger issues of institutional injustice to which I was mostly speaking—I had to apply the logic of the organizer here too: after all, if we can’t figure out how to respond to the “small stuff,” so to speak, we’ll never be able to deal with the bigger issues.
At first, I didn’t have an answer. One thing I knew though, was that my own normal responses weren’t sufficient. Sometimes, I wouldn’t know how to respond any more so than the people asking me for advice had known. At other times, I might respond with a pissed-off reply like, “I’m really offended you just said that, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say those kinds of things around me again.” Though such a reply lets everyone know where you stand, it’s almost guaranteed to make the offending party defensive, and to reply the only way a person in that situation can, which is to make
you
the problem—the one without a sense of humor, the one who needs to “loosen up,” or to understand that “it’s just a joke.” Not to mention, telling someone not to engage in racist commentary in front of you isn’t the same as getting them to stop practicing racism. It amounts to seeking protection for one’s own ears rather than trying to truly challenge the offending individual and move them to a different place.
So I decided I would try an experiment. If it worked, I would have something to tell the people who asked me the question—something more productive than for them to simply shut the offending party down. I thought about it for a while, began to rehearse the approach in a mirror, and waited for the opportunity to try it out.
Then one night, while speaking at a college in Montana, I was out with a group of people, all of them white, including several students who had brought me in for the presentation at their school. As the evening went along, one young man who knew some of the other students at the table (but who was unaware of the purpose for my visit) joined us. At some point, and for reasons I can’t recall, conversation turned to race, and I braced myself, knowing that things could turn bad, very quickly.
The young man asked if we wanted to hear a joke, and then, without waiting for a response, he simply launched into it. As expected, it was every bit as racist as I had feared it would be when he began.
When he was done, most everyone remained quiet or rolled their eyes. A few people laughed nervously and a few others said something to the effect that the joke had been terrible, and that he “really shouldn’t tell jokes like that.” I, on the other hand, laughed as though it had been the funniest joke I’d ever heard, which naturally confused my hosts who had just paid for me to come in and be an antiracist, not the kind of person who would likely appreciate racist humor. But I stayed in character because I needed to gain the young man’s confidence for the set-up that was to come.
“Hey, I’ve got one. Wanna hear it?” I asked. Naturally, he did.
I continued: “Did you hear the one about the white guy who told this really racist joke because he assumed everyone he was hanging out with was also white?”
“No, I haven’t heard that one,” he replied, not seeing where this was headed, and apparently expecting a genuine punch line, all the while missing the fact that he was it.
“Actually there is no joke,” I explained. “That was just my way of telling you that I’m black. My mom is black.”
This is the part I had had to rehearse in the mirror, since it wasn’t remotely true. But all that practice had paid off. I had sold him. Indeed, I could have been black. There are lots of African Americans lighter than myself, or folks with one black parent who may look white but who would certainly have been classified as black back in the day, and who identify themselves as such now.
His response was as immediate as it was revealing.
“Oh my God,” he demurred. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
It was at that point that I confessed: I wasn’t really black, but as white as he. Now his look of embarrassment turned to one of confusion. After all, whites don’t normally claim to be black when we’re not. There isn’t much in it for us.
“I’m not black,” I said, “but I find it interesting that when you thought I was, you apologized. In other words, you know that joke was messed up, so that if you’d been around a black person knowingly, you never would have said it. So why did you feel comfortable saying it in front of us? Why do you think so little of white people?”
Now he was really confused. It was one thing to have someone imply that he didn’t much like black folks—which he no doubt already knew—but to be told that he must have some kind of bias against whites, against his own group? That was a new one.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well,” I explained, “You must think all whites are racists, and specifically, that we’re all the kind of racists who enjoy racist jokes. Otherwise you wouldn’t take a chance making that kind of comment around white folks you don’t even know. So tell me, why do you think so little of white people?”
He stammered for a few seconds, but instead of getting angry, instead of telling me to get a sense of humor, he began to actually engage, and we proceeded to have a conversation about race. There is no way we’d have had that talk had I chastised him in the traditional manner. But by engaging him in a process, a reflective process that called into question how he knew what he knew—how he knew we were white, and how he knew we would all approve of racist jokes—I was able to stretch out the dialogue and contribute to making it more productive than it otherwise would have been.
For whites to resist racism this way sends a message to other whites: they can’t take anything for granted; they can’t presume to know our views; they can’t be sure that we’ll accept their efforts at white bonding. Far from merely providing a feel-good moment, planting those seeds of doubt is an important step in the process of resistance, because racism, especially of an institutional nature, requires the collusion of many persons; the lone bigot can’t accomplish it. By throwing racists off balance, we increase the costs associated with putting their racism into practice. In the case of joke tellers, they can never be too sure that the next stranger they try that with isn’t one of
those
whites—the “black white” people, or the kind of white person who won’t appreciate the commentary—and as such, may dial back their tendency to act in racist ways.
If we can impose enough self-awareness and doubt into the minds of those who engage in racist behavior, we make it harder for such persons to blindly act on it. Racism, like anything, takes practice in order to be really effective.
YET RACISM ISN’T
the only thing that takes practice—so too does antiracism. It takes practice, and a consciousness of mind, the truth of which statement came home to me in an especially glaring way during the last year of my paternal grandmother’s life.
My dad’s mom, Mabel (McKinney) Wise, was a central figure in my life. She was the person to whom I would often turn for emotional support when things got too chaotic at home. If life with my father turned especially volatile, it was to her and Leo’s that I would flee, spending the night until things blew over.
When Leo had died in the summer of 1989, my grandmother had begun to disintegrate. When I arrived at the hospital shortly after he had passed and first saw her in the arms of one of his doctors, it was as if even then her system had started to shut down.
As it happened, she would live until 1998, though only a few of those years would be of much quality. A year after Paw Paw’s death, while I had been at home following college graduation, she had a car accident. It was nothing serious, but when I got the call to head to the scene, just a half-mile or so from our apartment, it was obvious that the fenderbender had shaken her up. As the years went by, it became apparent that she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and had probably begun succumbing to the disease at the time of that accident.
We would watch as her grip on reality slowly slipped away. It was a process that, in its early years, is hard to categorize because a certain amount of mental slippage is inevitable as we get older. Since there are still moments of clarity, there are times when you’re inclined to think that there really isn’t anything all that serious going on. Then you see the person on one of their cloudy days and you’re snapped back into reality, unable to ignore that your loved one is dying, and it’s not going to be a pretty thing to watch.
By the mid-’90s, Mabel was still able to live on her own, in the house she and Leo had purchased four decades earlier, but she needed considerable help during the day. For the last two years of her life she relied on a couple of different nurses who would stay with her for several hours, make her lunches, clean up after her, and, near the end, bathe her as well. We always worried that after the nurses left she would burn the house down because she was a smoker, and in the depths of her growing dementia she could easily have fallen asleep, cigarette in hand, and that would have been the end of her.
In 1996, when I moved back to Nashville and was looking for a place to live, I had spent a week or so with her, sleeping in my father’s old room, and witnessed the deterioration up close. At any given moment she would have as many as two-dozen open Diet Coke cans in the refrigerator, having started to drink one, then placing it back in the fridge after a few sips and opening another, forgetting about the first. She would repeat this process until she ran out of shelf space, or until someone—myself, a nurse, or another visiting relative—would pour them out. At night, she would forget that I was in the back room, and if she heard me moving around it would scare her, so she would come to investigate the source of the noise. I would have to remind her, several times a night, that it was just me. A few mornings, when I came into the den to see her, she would be startled, having forgotten that I was staying with her.
By 1998, her deterioration had rapidly accelerated. Seemingly at once she began to forget who people were, confusing me with my father or even calling me Leo on occasion. In July, she came down with an infection and had to be hospitalized. While there, it became obvious that she could never return to her house. Upon release, her mind barely functioning, she was placed in a nursing home, on the Alzheimer’s ward. She would live a little less than a month, dying two weeks before Kristy and I were married.
That a story about a little old lady with Alzheimer’s might somehow be related to the subject of race, or whiteness, may seem like a stretch. But once you know the rest of the story, the connections become pretty clear.
First, it’s important to note that Mabel Wise was no ordinary white woman. Though not an activist, she very deliberately instilled in her children, and by extension in me (as her oldest grandchild and the one with whom she spent the most time), a deep and abiding contempt for bigotry or racism of any form. She was very proud of what I had chosen to do with my life, and although her antiracism was of a liberal sort that didn’t involve an amazingly deep understanding of the way that institutional injustice operates—it was an interpersonal level at which she tended to think of these issues—it was nonetheless quite real.

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