White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (37 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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That she saw racism and rebelling against it as a personal issue made sense, because it was at that level that she had learned to deal with it many years before. Her father had actually been in the Klan while working as a mechanic in Detroit in the 1920s, and after moving back to Tennessee shortly thereafter. It was an association that would become a problem for her several years later when, at the age of fifteen, she would meet and eventually fall in love with Leo Wise, a Jew.
Around the age of seventeen, she could no longer abide her father’s racism, and that, combined with his anti-Semitism, which she now took very personally, led her to confront him, to tell him in no uncertain terms that either he was going to burn his Klan robes, or she was going to do it for him. I can’t begin to imagine the kind of strength it would have taken to issue such a challenge in 1937, especially to a large man, given to anger, and hardly used to being accosted in such a way by a young girl, or any woman. But it worked. My great-grandfather, having been given an ultimatum, burned his robes, quit the Klan, changed his life, and would later accept the man who was to become my grandfather into his family.
From that experience, I suppose Mabel decided that standing up to racism wasn’t so tough, and so she would do it again often. For instance, once when a real estate agent announced that the house he was showing to her and Leo was desirable because it was in a racially-restricted neighborhood, she informed him that he had best get in his car and leave, or else she would run him over in hers. That’s who she was, and had always been, so long as anyone could recall.
Which brings us then to the rest of the story, the part that provides dramatic evidence of the way in which racism is capable of diminishing even the strongest of us, even the ones who have long made a point of resistance.
If you’ve ever had a loved one who was suffering with Alzheimer’s, you know that the loss of memories is among the more benign symptoms of the disease. The others are far worse; namely, the paranoia, anger, and even rage that accompanies the slippage of one’s mental faculties.
As she went through these stages of the illness that would ultimately contribute to her death, she began to work out the contours of her deepening crisis upon the black nurses whose job it had been to take care of her. And how might a white person treat a black person when they’re angry, or frightened, or both? And what might they call those black persons in a moment of anger, or insecurity, or both?
Resisting socialization, you see, requires the ability to choose. But near the end of my grandmother’s life, as her body and mind began to shut down, this consciousness—the soundness of mind that had led her to fight the pressures to accept racism—began to vanish. Her awareness of who she had been disappeared, such that in those moments of anger and fear, she would think nothing of referring to her nurses by the term Malcolm X said was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country.
Though I’m not sure when white folks first learn the word, Maw Maw made clear a more important point: that having learned it, we will never,
ever
forget it. It was a word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but which remained locked away in her subconscious despite her lifelong commitment to standing against racism. It was a word that would make her violent if she heard it said, and a word that for her to utter it herself would make her another person altogether; but there it was, as ugly, bitter, and no doubt fluently expressed as it had ever been by her father.
ever
forget it. It was a word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but which remained locked away in her subconscious despite her lifelong commitment to standing against racism. It was a word that would make her violent if she heard it said, and a word that for her to utter it herself would make her another person altogether; but there it was, as ugly, bitter, and no doubt fluently expressed as it had ever been by her father.
Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her children, had no idea who her husband had been, no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was; yet she knew what she had been taught at an early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a time bomb in the far recesses of her mind, it would reassert itself and explode with devastating intensity.
She could not remember how to feed herself. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a
nigger
. America had seen to that, and no disease would strip her of that memory. It would be one of the last words I would hear her say, before she stopped talking at all.
nigger
. America had seen to that, and no disease would strip her of that memory. It would be one of the last words I would hear her say, before she stopped talking at all.
Importantly, it wasn’t just some free-floating word bouncing around in her diseased brain, which she was tossing about as if it had no larger meaning. She didn’t call any of her family by that word, even though we were the recipients of plenty of her anger and fear as well. She knew exactly what she was saying, and to whom.
Given Mabel’s entire life and the circumstances surrounding her demise, her utterance of a word even as hateful as this says little about her. But it speaks volumes about her country and the seeds planted in each of us by our culture; seeds that we can choose not to water, so long as we are of sound mind and commitment, but seeds that also show a remarkable propensity to sprout of their own accord. It speaks volumes about how even those whites committed to living in antiracist ways and passing down that commitment to their children have been infected with a deadly social pathogen that can fundamentally scar the antiracist who carries it, whether or not they are fully aware of the damage. Maybe this is why I tire of white folks who insist, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” or, “I never notice color.” Maw Maw would have said that too, and she would have meant well, and she would have been wrong.
Watching all this unfold, it was especially interesting to observe how the rest of my family dealt with it. Whenever she would say the word in the presence of either of her two daughters, they would quickly reassure the nurses that she didn’t mean anything by it (which was patently untrue), and that it was just the illness talking (which the nurses already understood, far better than my aunts). While apologizing for racial epithets is nice, I suppose, far nicer would be the ability to learn from this gift my grandmother was giving us—and it
was
a gift, her final way of saying
look
at this, see what is happening here, do something about this. What those women at my grandmother’s nursing home need and deserve, much more than sincere but irrelevant apologies from embarrassed family members, is an end to this vicious system of racial caste and the conditioning it provides to us all.
was
a gift, her final way of saying
look
at this, see what is happening here, do something about this. What those women at my grandmother’s nursing home need and deserve, much more than sincere but irrelevant apologies from embarrassed family members, is an end to this vicious system of racial caste and the conditioning it provides to us all.
Those nurses knew, and so do I, why my grandmother could no longer fight. For the rest of us, however, there is no similar excuse available. We don’t have Alzheimer’s, and yet we all go through our moments of fear, anger, and insecurity. It doesn’t take a disease to usher us into those states of mind from time to time. We are all at risk, all vulnerable to acting on the basis of something we know is wrong, but which is there, ready to be used if the chips are down, or if we simply aren’t paying enough attention to the details.
THE NEXT TWO
years were defining ones for me, personally and professionally. I started writing in March 1999, for an online commentary service operated by
Z Magazine
. It was the first regular writing I’d done in about four years, and I quickly remembered how much I enjoyed it. But at the same time, I was getting nervous about the financial sustainability of the lecture circuit. Though I had never prioritized money, the fact remained that having grown up under conditions of persistent fiscal insecurity, I also knew better than to glamorize monetary struggle. There was nothing cool about it, nothing radical, nothing political. People who think starving for their art or their politics is somehow tantamount to making a statement have almost never done without; and they sure as hell never spent much time speaking to people who had, not one of whom wants to be poor. No, living hand to mouth was something I had had more than enough of. I wasn’t about to continue that cycle in a new family, whether it was just Kristy and me, or whether the family would come to include children.
years were defining ones for me, personally and professionally. I started writing in March 1999, for an online commentary service operated by
Z Magazine
. It was the first regular writing I’d done in about four years, and I quickly remembered how much I enjoyed it. But at the same time, I was getting nervous about the financial sustainability of the lecture circuit. Though I had never prioritized money, the fact remained that having grown up under conditions of persistent fiscal insecurity, I also knew better than to glamorize monetary struggle. There was nothing cool about it, nothing radical, nothing political. People who think starving for their art or their politics is somehow tantamount to making a statement have almost never done without; and they sure as hell never spent much time speaking to people who had, not one of whom wants to be poor. No, living hand to mouth was something I had had more than enough of. I wasn’t about to continue that cycle in a new family, whether it was just Kristy and me, or whether the family would come to include children.
When summer came and I didn’t have many speaking engagements booked for the fall semester, I panicked. Thinking that perhaps it was a sign from the universe that I should go in a different direction, I applied for and was ultimately hired as the Director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing (TCASK), the statewide anti–death penalty organization. Unfortunately, almost as soon as I began working for TCASK, I started to think I’d made a terrible mistake. I cared deeply about the issue, but as I tried to go about the task of running an office, coordinating chapters around the state, and paying bills (even simply remembering to pay myself on time), I started to realize how incompetent I was at almost everything but that which I had been doing the past several years. Literally, writing and speaking
were
my only talents, and my time at TCASK would finally prove it.
were
my only talents, and my time at TCASK would finally prove it.
The organization and I would part ways in April 2000, after just eight months. In part this was due to my incompetence as an organizational manager, and in part it was because my personal biography became a liability for the group. Working for TCASK meant that among the condemned for whom I’d be advocating would be Cecil Johnson, the man who had killed my friend, Bobby Bell, in 1980. I guess I should have figured that those who supported state murder would potentially seek to exploit that connection in the eyes of the public, and bash me to Bobby’s dad. What kind of person, after all, would support the continued heartbeat of a man who had killed one of his good friends? When I managed to embarrass the associate D.A. in a debate at Vanderbilt Law School and again on the nationally-televised
Nancy Grace
show—along with Nancy herself, who I managed to fluster to such an extent I thought her head may explode—it was clear that the only way to get back at me would be to call Bob Bell Sr. and accuse me of “using” his son’s memory to argue against capital punishment. This, all because I had mentioned having lost a friend to murder when I was a kid, and yet, still opposing the death penalty. I hadn’t mentioned Bobby’s name, but all the D.A. needed was an opening to discredit the far more informed side against which he was arrayed. Opening provided, he took it.
Nancy Grace
show—along with Nancy herself, who I managed to fluster to such an extent I thought her head may explode—it was clear that the only way to get back at me would be to call Bob Bell Sr. and accuse me of “using” his son’s memory to argue against capital punishment. This, all because I had mentioned having lost a friend to murder when I was a kid, and yet, still opposing the death penalty. I hadn’t mentioned Bobby’s name, but all the D.A. needed was an opening to discredit the far more informed side against which he was arrayed. Opening provided, he took it.
When word got out that pro-death penalty forces were planning on having Bobby’s father make some kind of public statement against me and TCASK, I knew that it was time to go. I certainly didn’t want to put Mr. Bell through any more pain, nor did I want the group’s important work to be harmed by my continued presence as their director. I prepared to resign, but ultimately wouldn’t need to. A few days before I was planning on leaving, Joe Ingle, a TCASK founder and board member, called me to his office and very graciously suggested that things weren’t working out, on multiple levels. He was right, and I was relieved.
By then, fortunately, the speaking engagements were starting to roll in again, but even if the money was going to be tight, I knew that the road was where I belonged, and so back to the grind I went.
In October, we learned that Kristy was pregnant and we’d be having a child that coming summer. Though pregnancy becomes immediately real for the woman who’s carrying the child-to-be, for the man (or nongestating woman) in the relationship, it really doesn’t register fully, in most cases, until that child is actually born. So although I was thrilled at the thought of being a dad—though scared, given my own lack of a real role model when it came to fathering—I had no idea how powerful the experience would be until our daughter, Ashton Grace, was pulled from her mother by C-section, early in the morning of July 2, 2001. At the first sight of her I was overcome by the emotion of it all, and literally dropped to my knees, my tears flowing like water through a city fire hydrant after being opened by children attempting to cool off on a hot summer day.
Trying to make the world a better place had suddenly taken on an even more immediate urgency. Little did I know how much more complicated creating that world would become, and how quickly.
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