White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (38 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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KNOWING THAT THE
baby was due in July, I had cleared my calendar for about two months after the due date, so I could be at home with Kris and Ashton. By late August though, it was time to head back out again. I far preferred being with my family, even though at that stage Ashton was mostly sleeping and eating. Just holding her, or getting up to do midnight feedings while Kris tried to squeeze in some badly needed sleep, was like heaven to me. I looked forward to going into her room early in the morning, warming up a bottle and feeding her while sitting in the glider, lights dim, the sounds of Meshell Ndegeocello’s
Bitter
album coming from the CD player just behind my head.
By early September, I was to be out for the better part of two weeks. Beginning on September 10, I was scheduled to serve as a visiting scholar at the Poynter Institute, in St. Petersburg, Florida, where several such visiting faculty were to conduct five days worth of seminars on race and reporting. About twenty journalists from around the country would be attending the session, where we would examine everything from how to productively frame stories on racial inequality to how to avoid inadvertently replicating stereotypes in print and broadcast media. As fate would have it, the timing for such a series of discussions could not have been better.
The morning of Tuesday, September 11, was a beautiful day in St. Petersburg: blue skies, not too warm, a pleasant breeze meeting the seminar participants as we walked the five blocks or so from our hotel to Poynter. We began filing in to the main seminar room a little after 8:30, where we grabbed some coffee and started to plot the day’s events. Each of the visiting scholars was to make a presentation over the next few days and then facilitate discussions with the visiting journalists when it was one of the other scholars’ turns to present. Within a few minutes though, whatever schedule we’d intended to keep would be scrapped.
Shortly before 9:00, Keith Woods, a permanent faculty member at Poynter (who would later become Dean of the Institute and eventually V.P. for Diversity at National Public Radio) came into the room, a nervous look on his face, and headed for the television. As he turned it on, I heard him mutter something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center in New York. Already the cameras were covering the smoke billowing from the North Tower, which had been struck by an American Airlines jet about ten minutes earlier. As we sat, transfixed by the tragedy unfolding in front of us, hardly able to understand what was happening, CNN cut away to a local station’s coverage, which began with a tight shot of the damage to the north tower, indicating a hit somewhere near the eighty-fifth floor of the giant structure.
After about a minute of commentary and speculation as to what had happened, the cameras pulled back, just in time for us to watch a new image come into view over on the right hand side of the screen. It came into the frame so quickly and proceeded to move to the left so rapidly that at least for me, it didn’t immediately register as to what it had been. Was that a plane? Wait, what?
Another
plane?
As a huge fireball shot from the side of the south tower, we all recognized that not only had it been a plane that we’d seen, but more to the point, it was history we were witnessing, in all its horrific splendor. There was no question now what was happening. The odds of two planes accidentally smashing into the tallest buildings in New York were so ridiculously small as to be incalculable, although one of the New York–based commentators speculated about that possibility for a few more minutes, perhaps unwilling to face the terrible truth. This was no coincidence. These had been deliberate attacks. About a half hour later it became obvious how deliberate, when yet another plane was reported as having smashed into the Pentagon, and an hour after that, when a fourth plane crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania after having been hijacked.
We all scrambled to call loved ones from the lower level of the Institute, as most people didn’t have cell phones in 2001. Patient, but worried, we waited to place calls on the pay phones, many of us checking on people we knew in New York to make sure they were alright. Of course, it was almost impossible to reach anyone in the city in the midst of the chaos, as all the lines in and out were tied up. I reached Kristy, and asked if she had heard from Wendy, a friend who lived in the city and passed through the World Trade Center subway stop each morning about the time of the tower strikes, before heading on a train under the Hudson to New Jersey where she worked.
“Why would I have heard from Wendy?” she asked.
“Oh shit,” I said, “are you not watching the news?”
“No, what happened?” she answered.
“Just turn it on,” I said. “Two planes just hit the twin towers.”
“Oh my God,” she replied, placing the phone in the crook of her neck and grabbing the remote. As she did, I could hear our baby girl in the background making the sweet nonsense noises of a ten-week old, and it almost broke my heart, thinking about the kind of world into which she had just been born. She would not, I thought to myself, know even three months without war.
With Kris on the phone my mind flashed back to our honeymoon, three years prior, the first few days of which were spent in New York. We had looked out over the city from the observation spots at Windows on the World, and taken pictures of the rest of Manhattan and Wall Street below from that vantage point—a vantage point that no longer existed except in my mind. I imagined all that empty space below where we had stood, and below that, now lying stacked forty stories high, millions of tons of steel, plaster, and human remains. I felt instantly nauseous.
After getting back to the session, we all agreed that although events had altered the trajectory of the seminar, we’d continue. No one was going to be able to fly home anytime soon, so we might as well get back to work. Not to mention, as media began to speculate about the role that Arab and/or Muslim terrorism may have played in the attack, the need to examine the tragedy without fueling racial or religious bias became even more apparent. Several years earlier, after the bombing in Oklahoma City, Muslims in the area had been briefly targeted until the white, Christian identity of the perpetrators was announced a day or so later. That such targeting could happen again was something about which we were all aware, especially given the magnitude of the acts that were unfolding at that moment.
As a first order of business, we were all asked to write something, anything, about our feelings in the midst of the attacks. Whether faculty or “students,” the assignment was the same. Yes, we needed to think about the professional implications of what had happened—how could we bring an anti-bias lens to reporting at such a critical time—but first, we needed to check in with how we were doing. Anger, fear, hopelessness—all that and more would spill out as we listened to each others’ journal entries, poems, essays, and rants over the course of that initial day.
For some reason, I couldn’t write anything at first. Perhaps it was my unwillingness to think about the implications of what had happened, given the newness of my daughter’s life, or maybe I was just trying to think of how to say something in a way that hadn’t been said already by someone else—ever the writer, looking for an angle. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t write anything until late that night, after watching hours of news coverage and hearing the first inklings of war talk and massive retaliation against whomever was responsible, streaming from the mouths of enraged Senators, ready to use the attack as justification to drop bombs and demonstrate American military prowess.
What would ultimately emerge would be a letter to my little girl, not really meant for her consumption, but spoken as if to her at some later date, when she might understand. It would be the most emotionally exhausting piece of prose I’ve written to this day, and when I read it to the seminar participants, several cried, as did I. Five days later, I would read it at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, to a crowd of about eight hundred people, fully expecting to be booed from the stage for its open challenge to U.S. militarism, bombastic retaliatory rhetoric, and talk of launching a “war on terror.” Quite the opposite, the piece would receive a standing ovation from two-thirds of those assembled, signaling that the unanimity of support that some would proclaim for the nation’s war plans was a lie. There were more people questioning the wisdom of that approach than many realized.
Back at Poynter, Heidi Beirich, who had recently been hired by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a researcher on the far-right, and who was attending the seminar, said she thought there was something I might find interesting being said on one of the neo-Nazi chat boards she regularly monitored. Curious as to the take of white supremacists on the day’s events, she had logged in to one of the boards and started reading the posts. Almost immediately she had come across one racist who praised the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and said he wished that whites had even half the “testicular fortitude” to carry out similar actions. Billy Roper, head of recruitment at the time for the Hitler-worshipping National Alliance (whose founder had been the author of
The Turner Diaries
, which McVeigh had found so inspiring) added that anyone who was willing to fly planes into buildings in order to kill Jews (whom Roper naturally assumed predominated in the buildings since it was in the New York financial district), was “alright” by him. Another chat room member said the attacks made him feel “excited and more alive than ever.”
One after another, these white warriors expressed their glee, their unbridled exuberance for the mass killing that had just transpired, but there would be no news coverage of this
anywhere.
Rather, the media would show coverage from the Palestinian West Bank, in which residents were seen cheering and dancing as if to say they were happy about the death of thousands of Americans at the hands of the Saudi and Egyptian hijackers (whose identities we would come to know because the luggage of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, had not made it onto the fatal flight he boarded and would be discovered within hours).
Of course, neither the Nazis nor the Palestinians had played any role in the attacks, but whereas the media thought the celebration by the latter was worth covering, that of the former was conveniently ignored. It was much like the L.A. riots in 1992, during which a news crew had taken footage of a white woman looting designer dresses from an expensive clothing store, piling them into a BMW, and justifying the actions by saying “everyone’s doing it.” When the footage came into the possession of reporters in Milwaukee who wanted to show it on their broadcast, they had been blocked from doing so by their producer, who told them the footage was irrelevant, since the story wasn’t about rich white people looting, but rather, angry black and brown folks who did.
Soon, the journalists who were at Poynter for the seminar started getting requests from their home offices to go interview the local Arab or Muslim communities in and around St. Pete. Go ask people at the local mosque how they were feeling about what had happened, and if they condemned the attack. One reporter from Detroit was asked to get home as soon as possible so she could go to neighboring Dearborn (which has the largest concentration of Arabs of any city outside the so-called Arab world), and ask the same questions. Realizing the absurdity of such a request—after all, she would note, they never sent her there to ask Arabs or Muslims about anything but terrorism—she had declined the request, as did everyone else when asked to get local Arab and Muslim feedback. The seminar was becoming more than an educational experience. It had become a tool for resistance.
UNABLE TO RETURN
home by plane, as flights remained grounded through the end of the week, Heidi rented a car and asked if I wanted to share the ride. Having no better plan as to how I might get home, I agreed. I would take her to her house in Montgomery and then drive the rest of the way to Nashville, dropping the rental off there. All the way home it was apparent that the nation was headed into full-froth revenge mode. Callers to one after another talk show (and not just on right-wing radio) demanded massive retaliation and even the use of nuclear weapons against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, whomever. Many callers weren’t discriminating; they were prepared without hesitation to turn the Middle East, in their words, into a “parking lot.” Of course, calls for racial and religious profiling were heard everywhere, with very few willing to challenge the position in those first weeks.
It was only rational to profile Arabs and Muslims, most folks insisted, since they were the ones who posed the greatest threat. That no similar calls for the racial profiling of whites had been issued after Tim McVeigh’s crime, or those of the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski), or the Olympic Park Bomber (Eric Rudolph), or the dozens of abortion clinic bombers and arsonists over the years (all of whom had been white and ostensibly Christian), went largely unmentioned. That al-Qaeda operated in more than fifty nations, and that the physical appearance of persons from those nations ran the gamut from the lily-white skin of the Chechen rebels to the olive color of most Indonesians and Filipinos to the blue-black of the Sudanese (and thus, profiling was an almost Sisyphean task, regardless of the ethics of the matter) was even less important, it seemed.

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