Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(10)

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I realize this is a lot for you to take in. It must make you woozy and weak at the knees. So much has been invested in whiteness that it is hard to let it go. It is often defensive, resentful, full of denial and amnesia. The only way to save our nation, and, yes, to save yourselves, is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports.

I’m not asking you to let go of your humanity, but, in the best way possible, to find your way back to it. You can let go of whiteness when you see it as a moral choice, an ideology, a politic, a terribly fearful reaction to the thing it hates the most but can least afford to do without: the black people it helped to will into existence. White or black identity is nothing without the people and forces that make it true. White and black folk are bound together, even when we breathe very different meanings into race.

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My friends, when you have to confront identities or experiences that don’t fit your view of the world, you fall back on preconceived notions that are no more real than the whiteness I’ve described. I learned this lesson even before my fateful meeting with the president of Carson-Newman.

One day his raven-haired assistant, with whom I’d formed a bond, delivered some troubling news.

“The administration thinks you’re going to do something violent at graduation,” the perky middle-aged white woman told me in a hastily called meeting in her office. After I assured her that I intended nothing of the sort, I stumbled out of her door, speechless.

I knew the president had sent her because he thought she had figured out the mystery of my blackness. I was sure she bragged about it, too, playing both ends against the middle. I didn’t mind as long as the result was peace. But this was beyond the pale.

It was clear that I was as much a creation of their imaginations as whiteness itself. They may have been watching too many reruns of Blaxploitation films. This was only a decade after the era of Shaft and The Mack after all. Maybe they envisioned me out to get revenge against the white man like Pam Grier’s characters in Coffy or Foxy Brown. Maybe they fantasized that I’d been reading Julius Lester’s book Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! But “whitey” didn’t have to worry about this child of Negroes. Hell, even some of their mamas thought I was cute and likable and invited me to dinner. True enough, I was more in the civil rights tradition than an advocate of black power, but I knew that it was all the same to most white folk. And I damn sure didn’t sport any bell-bottoms or modish sideburns. I must confess, however, that I did constantly listen to Isaac Hayes’ epic soundtrack to Shaft, so I may have confused the poor folk. No matter what, I came to understand Ralph Ellison’s meaning when his unnamed character says, in the fourth line of Invisible Man, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Carson-Newman upped the ante on Ellison. They not only tried to make me invisible, but they symbolically snatched my body and emptied out the contents of my black identity. In my absence they projected a woolly-haired phantom out to do them in. I couldn’t possibly compete with this smaller-than-life stereotype. I was an ordained Baptist minister who had worked in a factory. I had a wife and child to take care of, and an education to get. I had no time for tomfoolery or terror. I had never as much as hinted that rage might flood my body. I had never participated in a formal protest, never written a letter to the editor of the college newspaper. I had never expressed disgust at one racial problem or the next. I had never even raised my fist or voice.

I wasn’t na?ve. I knew that honest dialogue might rattle a white world that was not used to hearing a black man like me speak directly about race. No, my crime was far more mundane. I had whispered a prayer into a microphone in chapel during a Black History Month service asking God to help defeat racism in our midst. My few words set the white community on edge. My prayer was the clue that I wasn’t mesmerized by the fictions of whiteness, that I wasn’t satisfied with the sanctuary it wanted to provide. It was enough to tip off the president that I was ready for the Revolution and that I was prepared to bring it on violently. No other explanation made any sense.

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One thing you must understand, beloved, is that whiteness isn’t a solo act. It’s got a supporting cast. Lots of other things got created to uphold and justify whiteness. None was more seductive or necessary than the idea of American history. It may be hard for many of you to concede this. You think of history as a realm of complete objectivity. You think there are such things as indisputable facts, and those facts are woven together by neutral observers in a compelling story that is told as history. You think historians belong to a guild of chroniclers whose work is separate from what the culture considers important. You think they abide by the line from the sixties television series Dragnet, whose star character, the police sergeant Joe Friday, says famously, and dryly, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”

But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement. That version of American history is a sprawling, bewildering chronicle, relentlessly revised. It ignores or downplays a variety of peoples, cultures, religions, and regions, all to show that history is as objective and as curious and as expansive as the white imagination allows. Of course, the notion that someone invents history is also to insist that everybody can, or does—though, it must be noted, not to equal effect.