Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(14)

And let’s be real: O.J.’s betrayal hurt worse than Obama’s ascent. O.J. shared your worldview. O.J. took full advantage of the privilege you offered him as an honorary white man. He accepted the bargain in a way Obama never did, never could. Your anger for O.J. is that he was, finally—like you fear all black folk could potentially be—an ungrateful nigger. O.J. seemed to fully revel in whiteness and gladly deny that he was black, that is, until he got in trouble. Then that racial reflex kicked in: back against the wall, black against the wall.

You shouldn’t be too angry with O.J. He’s as white a black man as there’s been in the last half century. Even Clarence Thomas is blacker than O.J. It is true that Thomas is a darker version of Simpson. But Thomas was reviled by black culture for his dark skin. He repays us with decisions on the Supreme Court that mock our humanity and lower his dignity with each stroke of his pen.

What the Simpson case makes clear is that even though whiteness is an invention, it is nontransferable, at least to black folk. No matter how we try we still can’t be white, can’t truly enjoy white privilege. Many of you were willing to chalk up the black belief in Simpson’s innocence—well, truly, black folk never claimed Simpson was innocent, just not guilty, a distinction that whiteness has taught us—as an instance of black denial, of black delusion. It never occurred to you that that is just how whiteness operates at all times. It’s been that way ever since it was created a few centuries back to justify treating black people like dogs. It has stayed that way right up until this moment.

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I must say to you, my friends, that teaching in your schools has shown me that being white means never having to say you’re white. Whiteness long ago, at least in America, shed its ethnic skin and struck a universal pose. Whiteness never had to announce its whiteness, never had to promote or celebrate its unique features.

If whites are history, and history is white, then so are culture, and society, and law, and government, and politics; so are logic and thinking and reflection and truth and circumstances and the world and reality and morality and all that means anything at all.

Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history.

You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others. You love history when it’s yet another book about, say, the Founding Fathers. No amount of minutia is too tedious. No new fact is too obscure to report. The curiosity about presidents is nearly inexhaustible.

History is a friend to white America when it celebrates the glories of American exceptionalism, the beauty of American invention, the genius of the American soul. History is unrestrained bliss when it sings Walt Whitman’s body electric or touts the lyrical vision of the Transcendentalists. History that swings at the plate with Babe Ruth or slides into home with Joe DiMaggio is the American pastime at its best. History hovers low in solemn regard for the men who gave up the ghost at Appomattox and speaks with quiet reverence for the Confederate flags that gleefully waved to secession. Of course all of you don’t sing from the same hymnal. But American history, the collective force of white identity that picks up velocity across the centuries, mouths every note.

Beloved, I must admit that I’ve encountered many of you as white allies who know that whiteness is privilege and power. You know that white skin is magic, that it is a key to open doors. Yet you also know that whiteness for the most part remains invisible to many white folk.

It has been striking, too, to observe whites for whom their whiteness isn’t a passport to riches, whites for whom whiteness offers no material reward. But there is a psychological and social advantage in not being thought of as black; poor whites seem to say, “At least there’s a nigger beneath me.” And it’s a way for poor whites to be of value to richer whites, especially when poor whites agree that black folk are the source of their trouble—not the corporate behavior of wealthier whites who hurt black and white folk alike. It’s a way to bond beyond class. It’s a way for working class whites to experience momentary prestige in the eyes of richer whites. And there are a lot of privileges that white folk get that don’t depend on cash. The greatest one may be getting stopped by a cop and living to talk about it.

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After more than a century of enlightened study we know that race is not just something that falls from the sky; it is, as the anthropologists say, a fabricated idea. But that doesn’t mean that race doesn’t have material consequence and empirical weight. It simply means that if we constructed it, we can get about the business of deconstructing it.

And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes. The idea that whiteness should be abolished, an idea that some white antiracist thinkers have put forth, disturbs a lot of you—especially when you argue that whiteness is not all murder and mayhem. Historian David Roediger has questioned if there is a “white culture outside of domination.” At the University of Minnesota, where he taught for five years, conservative white kids on campus said there was a need for a white cultural center if a black cultural center existed. When he asked his class what they’d put in a white cultural center, he said “there was the longest silence that I have ever experienced in a classroom.” The silence “was broken by a hand going up, and a shout: ‘Elvis!’ And then laughter, that Elvis would somehow be considered unambiguously white.” Of course there was laughter. If ever there’s been what Norman Mailer termed a white Negro, at least in style, and one who’s made money and his reputation off a derivative blackness, it’s Elvis Presley. If Elvis belongs in a white cultural center, then so do Chuck Berry and Little Richard.