Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(15)

Beloved, I haven’t given up on your ability to confront whiteness, to give it the old college try, literally. Back at my alma mater Carson-Newman, after being banned for 31 years, and even though I felt the time warp, I also got cause for hope. When I preached in the chapel, I was certainly far more blunt and vocal in challenging whiteness than I had been when I went to school there. I preached about the black prophetic mission and its demand for social change. I riled up some conservative white students. Many got up and walked out. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it was racial déjà vu all over again.

But I also spoke of the need to combat class inequality, gender oppression, and homophobia. I tried to link these ills and thus lighten the load of responsibility that white folk would have to carry alone. But those young conservatives still got mad. I suspected they hadn’t heard a sermon like mine before, hadn’t had to hear it, either, at least not in the school’s chapel or their home churches. Some of the students threatened to protest my presentation later that evening where the entire local community gathered. I told the folk in charge that I didn’t mind that at all, and that I’d be more than happy to entertain their questions and to answer their outrage.

The protest never happened. But one of the angriest young men stayed behind to ask me a question as I signed copies of my books. He wanted to know how I could be a Christian and say the things I do; that I should take into account views with which I disagreed. I assured him that doubting my Christianity put him in good stead with many black folk I know, who, because of my stand against homophobia, count me among the religiously unwashed. Let me be real: my joyful embrace of the secular dimensions of black culture has landed me in trouble. It makes a lot of folk uncomfortable when I taunt the supposed abyss between the sacred and profane. I told the young man that to be black in America means always taking in views we disagree with, not out of altruism, but out of necessity and the impulse to survive. I gently insisted that he take off the blinders to his whiteness. I encouraged him to think of how he was reared and what role that had on his views, and how his rearing had a lot to do with the privileges of whiteness. I knew my crash course in whiteness wouldn’t convince him. But at least he listened. Instead of an angry protest, we shared an open, honest conversation. I asked him to recall an earlier question from one of his classmates in the audience, in whose voice I detected a fellow traveler.

“For a white working class kid, who learned about Western philosophy from reading the sermons and speeches and essays of Dr. King—that was actually how I learned about old dead white people, is through a black man. Given that context, how would somebody in my position be an ally? How . . . do I seek to supplant imperialism, how do I seek to supplant militarism, how do I seek to supplant white supremacy and the patriarchy without perpetuating those very same things through my action?”

Answering this earnest young man, I acknowledged the limitations of our subject positions. I also acknowledged that our lives are constantly in process. I told him that some of the greatest victims of whiteness are whites themselves, having to bear the burden of a false belief in superiority. I told him how I also loved the words of many old dead white men, from Tennyson to Merle Haggard, even though many of those white men would find me troublesome. I asked him not only to challenge white privilege, but also to resist the narcissism that celebrates one’s challenge to whiteness rather than siding with those who are its steady victims. Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding.

It felt at that moment, on that night, that something good might happen. I had no reason to doubt that at many other moments like this, on many other similar nights, hope might prevail. If you, my friends, would make a conscious effort to change. If you would stop being white.





2.

The Five Stages of White Grief


Let’s face it, you’ve grieved ever since you were forced to share some of your historical shine with the black folk you’d kept underfoot for centuries. You didn’t think we deserved that much attention; you’ve tried to hide us, even bury us, for too long. First we were the enslaved lackeys at your beck and call, then the servants at the family dinner. Later we were the embarrassing kinfolk at the family picnic. We finally made it to the holiday gathering too, but your paternalism relegated us to the children’s table. You were forced to invite us to affairs of state, but you mostly ignored us.

It has been exceedingly tough for you to wrap your minds around the notion that black folk are your equals in any realm. The exception might be sports, but you control the purse strings there, too, so no sweat off your billions. And as long as we know our place, and don’t, for instance, take a knee while the national anthem is played to protest injustice, we are well rewarded for our athletic exploits—gladiators for your titillation and fantasy leagues. But when that fantasy is up, and proper black manhood and womanhood is reclaimed, we know that you revert to your old ways and think of us as not worth the trouble. In most other realms of pursuit you deem us largely incompetent and irrelevant, and yet black folk, and the rest of the rainbow of colors too, keep proving you wrong.

It is being proved wrong that leaves you distressed. There is often sorrow and anguish in white America when blackness comes in the room. It gives you a bad case of what can only be called, colloquially, the racial blues, but more formally, let’s name it C.H.E.A.T. (Chronic Historical Evasion and Trickery) disorder. This malady is characterized by bouts of depression when you can no longer avoid the history that you think doesn’t matter much, or when your attempts to deceive yourself and others—about the low quality of all that isn’t white—fall flat. It’s understandable that you experience mood swings. It bears some resemblance to the five stages of grief a person passes through when they know they’re dying.