Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(16)

You’re determined not to lose the battle to control the historical narrative. After all, you realize that the pressure to broaden the scope of American history pries loose your headlock on the national mythology. Other cultures and other peoples are having their say as well, especially the black voices that have too long been suppressed. So you portray blackness as the enemy of all that is smart, or sophisticated, or uplifting, or worth emulating or transmitting. But the debt American culture owes to black folk can’t be easily erased, so you fight even harder to keep our story from being told in all its unforgiving brilliance and its undiscouraged beauty.

Yet you don’t seem ever, finally, to win the war to keep our history hidden. And the more you lose that battle, mostly because it’s built on lies, the more you kick your defensiveness into higher gears and vent your frustration, resentment, and sadness. So the quicker you admit you’re a (victim of) C.H.E.A.T., that you’ve got it bad and that ain’t good, the better off you will be, and the rest of us will be too. If not treated early on, C.H.E.A.T. leads to other disorders, including F.A.K.E. (Finding Alternative Knowledge Elusive), F.O.O.L. (Forsaking Others’ Outstanding Literacy), and L.I.E. (Lacking Introspection Entirely).

The only way for you to overcome C.H.E.A.T. is to confront the disorder head-on and acknowledge the five stages of white racial grief that you experience as you grapple with the presence of black folk and the history they created—and the very way they have changed American society. You are often stumped by feats of black competence; or you display a tolerance for blackness that slides quickly to condescension. There is resistance and rage too. There is anger at the refusal of the “other” to cave in to whiteness, to see history, American history, the way you see it, anger at our refusal to curtail black agency. During the eighties and nineties and the ballyhooed canon wars, you were fit to be tied when a writer like Toni Morrison, who should have been recognized long ago for her genius, finally got her due as an American master. It upsets you when black folk say that white history dressed up as American history is not a perfect picture of reality.

Beloved, white racial grief erupts when you fear losing your dominance. You get mighty angry at our demand that you live up to the sense of responsibility you say others should have—especially black folk and people of color. You often tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to make no excuses for our failures, and to instead admit our flaws and better ourselves. And yet so many of you, beloved, are obstinate to a fault, intransigent and thin-skinned when it comes to accepting the calling out you effortlessly offer to others. Donald Trump is only the most recent and boisterous example.

The first stage of white racial grief is to plead utter ignorance about black life and culture. It seems impossible to pull off, but many of you appear to live in what the late writer and cultural critic Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia.” When black folk get in your face, or even just expect you to know a little about black life, to take the past into account when speaking about black life, your reaction is often, simply, to forget it. It is a willful refusal to know. So often many of you claim no knowledge of black life, as if it never played a role in your world or made a difference to your existence. But it is no less distressing that you can so easily dismiss the history of a people you share space and time with as you both carve out your destiny together on the same national geography. It is not unlike those explorers and pilgrims who “discovered” America, that is, discovered a land full of native people. Native lives stopped mattering before they ever began to count.

The historical erasure of blackness strengthens this racially blind version of American history, makes it easier to make the argument that black folk never did a damn thing for the nation. Iowa congressman Steve King wondered in 2016 where in history “are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people . . . where did any other subgroup of people [other than whites] contribute more to civilization?” King said that Western civilization is “rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.”

Let’s be honest, my friends, this kind of sentiment is far more widespread than you may care to admit. It makes one thing clear: black and white folk are often speaking different languages with no common frame of reference, and therefore, no possibility of understanding each other. Thus the crudest conclusions possible in American history have stuck to black life. Black folk are often seen as simians at the high table of culture, aping white society. This poisons public discourse, distorting the history of American politics. Liberal professor Mark Lilla argued that Hillary Clinton’s “calling out explicitly to African-American” and other groups in the 2016 campaign “was a strategic mistake” because it left out the white working class and the highly religious. But the history of American politics is the history of accommodating whiteness at many levels, and while religiously influenced working class folk surely need to be heeded, it is odd that Lilla’s invective against identity politics appeals to the religiously rooted white working class at the expense of the black or brown religiously influenced working classes. Lilla’s view is amnesia with a bang, or really, a fang, an exposed snarl at the inconvenient messiness of real history.

Real American history is the sticky web in which black and white are stuck together. Stop trying to pretend that you don’t know this. You can kill us, even brutalize us, but history makes escape from us impossible. An even greater fear lurks barely beneath the surface. What horrifies many of you is that America, at its root, has been in part made by blackness. God forbid, but it may in part be black. Slavery made America a slave to black history. As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now. America doesn’t even exist without us. That’s why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America. America shudders and says to itself: The president’s supposed to be us, not them. In that light, Donald Trump’s victory was hardly surprising.