Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(17)

The one-drop rule, the notion to racial purists that even a speck of black blood contaminates one’s heritage, has always signified that white America believed that blackness was superior. Even the slightest presence of black blood was able to overcome and outsmart whiteness. Blackness had to be taboo because it couldn’t be vanquished or destroyed. Blackness feels like a curse to your view of history.

White America, you deliberately forget how whiteness caused black suffering. And it shows in the strangest ways. You forget how you kept black folk poor as sharecroppers. You forget how you kept us out of your classrooms and in subpar schools. You forget how you denied us jobs, and when we got them, how you denied us promotions. You forget how you kept us out of the suburbs, and now that you’re gentrifying our inner city neighborhoods, you’re pushing us to the suburbs. You forget that you kept us from voting, and then blamed us for being lackadaisical at the polls. Although it sounds delusional, perhaps more than a few of you feel the way Donald Trump’s former campaign chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, Kathy Miller, does. “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” Miller said. “You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” She also said, “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected.”

Think of how the members of the House of Representatives, influenced by the Tea Party, opened the 112th Congress in 2011 by reading out loud on the House floor the Constitution in its entirety. Except they didn’t read the entire, or the original, version, which included Article 1, Section 2, which says that black folk equaled three-fifths of a white person. The representatives lapsed into calculated forgetting.

That sort of behavior is not limited to the mostly white men who make up our Congress. It bleeds into the general population as well. How many high school social studies textbooks, like the one prepared for use in Texas, forget racial terror by downplaying slavery and barely mentioning segregation, presenting a seamless transition from bondage to freedom?

Toni Morrison, in her great novel Beloved, replaces memory and forgetting with “rememory” and “disremember” to help us think about who, or what, the nation chooses to remember or forget. President Donald Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his 2016 campaign slogan. It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days. But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember. It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture. Going back to a time that was great depends on deliberate disremembering.

One of the great perks of being white in America is the capacity to forget at will. The sort of amnesia that blankets white America is reflected in an Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman lyric sung by Barbra Streisand: “What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.” The second stage of grief flashes in the assertion “it didn’t happen.” Instead of “forget it,” there is “deny it.” Civil rights icon Joseph Lowery often says that we live in the fifty-first state, the state of denial. Denial is even more sinister than amnesia because there is some concession to facts that are then roundly negated. Here is where the gaslight effect goes wild. Black folk are made to feel crazy for believing something they know to be true.

Beloved, you must admit that denial of fact, indeed denial as fact, has shaped your version of American history. This is how you can ingeniously deny your role in past racism. You acknowledge that bigotry exists. For instance, you will often say that separate but equal public policy was bad. You just don’t find too many current examples of the persistence of racism, like the fact that, given they have the same years of education, a white man with a criminal record is often more likely to get a job than a black man with no record. Or that even when they commit the same crime, black folk are more likely to do more time than a comparable white person. Or that a black male born in 2001 has a 32 percent chance of going to jail—a one-in-three shot—whereas a Latino has a 17 percent chance, and a white male a 6 percent chance. Or that black women are far more likely than others to be evicted. Or that police stop black and brown folk far more than white folk. Or that black folk are frequently illegally excluded from jury service. Sure, there are no white and black water fountains, but inequality persists.

White denial thrives on shifts and pivots. “It was my ancestors, not me, who did this to you.” But what looks like confession is really denial. The “them, not me” defense denies how the problem persists in the present day. It is best to think of systems and not individuals when it comes to racial benefit in white America. Thinking of it in individual terms removes blame from many of you who are present beneficiaries of past behavior. The institutions of national life favor your success, whether that means you get better schools and more jobs, or less punishment and less jail. Not because you’re necessarily smarter, or better behaved, but because being white offers you benefits, understanding, and forgiveness where needed. A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you actively resist black success, or the success of other people of color. It’s what you do for each other, how you take each other into account, that makes up a lot of what we have come to call “white privilege.”