Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(18)
When it comes to race the past is always present. What Jim Crow achieved in the past through, say, redlining—where services like banking, insurance, health care, and supermarkets are denied to specific racial or ethnic groups—continues to this day. Formal segregation in housing policies may have been struck down, but steering, where real estate brokers direct home buyers toward or away from particular neighborhoods based on race, is as effective as ever. School segregation is no longer the law of the land, but classrooms today are depressingly re-segregated.
Yet no one is responsible. All we hear is the refrain from reggae star Shaggy’s hit, “It wasn’t me.” We end up with what social scientist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “racism without racists.”
My friends, if you simply look around, and reflect on even recent history, you’ll see that denial shows up in painful ways, even among young folk. A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that 56 percent of Millennials think that the government spends too much on black and minority issues, and an even higher number think that white folk suffer discrimination, and it is just as big a problem as that suffered by black folk and other minorities. Or those white youth wonder why they don’t have a White Entertainment Channel to match BET.
In the political realm, look at the Supreme Court in its Shelby v. Holder voting rights amendment decision. The Court struck down the requirement to get legal permission to change voting practices because it concluded such permission was no longer necessary. The court denied the primary reason for recent black voting success: the existence of the rule for preclearance—where a jurisdiction covered under the law cannot change voting procedure without written approval from the Department of Justice—in Section Four of the Voting Rights Act. Now they were throwing it out because the very success of the rule counted as evidence that it was no longer needed. It was a nifty and nasty bit of circular reasoning that denied the facts. Can you not imagine how this sort of reasoning makes us just a little bit crazy? How it makes us think that white folk are hell-bent on denying how much the past is still with us? Black folk were successfully voting because they were being protected. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg torched her conservative colleagues with blistering eloquence. She argued that “throwing out preclearance [the Section Four formula] when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella because you are not getting wet.” That’s just one example of why Ginsburg may be black folks’ favorite justice since the death of Thurgood Marshall—despite calling Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality “dumb and disrespectful,” an issue I’ll take up later.
Instances of denial clutter the landscape. Fox News channels such denial nightly. I’m distressed to see the right-wing network blaring from the television screens in the restaurants of hotels I stay in when I’m on the road in states like Ohio or Florida. Places where working class and poor whites don’t fare so well, and yet they cling to the racial fantasies of going back to a time when they ran things. But just as it was true when, say, Ronald Reagan was in office, working class whites and their poor kin won’t benefit from the economic policies of the conservative politicians they depend on to diss black people and other minorities. What they gain from not being seen as black they lose in real economic terms. It’s a Faustian racial bargain.
The third stage of white racial grief, appropriation, looms everywhere. If black history can’t be forgotten or denied, white America can, simply, take it. Appropriation is a tricky symptom of white racial grief, and one that, ironically, defers to black culture even as it displaces it. White culture bows at the shrine of black culture in order to rob it of its riches. White America loves black style when its face and form are white.
Rachel Dolezal, former president of the NAACP in Seattle, Washington, caused quite a stir when she lied about her racial identity, which was white, and claimed to be black. She was eventually forced to leave her post at the NAACP. Dolezal didn’t feel that her white identity should in any way still the heart of blackness that beat within her. White Australian rapper Iggy Azalea mimicked the dialect of the hood in America to cash in on the desire to have white hip-hop stars equal the achievements of their black peers, much like the truly great Eminem. Eminem has paid homage to hip-hop culture with extraordinary talent and hard work, just as Justin Timberlake does with rhythm and blues, except, in the case of Timberlake, he picks and chooses his way through blackness. He’s black at awards time, not so much when it comes to taking heat with Janet Jackson over their controversial halftime Super Bowl performance in which he tore off part of her clothing at the end of their act. Timberlake proves that cultural critic Greg Tate is right: such white stars want everything but the burden of the blackness they sample. The credo of appropriators is “it happened to me too.” Blackness, that is, but not its costs or penalties. Moreover, these stars claim an outsider status without actually having to be outsiders.
The novelist Lionel Shriver threw an opening salvo in the newest installment of the writing wars to determine who could say what about whom. Shriver dropped her bomb in 2016 when she addressed the Brisbane Writers Festival and rode herd on her free speech horse against political correctness. Millennials, and the generation trailing them, are especially vulnerable on this score, Shriver argued, because they are in a race “to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved—who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.” As Shriver sees it, the left has become all too nervous about living in the skin or brain or experiences of the other. The demand that folk write only about what they know or experience is utter nonsense to Shriver; it is suffocating orthodoxy that imperils the art of the novel. “Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina.” It’s easy to empathize with Shriver; after all, if you only write what you know, then you are left with precious little to write about.