Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(23)
I have seen this in many lectures I’ve given over the years. When many white folk disagree, or feel uncomfortable, they get up and walk out of the room. Black folk and other people of color rarely exercise that option. We don’t usually believe that doing so would solve anything. We don’t trust that once we leave the room the right thing will be done. Plus we’ve fought so hard to get into most rooms that a little discomfort is hardly a reason to drive us from the premises. Such rooms likely affect our destinies, something that many white folk needn’t worry about, because they have access to so many other rooms just like the ones they are leaving.
I have, over the years, developed a pedagogy of the problematic to address the thorny matter of race, whether it is wrestling with the burdens and sorrows that honest talk of whiteness brings or discouraging my black students from the easy retreat into sanctuaries of black solace. I want students to confront the brutal legacy of race with the kid gloves off, and yet respect each other’s humanity.
Such an effort isn’t easy. I get scores and scores of letters and e-mails from white folk who are angered by how my pedagogy of the problematic plays out in the media. They make sure to let me know what a moron I am, how unfortunate my students are to have me as a professor—okay, let’s be honest, at times that might really be true—how Georgetown should fire me on the spot. They often call me “nigger” to remind me of the inferior status I keep forgetting to embrace. And many are mad because they say I am trying to warp young people’s minds.
On that score they have a point. I seek to fix the warp that racial bigotry can bring; I want to challenge, one brain and body at a time, the poisonous precincts in which some of my white students were bred. I want my students to be uncomfortable with their racial ignorance, with their sworn, or unconscious, innocence. I’m sure that feels warped to many whites.
Teaching at a Catholic school like Georgetown has given me renewed appreciation for “culpable ignorance”—in this case, the idea that white people are responsible for things they claim not to know. Although I’m a man of books and thought, I’m also a man of faith. It is my faith that helps me see how whiteness has become a religion. The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
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As my brave white student discovered, whiteness claims so loudly its innocence because it is guilty, or at least a lot of white folk feel that way. This is why, of course, your resistance to feelings of guilt is absurdly intense. There is a terror in accepting accountability, because it doesn’t end with your recognition that something is rotten in Denver or Detroit. It suggests something is amiss across our country.
That’s a terrifying thought to field, a terrifying responsibility to absorb. It means accepting accountability for your unanimous, collective capacity for terror, for enjoying a way of life that comes at the direct expense of other folk who are denied the privileges you take for granted.
If white guilt is real, so is black guilt, though it is quite different and has its own history. Black bodies that were captured and enslaved reached American shores half dead and soaked in racial guilt. They were guilty of their blackness, guilty of being dangerously different. They were guilty of resisting the loss of their freedom, guilty of their rage at injustice, guilty of trying to escape, guilty of the insubordination of indignation. They were guilty in every way of every crime, and whiteness, in adjudicating that guilt, told itself the very same lie every abusive parent, every batterer, and every spouse killer has told their victim throughout space and time: you made me do it.
And when this innocence is questioned, whiteness rages, or it weeps in disbelief. Conservatives lambast the moral and intellectual inferiority of blacks. Liberals cry at our ingratitude. How dare the historically guilty point a finger at the innocent? No court in the land can change the immutable fact of race, of guilt and innocence by pigment. It might be the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that held that an enslaved man was his master’s property and that blacks are not citizens. It might be the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that cleared the way for the separate but equal policies of Jim Crow. No matter the weight of white transgressions, they are seen as small acts of badness within a bigger body of goodness. “We have bad seeds,” says the innocence narrative, “but those bad seeds only prove how good the plant is. A few of us are guilty, but only a few. The rest of us are innocent.”
You preach responsibility as a personal credo, as a civic tenet, and yet you will have none of it. Your guilt is unbearable to you. But our daily subjugation, our not naming your guilt, is unbearable to us. We are unbearable to each other. And so we are stuck looking across a divide we cannot bridge.
What I ask my white students to do, and what I ask of you, my dear friends, is to try, the best you can, to surrender your innocence, to reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in our complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings.
Many of you find yourselves exhausted by thinking of how such colossal change might be made. You worry that your individual choice to do better won’t be a match for our horrible history of hate. And even when individual black people confront individual white people, even when we love one another, white innocence still clouds our relationships. We are two historical forces meeting, and the velocity of that history is so strong that it can break the bonds of individual love. We are no longer two people asking each other to be understood. Instead, we are two symbols in a 400-year-old battle of guilt and innocence.