Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(24)

This happens to so many of us, so many of you. The white person we love is no longer an individual, but, in their insistence on innocence, they are all of whiteness; they have chosen whiteness over us. This may happen between loving black and white classmates in a college course that probes the history of race. In these encounters abstract ideas often become concrete realities. The beauty of history, its ornate, or ugly, truths, are distant until we are brought face-to-face with their consequences. History takes shape in the person before me. When it is made personal, history becomes urgent. The neat irresolution of history becomes messy, yearning for an answer now.

We are no longer ourselves alone. What was once the collective, institutional notion of whiteness becomes the white person I encounter. And my blackness is no longer isolated and atomistic; it forges destiny with all the blackness that came before me. And in my insistence on holding you accountable for privilege, for tiny but terrifying aggressions, for condescension, for any of the everyday racial slights that reinforce white supremacy, I have invoked again your sense of your guilt. I am not just a person, but a pointing finger, a scold, a challenge to the authority you were given as a birthright and that you cannot bear to relinquish.

If this can occur between classmates, between friends, between lovers, between blood kin, imagine the stakes when it occurs between groups of people. Whiteness becomes a mob of innocence and it responds like a mob to a call for black justice. It responds with riot gear, tear gas, clubs, arrests, Tasers, rubber bullets, and real bullets too. It responds with a collective no. In that moment of mob innocence, it truly believes that if one police officer is indicted, whiteness itself is indicted. If one mass shooter at a black church is brutalized or injured before he can reach a fair trial, then whiteness itself is injured.

White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top of. The fragility of ego versus the forced labor of slavery, the lynchings of Jim Crow, the beatings and the police violence sparked by the endeavors of desegregation. If it weren’t real, if it weren’t in action every single day—and every day seems to bring new stories of an unarmed black person being shot down by the police, new stories of black college kids being called “nigger,” new stories of white anger flashing in bigoted humor about the first black president—it would be a perverse joke.

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Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your own hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life.

This is why the cry “Black Lives Matter” angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary. It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity.

The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.” But that is a tough thing for most of you to do. My students are a bit of a captive audience. They’re more willing to wrestle their whiteness to a standstill—or at least a tie between the historical pressure to forget and the present demand to remember. Believe it or not, that tiny concession, that small gesture, is progress.

Of course it is hard to undo an entire life of innocence and the privileges it brings. And so you play a game. You pretend that by accountability we mean that you are guilty in a very specific way of some heinous injury. For instance, when we speak of affirmative action, we are not saying that you are individually responsible for the bulwark of white privilege on which it rests. We are saying, however, that you ought to be honest about how you benefit from getting a good education and a great job because you’re white. To twist that into the attempt to prosecute a case against all of white privilege through your individual story is an irresponsible ruse, and you know it, and yet you continue.

There is a big difference between the act of owning up to your part in perpetuating white privilege and the notion that you alone, or mostly, are responsible for the unjust system we fight. You make our request appear ridiculous by exaggerating its moral demand, by making it seem only, or even primarily, individual, when it is symbolic, collective. By overdramatizing the nature of your personal actions you sidestep complicity. By sidestepping complicity, you hold fast to innocence. By holding fast to innocence, you maintain power.

The real question that must be asked of white innocence is whether or not it will give up the power of life and death over black lives. Whether or not it will give up the power to kill in exchange for brotherhood and sisterhood. If it does, it can at long last claim its American siblings and we can become a true family.

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Beloved, fake regrets or insincere apologies for wrongdoing only reinforce white innocence.

I got a whiff of this sort of moral failure in 2015 when I watched the tribulations of Levi Pettit unfold in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa has a long history of white oppression. In 1921 white residents of Tulsa massacred hundreds of black citizens and torched Greenwood, one of the wealthiest black communities in America, in a matter of a few hours in one of the worst acts of racial terror in the nation’s history. Pettit, a University of Oklahoma student and former high school golf star, was caught on video chanting a frat song that exulted in saying “nigger.” It also endorsed lynching. The gist of the ugly ditty he led on a bus trip to a party for his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was that a black person would never be admitted to the group. When the video went public Pettit was expelled from the university.