Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(25)



Pettit held a press conference at a black church in Oklahoma City to apologize for his racist behavior. The black leaders that he sought forgiveness from dutifully surrounded him. Pettit was performing a common three-step ritual of the remorseful: mess up, dress up, ’fess up.

The beginning of Pettit’s mea culpa was promising. He thanked black state senator Anastasia Pittman, to whom he turned for guidance, for schooling him about the meaning behind his hurtful words. Pettit said he was sorry for his actions and admitted that there was no excuse for his behavior. He never saw himself as a bigot, but then, to be blunt, not many of you do. Pettit pledged to combat racism for the rest of his life.

The trouble started when Pettit was asked where, and from whom, he learned the nasty song. He waved the question off, insisting that he was there to address his actions and not the song’s origins. That gesture was surely a sign of willful, durable white innocence. When he was pressed about what he was thinking as he mirthfully chanted the song, Pettit dismissed the question as immaterial to his apology. And yet he and his fellow fraternity boys were all enjoying themselves on the video. After only a few questions Pettit held up his hand, announced “I’m done,” and quickly exited the room.

Pettit refused to address some of the most damning elements of his offense. Thus he took back with one hand what he had given with the other, that is, the willingness to confront racism head-on. Such a gesture is the prerogative of white innocence. My friends, there has been a great deal of talk, and no small consternation, about the idea of white privilege, the unspoken and often unacknowledged advantages that white Americans enjoy. And many of you are resentful of such talk; you think it is foolish. This was a glaring example. When Pettit stood at the lectern he appeared to take responsibility for his actions. In some ways he did, even as other culprits were hidden from view. That hateful chant was undoubtedly passed down through SAE generations as part of the fraternity’s racist legacy, one that it clearly cherished. Pettit functioned that day as a scapegoat.

It is harder to indict forces and institutions than the individuals who put a face to the problem. Institutional racism is a system of ingrained social practices that perpetuate and preserve racial hierarchy. Institutional racism requires neither conscious effort nor individual intent. It is glimpsed in the denial of quality education to black and brown students because they live in poor neighborhoods where public schools depend on the tax base for revenue. Minority students, like the ones I teach at Georgetown, are more often beset by economic and social forces than overt efforts to deny them equal education.

Racial profiling is another strain of institutional racism. It is the belief that a person’s racial identity, and not their behavior, is a legitimate reason to be suspected by the police of criminal activity. Redlining is yet another example. Until the late 1960s, banks marked certain neighborhoods on the map to show where they would withhold investment. Those banks also overcharged black and brown people for services and insurance, or encouraged them to take on faulty mortgages. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed redlining, and yet the practice persists, arguably leading to the largest loss of black wealth ever in the subprime mortgage scandal that triggered an economic recession in 2007. And even though the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed the franchise, the relentless assault on black voting rights through unprincipled and often illegal voter ID tactics complicate that right. These are institutional practices that extend racial hierarchies.

Beyond these institutional forces lie the symbolic meanings of public gestures. A pat on the back by one of the ministers gave the impression that Pettit was a victim in need of support and understanding. No such gesture was extended to the invisible sea of black students on campus, and across America, who had been antagonized by Pettit’s racist antics or very similar behavior.

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My friends, sometimes the call of white innocence is far more insistent, far more explicit, far more unapologetic. And there are occasions where you have sought to hide behind a figure who gives bigger voice to your grievances and your fragility, to your angry insistence of innocence. In such instances you outsource it to a vile political figure who echoes your most detestable private thoughts. Even before the nation got a full blast of such a phenomenon, I saw it up close.

It was the summer of 2015, and there I was, in the lobby of the NBC building in New York, confronted with the flaming orange visage that is Donald Trump. I had just finished criticizing him on a daytime talk show when our paths crossed in front of the elevator bank.

“You’ve been very tough on me,” the future president said. “But I love you.”

There’s no question that Donald Trump has “huge” charisma. He possesses a brutally appealing magnetism that, tragically, amplifies the most virulent rumblings of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has reckoned with in quite some time. That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology.

Each election, we hear that this run for the presidency says more about who we are than any other—Obama defines us, Reagan embodies us, Bush will be the ruin of us all. We’ve become inured to the get-out-the-vote sales pitch; the nation endures. And yet the 2016 election was indeed the most eventful of my lifetime, and perhaps the most important. Whiteness was at stake in a way it hadn’t been in decades.

Trump’s efficacy as an ambassador of unrepentant white innocence, and ignorance, and privilege, doesn’t depend on whether his personal racial views add up to bigotry. What he’s done in public will suffice to pass judgment. Trump’s political popularity took off when he sullied the citizenship of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. The “birther” claims were driven by unwarranted skepticism about the place of Obama’s birth and the status of his birth certificate. Trump’s recent assertion that Obama is an American still rang false and appeared as little more than an attempt to deflect responsibility for his vicious views onto his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. His admission that he said Obama was born in America to keep his campaign going was a moment of ruthless honesty that sealed the case.

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