Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(32)
Yet many of you, beloved—honestly, it may be most of you—pretend not to know any of this. It may be that you don’t know many of us. You’ve got one, two, perhaps three really good black friends. Maybe you’re not pretending. Maybe you don’t know because you don’t want to know. Maybe it’s worse. You don’t have to know. Your life hasn’t depended, like ours has, on knowing what the “other” likes or dislikes.
Black folk have had to know white culture inside out. We know what coffee you like, what mood you’re in, whether you’ll be nasty or nice to us on the subway. We know just by how you glance at us as you interview us if we’ll get that job. We know the fear you feel when we get on the elevator, so we whistle Vivaldi or the Andy Griffith theme song to put you at ease. Although, just to spook you, we sometimes ask the black person we’re with how he’s adjusting to life after being locked up for murder for the last 20 years.
We know the way you clinch your white girlfriend a bit tighter when our virility marches up on you unannounced, and the woman on your arm, you fear, will want to be in our arms. So we act less threatening. We have to know as much as we can know about you to keep you from wrecking our lives because you had a bad day. We have to know all we can know about you to keep you from firing us or gentrifying our communities and shipping us to the outer perimeters of hell. As the creator of a bad racial allegory, you have all of Dante’s rage but none of his poetry.
*
Beloved, we know the word finds greater currency and menace in white circles than you are willing to say. The ban on its use by white people is an attempt to arrest its murderous spread. The white folk who claim that the call to stop using the word is to cave in to political correctness ignore history and black humanity. They are the kind of whites who pose as “honest.”
We have, most of us, anyway, rejected your imagining and defaming of us as nigger. We have done everything humanly possible to prove that we are not who you say we are. I am from a generation far more willing to make the effort than the one freshly on the scene. Black Millennials have little use for respectability politics; they see no need to prove their humanity before you treat them with decency. They discern the fatal lapse in your logic: Why should black folk ever have to prove our humanity to white folk who enslaved and raped us, castrated and murdered us for kicks?
Your white humanity is forever at stake with such young folk. And you know what, beloved? They have a point. Black folk my age and older have a direct memory of what it means for white folk to be blind and deaf to us even when we stood by the thousands in the streets and screamed our names for the world to hear. “I Am a Man,” we blared through a bullhorn, amplifying both our desperate desire to be recognized and our unknowing sexism. While pleading that the world not be blind to us, we couldn’t see the women by our side. “I Am Somebody,” we insisted, even when it was more aspiration than belief. All of that was our way of saying—in reality, our way of preparing to proclaim—that “Black Lives Matter.”
Beloved, there is something black folk fear, whether you can see it or not, whether some of us black folk will say it or not. Our fear is that you believe, that you insist—finally, tragically, without hesitation, with violent repercussions in tow—that, in all sorts of ways, we are still your nigger.
It is a belief you hold on to all these centuries later. It is a belief that has survived all of the marches, and bullhorns, and protests, and politeness, and good behavior, and forgiveness, and Kumbaya, and nice Negro smiles. It has survived our dancing to a song playing nowhere except in our heads. It is a song that we hoped would quiet your insistence that we disappear or die. It is a belief that has survived all our trying, trying, trying to make you see that most of us will never do you any harm. And you’ve shown a brutal consistency through the centuries by not hesitating to kill a nigger on sight.
It’s painful when black folk have so easily, sometimes unknowingly, perhaps invisibly, bought into the logic of the nigger and let it rule our minds. I saw this in my own family.
When I got into Cranbrook—a prestigious prep school outside of Detroit in Bloomfield Hills, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America—my parents and I took a tour of the school’s prosperous geography. As a white student guided us around campus, we weathered a light drizzle and came upon a puddle. The white kid stepped around it, and I stepped right through it since it wasn’t deep.
“See Ivory, the white boy is a genius, and Michael ain’t,” my father said to my mother, thinking I hadn’t heard him, or, perhaps, he didn’t care whether I heard or not.
A great grief engulfed me. It was at that instant that I completely, unforgettably, understood what Baldwin meant when he wrote of his own father that “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” I felt the same about my father. He was a barely literate man who likely had to drop out of school in Georgia in the eighth grade. He was a man whose industry and muscles got him work in a factory. He was proud of my desire to get more education, yet he lived in a prison of disbelief in his own worth. Therefore he doubted mine too. That he could believe that a white kid was smarter than me because he stepped over a puddle proved how little he believed in black intelligence and how much he bought the lie of white superiority.
I flashed back to when I was eight years old and I mimicked his pronunciation of the number four. He pronounced it “foe.” I followed suit, but he stopped me in my tracks.