Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(36)

Beloved, let’s try a brief thought experiment. Let’s apply the logic of some of your arguments about black folk to you. Take your argument that we should pay more attention to black-on-black crime than white cops killing black folk because more blacks are killed by other blacks. Now let’s compare the number of white Americans killed by whites to the number of Americans killed by terrorist acts. I can already feel your hair standing on end. You see how hurtful it is to make such a comparison? You see how it could miss the point of giving each cause of suffering its due? According to your logic, we should not be concerned with political acts of terror committed on American soil because, since 9/11, less than 100 people have been killed in such attacks in America while 11,208 people were killed by firearms in 2013 alone and 21,175 died by suicide with a firearm.

By Giuliani’s logic, then, the obsession with terror is both misplaced and hypocritical. We should focus instead on the plague of firearms on the American population. Far more white folk kill each other than are killed by terrorists. So let’s stop worrying about terrorism and worry about white-on-white homicide. Stop griping about a couple of planes crashing into a couple of towers. Stop crying over a few folk getting butchered by a few religious fanatics when the routine crime that snuffs white life lies in a white man’s assault rifle.

Notice how just reading those words makes your blood boil? See how your nationalist bravado flashes? Can you imagine how your rage might spill over if that were said to you with the same callous disregard for white life that Giuliani speaks with when he dismisses cops killing unarmed black folk? See how your temperature rises by just reading those words? These are words that are rarely spoken directly to white America. Words that reflect back to you your dishonesty and indifference and tone-deafness to our plight.

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Beloved, I must admit that there are ways that black folk do aim hate at each other, ways we do rip each other apart. A lot of it has to do with how we’ve taken into our minds and souls the poisonous bigotry you’ve spread. It’s brutal and agonizing to watch, especially because we are imitating the hate for blackness, for “otherness,” that you taught us. But you seem hardly aware of this sort of black-on-black crime. Could it be that you don’t really care about black-on-black crime unless you can use its existence to attack us even more?

But there is some value to you in our folly. You can point to it and say, “See, black folk are just as bad as us. They’re even more destructive and hateful to each other than whites have ever been. See, just as the song in the Broadway play Avenue Q says, ‘We’re all a little bit racist.’” (Of course that’s a horrible misuse of the term. Better to say we’re all just a little bigoted, yes, or prejudiced for certain. But I’m afraid you’ve got to own racism all by yourselves, beloved. It signals the power not only to hate, but to make that hate into law, and into convention, habit, and a moral duty. Thank God brave Americans challenged the legal and ethical roots of racism in this country.)

You even find comfort in exploiting black prejudices—against darker black folk, against women, against queer folk, against poor folk. You feel good about it because it lets you off the hook as well. It’s as if you take glee in thinking black people are equally bigoted. Especially when you hear one of us tell our dark-skin children not to marry a dark-skin mate so they won’t have dark children. Or when you hear one of us say that only light-skin people have “good hair,” or that there was no homosexuality in Africa and that it’s a white man’s plague.

We have sometimes been faithful proxies of white supremacy. If you’d take the time to know us, you’d see that we’ve imported some of the harmful beliefs you’ve laid on our psyches. Or we’ve generated our own varieties of troubling blackness. In fact, your racist dogma was so appealing that even when you stopped barking it, we demanded more in our own cultural quarters.

The ventriloquist effect of whiteness has worked brilliantly; black mouths moving, white ideas flowing. What your vast incuriosity about black life keeps you from knowing, and this is heartbreaking to admit, is that we black folk often see ourselves the same way you see us. Sometimes we view our own culture, our traits and habits, through the distorted lens of white condescension or hatred. Often we make other vulnerable black folk in our midst the nigger you’ve made us all out to be.

This came home to me after I battled bias at Carson-Newman. The racial dynamics of the college were troubling. Black students couldn’t have been more than 6 percent of the student body. We weren’t warmly welcomed either, except if we played ball. When I asked why there weren’t more black speakers at the mandatory Tuesday chapel, it came down to crude mathematics: our small percentages mandated only one black speaker a year. Most of the other black students accepted that as par for the course; I was a few years older so it rankled me a bit more. I didn’t enlist their help. I formed a one-man quiet protest and refused to attend chapel. In return for my resistance—chapel was mandatory—I was unceremoniously booted from the school after my junior year.

Then I had to figure out what to do to support my family. I had worked all through college, cleaning and degreasing heavy machinery at a local factory. Later I pastored a couple of different churches. After getting my walking papers from Carson-Newman, I got “called” to a bigger black church in East Tennessee.

I went there thinking that I had found my life’s purpose. After being expelled from college, I was eager to apply my knowledge of the Bible and my beliefs about social justice in the black church setting. The only thing I really discovered is that God has a mighty sense of humor. The church I took charge of is named Thankful Baptist Church. They proved anything but grateful for me.