Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(47)

VI.

Benediction

R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.V.E.

This old man was very wise, and he could answer questions that was almost impossible for people to answer. So some people went to him one day, two young people, and said, “We’re going to trick this guy today. We’re going to catch a bird, and we’re going to carry it to this old man. And we’re going to ask him, ‘This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?’ If he says ‘Dead,’ we’re going to turn it loose and let it fly. But if he says, ‘Alive,’ we’re going to crush it.” So they walked up to this old man, and they said, “This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?” He looked at the young people and he smiled. And he said, “It’s in your hands.”

—Fannie Lou Hamer


Beloved, in this sermon I have shared with you from the depths of my heart what I believe to be true about the state of race in America. As we prepare to part, I offer you a few practical suggestions about what you as individuals can do to make things better.

First, my friends, you must make reparation. I know that you may not have followed the fierce debate over reparations, and even if you have, you may not support the idea. If affirmative action is a hard sell for many of you, then reparations, the notion that the descendants of enslaved Africans should receive from the society that exploited them some form of compensation, is beyond the pale. But surely you can see the justice of making reparation, even if you can’t make it happen politically. Please don’t say that your ancestors didn’t own slaves. Your white privilege has not been hampered by that fact. Black sweat built the country you now reside in, and you continue to enjoy the fruits of that labor.

There are all sorts of ways to make reparation work at the local and individual level. You can hire black folk at your office and pay them slightly better than you would ordinarily pay them. You can pay the black person who cuts your grass double what you might ordinarily pay. Or you can give a deserving black student in your neighborhood, or one you run across in the course of your work, scholarship help. In fact, your religious or civic institution can commit a tenth of its resources to educating black youth.

It may be best to think of reparation as a secular tithe, a proportion of money and other resources set aside for causes that are worthy of support. You can, as an individual or as a small group, set up an I.R.A., an Individual Reparations Account. There are thousands upon thousands of black kids whose parents cannot afford to send them to summer camp or to pay fees for a sports team, or to buy instruments to play if they attend one of the ever-shrinking number of schools that has a band. Their parents cannot pay for tutors for math or science or English or whatever subject their kids need help with. An I.R.A. would work just fine.

You can also pay a black tax, just as black folk do. The black tax refers to the cost and penalty of being black in America—of having to work twice as hard for half of what whites get by less strenuous means. You can help defray the black tax by offering black tax incentives: if a black accountant is doing a good job for you, assume a surcharge and pay her more. If a black lawyer performs good service, then compensate him even more for his labor.

You can also treat some black folk to a few of the signs of appreciation you offer to military veterans. For instance, at football games, there ought to be a “civil rights veterans” night to recognize the valor, honor, and sacrifice of those who made this country great—living legends like Andrew Young, Diane Nash, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Eleanor Holmes Norton.

As part of an I.R.A. you can also pay for massages for working class folk. You can choose five black children to sponsor on an annual trip to the local zoo. You can begin a film club for black children to attend movie theaters in more affluent areas where they might also enjoy a trip to the museum. Or you can pay for the textbooks of ten black college students each year. The point is to be creative in transferring a bit of your resources, even if in modest amounts, to deserving and often struggling descendants of the folk who gave this country its great wealth and whose offspring rescued its reputation for democracy.

Beloved, you must also educate yourselves about black life and culture. Racial literacy is as necessary as it is undervalued.

What should you read? I always start with James Baldwin, the most ruthlessly honest analyst of white innocence yet to pick up a pen. Baldwin was a boy preacher, and though he outgrew the rituals and theology that hemmed in the very souls religion meant to free, he never left the pulpit. His words drip with the searing eloquence of an evangelist of race determined to get to the brutal bottom of America’s original sin. Baldwin married the gospel fervor of Jonathan Edwards to the literary style of Henry James, most notably in The Fire Next Time.

Beloved, you should read books about slavery that prove it was far more varied and complicated than once believed, including Ira Berlin’s incisive history of slavery before cotton became king in Many Thousands Gone; Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom, which explores the fate of enslaved women; and books like Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage, which probes the relationships between black and white women. The novels The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, about a black family that owned enslaved blacks in the antebellum south, and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, about a newly freed slave who hops aboard a slave ship, give color and texture to slavery. Toni Morrison’s epic novel Beloved lyrically probes the aftereffects of enslavement on the minds and souls of black folk. Her Playing in the Dark is a slim classic that brilliantly probes the white literary imagination and how it silences and distorts the dark agency from which it derives its meaning.