But in the end, the past isn’t really the biggest issue. Putting aside the historic crime of slavery, the only slightly lesser crime of segregation, the genocide of indigenous persons, and the generations-long head start for whites, we would still need to deal with the issue of racism and white privilege because discrimination and privilege today, irrespective of the past, are big enough problems to require our immediate concern. My own life has been more than adequate proof of this truism. It is to this life that I now turn.
AWAKENINGS
FOR WHITES, THE process of racial identity development is typically far slower than for people of color. As the dominant group in the United States, whites too often have the luxury of remaining behind a veil of ignorance for years, while people of color begin noticing the different ways in which they are viewed and treated early on. Recent studies suggest that even by the age of eight, and certainly by ten, black children are cognizant of the negative stereotypes commonly held about their group. Folks of color know they are the other, and pretty soon they learn what that means. What’s more, people of color not only recognize their otherness , but are also inundated by whiteness, by the norm. Sort of like that kid in the movie The Sixth Sense who sees dead people, to be black or brown is to see white people often. It’s hard to work around us.
But for whites, we often don’t see people of color. To be white in this country has long been to be in a position where, if you wanted to, you could construct a life that would be more or less all-white. Although the demographic changes underway in the nation—which by 2040 will render the United States about half white and half of color—are making it more difficult to maintain racially homogenous spaces, in many parts of the country white youth grow up with very little connection to anyone who isn’t white.
Even in 2011, I meet white folks all around the country who never really knew any person of color until they came to college; in some cases, they had hardly even seen people of color (other than on television) until then. Though perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, in part it does because such insularity is so foreign to my own experience.
Fact is, I remember the first time I ever saw a black person too—I mean really saw them, and intuited that there was something different about our respective skin colors. But that memory is not a college memory or a teenage memory; rather, it is my very first memory from my childhood.
I must have been about two, so it would have been perhaps the fall of 1970, or maybe the spring of 1971. I was in the living room of our apartment, gazing as I often did out of the sliding glass door to the porch, when about two hundred feet away, cutting across the rectangular lawn used as common recreation space by residents of the complex (which I would in years to come all but commandeer as my personal baseball diamond), came striding a tall, middle-aged black man in some kind of a uniform.
The man, I would come to learn, was named Tommy, and he was one of the maintenance crew at the Royal Arms. It is testimony to how entrenched racism was at that time and place that this man, who was at least in his fifties by then, would never be known to me or my parents by anything other than his first name. Even as a mere infant I would be allowed the privilege of addressing this grown black man with a family and full life history only as Tommy, as if we were equals, or perhaps “Mister Tommy,” as my mother would instruct, since at least that sounded more respectful. But about him, I would need know nothing else.
As I gazed out the window my attention was riveted to him and the darkness of his skin. He was quite dark, though not really black of course, which led me to ask my mother who the brown man was.
Without hesitation she said it was Mr. Tommy, and that he wasn’t brown, but black. Having developed a penchant for argument, even at two, I naturally insisted that he most certainly was not black. He was brown. I knew the names of all the crayons in my Crayola box, and knew that this man certainly didn’t look like the crayon called “black.” Burnt umber maybe, brown most definitely, but black? No way.
My mother acknowledged the accuracy of my overly literalistic position, but stuck to her guns on the matter, explaining something rather profound in the process, the profundity of which it took many years for me to appreciate. “Tim,” she explained, “Mister Tommy may look brown, but people who look the way Mister Tommy does prefer to be called black.”
And that was the end of the argument. Even at two, it seemed only proper that if someone wanted to call themselves black they had every right to do so, whether or not the label fit the actual color of their skin. Mine, after all, wasn’t really “white” either, and so it was really none of my business.
This may not seem important, but think how meaningful it can be to learn early on that people have a right to self-determination, to define their own reality, to claim their own identity—and that you have no right to impose your judgment of them, on them. When it comes to race, that’s not a lesson that most whites learn at the age of two or ever. Historically, white Americans have always felt the right to define black and brown folks’ realities for them: insisting that enslaved persons were happy on the plantation and felt just like family, or that indigenous persons were the uncivilized ones, while those who would seek to conquer and destroy them were the practitioners of enlightenment.
At the level of labels, racism has long operated to impose white reality onto others. Whites found the assertion of blackness (and especially as a positive, even “beautiful” thing in the 1960s and 1970s) threatening because it was an internally derived title unlike “colored,” or “Negro,” terms which had been foisted upon black bodies by the white and European tradition. Likewise, many whites today react hostilely to the use of the term “African American” because it came from within the black community, and as such, stands as a challenge to white linguistic authority.
When whites tell black folks, as we often do, that they should “just be Americans,” and “drop the whole hyphen thing,” we’re forgetting that it’s hard to just be an American when you’ve rarely been treated like a full and equal member of the family. More to the point, it isn’t our hyphen to drop. But it’s always hard to explain such matters to those who have taken for granted, because we could, that we had the right to set the parameters of national identity, or to tell other people’s stories as if they were our own. It’s been that way for a while and explains much about the way we misteach history.
So at roughly the same time as I was being instructed by my mother on the finer points of linguistic self-determination, I was also beginning to read. I read my first book without help on May 5, 1971, at the age of two years, seven months, and one day. That’s the good and reasonably impressive (if still somewhat freakish) news. The bad news is that the book was Meet Andrew Jackson, an eighty seven-page tribute to the nation’s seventh president, intended to make children proud of the nation in which they live, and of this, one of that nation’s early leaders. Given that my mother had been quick to prohibit books like Little Black Sambo from coming into our home because of the racial stereotypes in which the story trafficked, it was somewhat surprising that she would indulge such a volume as this one, but she did, and I consumed it voraciously.
Therein, I learned that Jackson’s mom had admonished him never to lie or “take what is not your own” (an instruction he felt free to ignore as he got older, at least as it applied to indigenous peoples or the Africans whom he took as property), and that when Jackson headed West as a young man, he encountered Indians who “did not want white people in their hunting grounds,” and “often killed white travelers.” This part was true of course, if a bit incomplete: people whose land has been invaded and is in the process of being stolen often become agitated and sometimes even kill those who are trying to destroy them. Imagine.
On page 46, I read that although “some people in the North were saying it was not