White Tears
When we were about eleven years
old, me and Beverly were walking back from Fieldtown there was right across
from St. Dominic’s a little service station on the corner and we were coming
back to my grandma’s because I stayed there at night, and Beverly says, “Well,
Cissy, I got to use the bathroom,” and I says, “Me, too, I got to wee wee,” and
there was this heavy set man, you know he just real gruff looking, and she
says, Cissy, please don’t ask him, and I says, Well Beverly, I’m about to wet
on myself, and I said, well, Beverly, you think you can hold yours until you
get to Grandma’s and she says, I think I can, but I knew I couldn’t, cause
Sharon you know how I would laugh and I would wet all over.
I said Sir, I was antsy all over the place, and says Sir
may I please use the bathroom, he says, “Get on in there and do your business.”
We laugh about it, even now.
Sharon says: But Cissy, that was so long ago. I mean
Beverly’s come so far.
Oh, yes, Cissy says, but we didn’t forget and we still talk
about it.
But the pain is gone?
Oh, yes, the pain is gone.
I find that I am crying. This is unexpected, and I feel it
is wholly unacceptable.
I’m well aware that one of the worst things white people
can do, and do, often (and, I’m afraid to say, liberals do the most often) is
to inject themselves and their feelings into
the narrative of people of color. Centering whiteness is problematic. It
hasn’t, yet, presented a practical problem for me as I worked and talked with people,
but it has troubled my reflections. I know that my feelings, be they feelings
of guilt, empathy, rage, or grief, are not the focus of this work.
The first time I listen to this tape all the way through,
almost two years have passed and I’ve forgotten about the story Julia told me
about her eleven-year-old self and her cousin Beverly.
When I’ve tried to listen. I’ve become exasperated with how
Sharon’s insistence that bygones need to be bygones has kept Julia/Cissy from
telling the stories she had planned to tell me about growing up in Springfield,
and has diminished her expressions of injustice over and over.
Since then, a book has been published with the title Black Tears. It’s a story about two
young white men who appropriate Black culture and music and end up facing some
tragic consequences. In a review of this book, Leah Mirakhor writes about what
she calls a “pathology of whiteness.”
The
white characters in this novel deny their own personal catastrophes, seemingly
unaware that the sounds of such events “persist, fainter and fainter”; instead,
they do what legions of Americans have been doing for centuries, which is turn
to black Americans for catharsis while simultaneously denying their humanity.
As one of the unnamed black women expresses later in the novel, “we’re
fascinating to you, long as we’re safely dead.” It should come as no surprise,
then, that white Americans can in the same month “celebrate” Coretta Scott King
as an icon and then refuse to hear her historical testimony about an Attorney
General nominee. The novel contains similar examples — examples of what happens
to human beings, in the name of protecting the illusion of whiteness.
But
when I hear myself speaking through tears, at first I am so disappointed. Did I
really make this all about me?
They asked me if I was crying because I could identify with
them.
Sharon asked me who raised me after my mother died.
I started talking about Emma and how my father never took
us to see her. But why didn’t I go to see her?
“Why am I crying?”
“You can identify with us as a Black race? You can put
yourself in our place?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Well,
I mean, I can in that every child gets yelled at by adults, gets scolded and
feels bad, yes.. but, look.”
This
is exactly the problem as has been pointed out in workshops since then: Black
people are suddenly taking care of white people’s feelings. This was the last
thing I would have wished for. Cissy, having worked for white people all her
life, certainly knew how to anticipate their needs and moods and minimize her
own. But, to find myself creating that situation was awkward and I tried to
shake it off, by explaining.
“Okay, I’m going to stop crying. We white people have lived
with the privilege of being white our whole lives. If a cop stops me, I can just
act however I want.. he’s not going to shoot me.”
“The other night, I went to see Carol. And Pansy tells me,
well you go on to LeeAnn’s and you turn then go to about the sixth house, and
just go up to the door, so I went to a house and there was a man there. I said,
Hi, is Carol here? He says, No, she’s next door. But come on in.”
“I got home that night and I thought, what if a Black
person just walked into a white person’s house in Springfield?”
“They’d probably call the police or start shooting.” Cissy
said.
“That’s what Pansy said, depending on who the white person
was.”
“Do you feel that our race is more, empathetic, or has
more, somehow more wisdom…” Julia asks me.
“Well,
you have suffered more, and so, yes, you are closer to God, I would say.”
There
were moments of silence here, as I tried to pull myself together, and we all
figured out what to say next.
Cissy
asked, “Could you just tell me why the white race maybe thinks they’re so
superior that they are invincible, whatever they do or want to do is fine?”
“It’s
called white privilege. They don’t even think it. It’s drummed into white
people from birth…”
Sharon
said, “You have to learn to act white.”
“It’s
how you carry yourself. You watch them, you see how they act, you act how they
act. You mimic them, you learn how to tweak white people through that.”
My
frustration and puzzlement over this almost two-hour conversation returned as I
contemplated it in the following months. To me, it represented something that I
needed to acknowledge: in listening and recording the feelings and memories of
the Black community, I would have to allow for the many perspectives
individuals had on slavery, racism, religion, and on Black America. I had
engaged in trying to convince Sharon the racism was very much alive, and that
there was a direct line from the past to the injustices of today. But Sharon
was firmly set upon a narrative that envisioned Black people as personally
responsible for their own liberation, emotionally as well as economically and
politically.
This philosophy has long held sway
among scions of Black life. Henry Louis Gates, in an article from the New York Times, touches upon it:
Booker
T. Washington himself led the charge by calling for a New Negro, one who would
cease complaining about slavery. Even in his classic ''Up From Slavery''
(1901), he urged his black readers to obliterate their memory of hurt and
wrongs, bragging that he had completely rid himself of ''any ill feeling toward
the Southern white man for any wrong that he may have inflicted upon my race.''
As his contemporary Benjamin Tanner put it, ''The very remembrance of our
experience is hideous.'' Sarah Debro, an ex-slave, told an interviewer in North
Carolina in 1937: ''My folks don't want me to talk about slavery. They's shame
niggers ever was slaves.'' Slavery? Forget about it.
WASHINGTON'S
blueprint for a New Negro was actually a call for a full embrace of white,
bourgeois values, complete with his insistence on the importance of ''a
toothbrush and a bar of soap.'' Even by then, class tensions had had a long
history among African-Americans, and they had also troubled the abolitionist
movement. Douglass complained in 1856, ''Opposing slavery and hating its
victims has come to be a very common form of abolitionism.'' In the slave narratives,
the noble, aspiring fugitive often established his nobility, implicitly, at the
expense of the average, illiterate, less adventurous slaves left behind --
whose spoken language even black authors often rendered in a harsh, humorous
dialect.
