Tim Wise's Blog, page 7

Historical Memory and the Implicit White Supremacy of American Conservatism

Sometimes racism isn’t about vicious bigotry and hatred towards those with different skin color than your own, let alone a willingness to walk into a church and massacre nine of those others because you think they’re “taking over your country.” Sometimes, racism is manifested in the subtle way a person can dismiss the lived experiences of those racial others as if they were nothing, utterly erasing those experiences, consigning them to the ashbin of history like so much irrelevant refuse. In the last few days, since Dylann Roof’s terrorist rampage in Charleston, we’ve seen some of that on the part of those who steadfastly defend the confederate flag, which Roof dearly loved, from its critics. As the flag has come down in Alabama and is poised for removal from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina, its supporters have insisted that the flag is not a sign of racism, even if the government whose Army deployed it made clear that its only purposes at the time were the protection of slavery and white supremacy.

Those who defend the flag consider the black experience irrelevant, a trifle, hardly worthy of their concern. Who cares if the flag represented a government that sought to consign them to permanent servitude? Who cares if segregationists used that flag as a blatant symbol of racist defiance during the civil rights movement? Remembering the courageous heroics of one’s great-great-great-grandpappy Cooter by waving that flag or seeing it on public property is more important than black people’s lived experience of it. That such dismissiveness is intrinsically racist should be obvious. But what of less blatant examples?

For instance, what are we to make of certain comments by Congressman Louis Gohmert, Senator Ted Cruz and conservative media personality Sean Hannity in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing marriage equality nationwide? While those comments were not about race per se, it is hard to deny that their implicit subtext demonstrates a worldview entirely shaped by a white racial frame, viewed through a white racial lens, and one that takes as its starting point a profound disregard for the lives of persons of color: in short, a worldview that is (whether consciously or not), white supremacist to the core.

Start first with Gohmert. Given to hyperbole, one is loath to pay too much attention to the likes of Louis, and yet, his comments in the wake of the marriage equality decision represent far more than his solitary views, so similar are they to the kinds of things heard from many an evangelical white Christian whenever their moral sensibilities are offended. According to the Texas Congressman, because of the ruling, “God’s hand of protection will be withdrawn” from America. In other words, God so loves the world (but hates the gays) that he will either smite us directly, or at the very least no longer offer his thus far really impressive protection from things like economic recession, killer tornadoes, scorching heat waves, disastrous blizzards, a crumbling national infrastructure, and for that matter, racist young men who walk into churches and slaughter nine of his followers in cold blood. Got it? No more “protection” from those things!

At first glance, perhaps this comment seems to have nothing to do with race at all; but think about it. For Gohmert to claim that now God’s protection will be withdrawn is to suggest that prior to this time we were the active recipients of that protection, that to this point God had shined his light upon America, blessing us with all good things, happy at the sight of our superior morality. And yet, for that to be true, one would have to believe that God saw nothing wrong with the enslavement of African peoples for over two hundred years, the slaughter and forced removal of indigenous peoples from their land, the invasion and theft of half of Mexico, the abuse of Chinese labor on railroads, the internment of Japanese Americans—nothing wrong with lynching or segregation. You would have to accept that God is more offended by marriage equality than any of those things, that God was essentially sanguine about formal white supremacy, and willing to extend his protective blanket over us even in the face of that, but somehow so-called “gay marriage” is a bridge too far.

Aside from the loony-tunes nature of such a belief as this, on its face, is it not obvious that the position amounts to an erasure of the lived experiences of people of color? That it diminishes the horrors with which they lived and suggests that those horrors were not horrors after all, at least not in any moral sense that the presumed Creator might recognize? And if so, how can such a belief not be called racist? If I deny your experience, relegate it to the category of the irrelevant, or suggest that the denial of your rights as people of color was morally less problematic than the extension of rights to others, how can I possibly claim exculpation from the charge of holding an implicitly white supremacist worldview? Is one such as Gohmert not clearly implying here that the experiences of people of color do not matter? Or at least not that much? Is he not suggesting that whatever terrors they experienced were basically no biggie so far as the Lord was concerned, and as such, should certainly prove no great distraction for the likes of mortal men and women like ourselves?

Indeed, to believe that God protected America all through those periods of formal and overt white racial fascism is to believe that those days weren’t so bad after all—a fundamentally racist worldview that disrespects people of color by definition—or that God is a white supremacist, which view not only disrespects people of color but would likely displease any Creator should he exist and actively intervene in the affairs of man. In which case, Louis Gohmert might want to chew his food especially well from this point forward.

Then there’s Ted Cruz. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Cruz took to Sean Hannity’s radio program, where he proclaimed that the previous twenty-four hour period (in which the court not only legalized marriage equality but also saved affordable health care for between 6-8 million Americans) had been “among the darkest 24-hours” in the history of the nation itself. It was a claim to which Hannity responded that he could not have said it “more eloquently” himself.

Really? A 24-hour period during which the court extended rights to millions of people and guaranteed that upwards of eight million wouldn’t lose their health insurance was among the worst 24-hour periods in history?

As bad or worse than any 24-hour period under slavery, under segregation, or during which day-long progression multiple black bodies may well have been strung up from tree limbs?

Worse than the 24-hour period in which the same court issued its decision in Dred Scott, holding therein that blacks had no rights the white man was bound to respect?

Worse than the 24-hour period in which whites bombed and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma or slaughtered dozens of African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois in orgies of racial terrorism?

Worse than any 24-hour period in which multiple slaving ships pulled into port in cities like Charleston or New Orleans and offloaded their human cargo for sale at market?

Worse than any 24-hour period in which Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Muscogee Indians were forcibly marched westward during the Trail of Tears, or any 24-hour period in which Lakota and Dakota peoples were being hunted in the Black Hills, or the 24-hour period during which Colonel John Chivington led his forces in a sadistic massacre of Cheyenne families at Sand Creek?

Fascinating.

It would seem axiomatic to rational people that any day under enslavement or Jim Crow segregation, or debt peonage or the Black Codes, or the that existed even well into the twentieth century in many parts of the South, would have been worse than the 24-hour period about which Cruz and Hannity are so exorcised. But then again, that would only be true for black people, and as such, would not count to the likes of men such as they. And that’s the point: to disregard the racialized horror that defined the black experience every single day for centuries, or to consider it somehow less horrible than a 24-hour span in which LGBT folks were treated as full and equal citizens and eight million people were kept from being thrown off of health care rolls, is to possess a worldview that is not only stupendous in its thoroughgoing mendacity, but also embarrassingly white and implicitly racist. Only someone who didn’t care about the history of America as regards people of color could say such a thing; and one who doesn’t care about said history is engaged in a form of racism by default—guilty of committing racial memoricide by way of their dismissiveness.

And yet this kind of historical mis-remembering is virtually a requirement for being a modern conservative in the United States. It’s why Donald Trump can say, with no sense of misgiving (and Bill O’Reilly heartily agree) that thanks to defective black culture and bad parenting, black children are “in worse shape today” than at any other time in American history, including, one presumes, that time during which they were being forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk, beaten or mutilated for learning to read, raped by depraved owners, sold away from their families, or relegated to deliberately inferior separate and unequal schools (or in some cases denied education altogether).

Despite the ongoing chasms that exist between white folks and black folks in every area of well-being, the fact remains that notwithstanding the supposedly corrosive influences of hip-hop and saggin’ pants, black youth are more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to enroll in college, less likely to live in poverty, less likely to suffer from hunger and less likely to die in infancy than at any point in the nation’s history. All of this, thanks to the legacy of the civil rights struggle, in which neither Trump nor O’Reilly nor any prominent conservative played a part. Though people of color still face persistent obstacles to full equality of opportunity, and ongoing racial discrimination (as many, myself included have long documented), suggesting that they are worse off than ever before is not only asininity on stilts, but so too an act of supreme disrespect for the lived experience of black and brown peoples. It minimizes their pain in a way that only someone who never lived it could, and wipes clean their history in a way that only a person who didn’t care about those whom that history injured, possibly would countenance.

By their statements, the modern American right shows itself not only dismissive of racism’s continuing presence in the contemporary period, but even its central role in the nation’s history. They demonstrate their ignorance, and more, their nonchalance at the pain and suffering inflicted upon black and brown peoples so as to make possible this country they love so much. Indebted though they are to those peoples of color, without whose forced labor and stolen land they would still be among Europe’s most spectacular failures, white conservatives continue to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that with this week’s Supreme Court rulings they are among the nation’s greatest historical victims.

The delusion would be laughable were its consequences not so dangerous. People such as this cannot be allowed to wield any power, anywhere, ever again.

Tim Wise on KCRW/PRI, 6/24/15 – Black Deaths and White Culture: Challenging Racism After Charleston

My appearance on “To the Point” (KCRW/Public Radio International), June 24, 2015 to discuss racism in America in the wake of the Charleston Massacre. An excellent discussion with journalist Jonathan Capehart, author Joshua DuBois, and Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Or, if the above player doesn’t work, you can listen on Soundcloud here:

Tim Wise on CNN New Day – 6/23/15 – White Entitlement and President Obama’s Use of the N-Word

A short clip of my appearance on CNNs New Day, to discuss the “controversy” over the President’s use of the n-word in a recent podcast, in which has was discussing the issue of racism. Here, I respond to those whites who still can’t understand why black folks are able to say the word, while we can’t (or shouldn’t). It’s a point I’ve made before, but is worth making again, since many people still don’t get it

Tim Wise on RT America News, 6/22/15 – The Charleston Massacre and Neo-Confederacy in America

My appearance on RT America News, June 22, 2015 to discuss the Charleston Massacre and the connection between terrorist Dylann Roof and the larger white nationalist and neo-Confederate movement — and specifically the debate over the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina.

Heritage of Hate: Dylann Roof, White Supremacy and the Truth About the Confederacy

In the wake of the terrorist killings in Charleston by admitted white nationalist and neo-Confederate Dylann Roof, many a voice have called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse, and in general, from American culture. That flag—actually a battle standard of the army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War—is prized by Roof as a symbol of white supremacy and segregation: both of which his recently discovered manifesto makes clear he supports. Much as the Klan and Neo-Nazi groups have brandished that flag as a symbol of their cause since the 1950s, so too does Roof consider it an appropriate totem for his.

Naturally, those who defend the flag, whether on statehouse grounds or a bumper sticker, have been quick to condemn any suggestion that the flag is a racist symbol. No matter the use for which it has obviously been put by overt white supremacists, including Roof, they insist that the flag and more broadly the Confederacy itself was not about racism. Indeed, they insist the flag is about “heritage, not hate.” It’s an old canard and one that we who are southerners have heard all of our lives: The Confederacy was about state’s rights, they insist, or tariffs, or taxes, or an intrusive “central government.” That anyone could still believe such things is testament to the broken and utterly pathetic state of American education. Much as some apparently don’t wish to believe Roof was motivated by racism and white supremacy, even as he said so from his own mouth before slaughtering nine people, many white folks appear incapable of trusting the very words uttered at the time of secession by Confederate leaders, all of which make clear that enslavement and white domination were not only the biggest reasons for their breakaway government but indeed the only ones.

It’s as if we shouldn’t take at face value the words of Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, even as he explained in clear language that his government’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” Apparently some would have us ignore his plainly spoken assurance that:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution. African slavery as it exists amongst us is the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away…Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.

Far from an afterthought, overshadowed by larger ruminations on taxes or trade policy, Stephens took great pains to distinguish the centrality of racism and slavery in the South, from that of all past governmental systems, including the United States:

This, our newer Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…Those at the North…assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights, with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just; but their premises being wrong, their whole argument fails.

And far from a one-off anomaly, Stephens repeated the arguments from his “cornerstone” speech a month later when speaking to the Virginia secession convention and seeking their entry into the new breakaway government. Prior to his address, the Virginia delegates had rejected secession by a 2:1 margin. Stephens was dispatched so as to sway them to change their vote, and in order to do so, dug deeply into his bag of incendiary and racist rhetoric to affect the outcome. During his speech he articulated the principle of white supremacy as central to the ideology of the Confederate government:

As a race, the African is inferior to the white man. Subordination to the white man is his normal condition. He is not equal by nature, and cannot be made so by human laws or human institutions. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature. It is founded not upon wrong or injustice, but upon the eternal fitness of things. Hence, its harmonious working for the benefit and advantage of both…The great truth, I repeat, upon which our system rests, is the inferiority of the African. The enemies of our institutions ignore this truth. They set out with the assumption that the races are equal…hence, so much misapplied sympathy for fancied wrongs and sufferings. These wrongs and sufferings exist only in their heated imaginations. There can be no wrong where there is no violation of nature’s laws…It is the fanatics of the North, who are warring against the decrees of God Almighty, in their attempts to make things equal which he made unequal.

Immediately after Stephens’ address, in which maintenance of the system of white supremacy and enslavement was the only reason offered for secession, the Virginia delegates reversed course and made the decision to join the CSA, suggesting that their decision to do so had nothing to do with state’s rights in the abstract, but the specific right of the states in the south to maintain the system of enslavement permanently.

One wonders, exactly how many times does the Vice-President of a Government have to say the same thing regarding his administration’s philosophy (and that of his “nation”), each time without correction or censure from his superiors or governmental colleagues, before we believe him? And when that Vice-President himself insists that other issues like trade tariffs had already been adequately resolved to the satisfaction of the southern states—as he did in his November 14, 1860 address to the Georgia legislature—who but a liar or a fool can continue to insist that it was matters such as this that animated the Confederate cause?

Although only five states ultimately issued formal declarations as to their causes for secession, those declarations leave little doubt as to the thinking behind the Confederate movement. Each of them noted that the “domestic institution” of slavery was their principal concern, and the one they felt was most threatened by the election of Lincoln. Whether their own states’ right to hold blacks in bondage, or the right of white settlers in the West to bring chattel there and establish new slave states, it was this end for which the breakaway states announced their secession.

Texas, being Texas, was perhaps the biggest, boldest and most blatantly bigoted of states when it came to explaining why they felt it necessary to depart the nation to which they had only shortly belonged. In their declaration of causes, Texas noted that it had been admitted to the Union “as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits—a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.” The problem, or so the declaration claimed, was that the Federal Government had sought to exclude slavery from the newly expanding national territories to the West, in effect choking off the economic vitality of the region and “destroying the institutions of Texas and their sister slaveholding states.”

The declaration continued:

In all the non-slave-holding states…the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party…based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern states and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of Negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and Negro races, and avow their determination to press their crusade against us…

The Texas secession delegates went even further than those in most other Southern states, by declaring:

We hold as undeniable truths that the government of the various states and of the (federal) confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

As if this were not all quite putrid enough, they pressed on:

…In this free government, all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil rights…the servitude of the African race, as existing in these states, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator; as recognized by all Christian nations…

When South Carolina’s legislature voted for secession, it reported out two documents from its convention. The first was a Declaration of Causes, written by C.G. Memminger, who would become the CSA’s Secretary of the Treasury. The second was an address to the other slaveholding states, written by Robert Barnwell Rhett.

In Rhett’s document—an exhortation to the other slave states to secede—he argued:

The fairest portions of the world have been turned into wildernesses, and the most civilized and prosperous communities have been impoverished and ruined by Anti-Slavery fanaticism. The people of the North have not left us in doubt as to their designs and policy…they have elected as the exponent of their policy one who has openly declared that all the States of the United States must be made Free States or Slave States…if African slavery in the Southern States be the evil their political combinations affirm it to be, the requisitions of an inexorable logic must lead them to emancipation. If it is right to preclude or abolish slavery in a territory, why should it be allowed to remain in the States?

His address continued by insisting that South Carolina hoped to be part of a “great slaveholding confederacy,” and, in an interesting clause, argued that it was important for those regions of the world (such as the South) “where the Caucasian cannot labor” to be “brought into usefulness by the labor of the African.” In other words, whites were too lazy to work hard so as to produce the wealth of the South, and Southern whites were completely dependent on black labor.

Likewise, in December 1860, Alabama sent commissioners to the other slave states to advocate for their secession. One of the commissioners was Stephen Hale, whose job was to persuade Kentucky to leave the Union. In his letter to the Governor of Kentucky, he asked and answered the question as to which “state’s rights” were being violated by the North. “What rights have been denied, what wrongs have been done, or threatened to be done, of which the Southern states, or the people of the Southern states, can complain?” he inquired, rhetorically. Then, he proceeded to provide the answer:

…African slavery has not only become one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern states, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property…forming, in fact, the basis upon which rests the prosperity and wealth of most of these states…It is upon this gigantic interest, this peculiar institution of the South, that the Northern states and their people have been waging an unrelenting and fanatical war for the last quarter of a century. An institution with which is bound up, not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community…They attack us through their literature, in their schools, from the hustings, in their legislative halls, through the public press…to strike down the rights of the Southern slave-holder, and override every barrier which the Constitution has erected for his protection…The Federal Government has failed to protect the rights and property of the citizens of the South, and is about to pass into the hands of a party pledged for the destruction not only of their rights and property, but…the heaven-ordained superiority of the white over the black race…Will the people of the North cease to make war upon the institution of slavery, and award to it the protection guaranteed by the Constitution? The accumulated wrongs of many years, the late action of the members of Congress in refusing every measure of justice to the South, as well as the experience of all the past, answers, No, never!

Hale then explained that it would be best for the South to leave the union immediately, so as to maintain slavery, rather than waiting until new free states were added to the union and would be able to abolish it nationwide:

Will the South give up the institution of slavery, and consent that her citizens be stripped of their property, her civilization destroyed, the whole land laid waste by fire and sword? It is impossible; she cannot, she will not…Will the South be better prepared to meet the emergency when the North shall be strengthened by the admission of the new territories of Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Jefferson, Nevada, Idaho, Chippewa, and Arizonia, as non-slaveholding states, as we are warned from high sources will be done within the next four years, under the Administration of Mr. Lincoln?…Shall we wait until our enemies shall possess themselves of all the power of the Government? Until Abolition Judges are on the Supreme Court bench, Abolition collectors at every port, and Abolition postmasters in every town…?

Hale’s fanatical commitment to the notions of white supremacy and African savagery was made clear later in the letter when he argued:

…this new theory of Government (as articulated by the Republicans) destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans…

He continued by conjuring up the fear that whites and blacks would be made social equals under Republican rule: a fate that, to hear him tell it, was worse than death, and that this fate would harm slaveowning whites and those who didn’t own slaves—clearly an attempt to inflame those without direct property ownership of slaves, in favor of secession.

If the policy of the Republicans is carried out, according to the programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern states. The slave-holder and non-slave holder must ultimately share the same fate—all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side-by-side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life; or else there will be eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting the destroying all the resources of the country. Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism, of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed?

Hale then explained that a Southern triumph over the Union would allow the maintenance of slavery as its principal (and only mentioned) benefit, and would serve as a bulwark against black barbarism.

If we triumph…we can…preserve an institution that has done more to civilize and Christianize the heathen than all human agencies beside—an institution beneficial to both races, ameliorating the moral, physical and intellectual condition of the one, and giving wealth and happiness to the other. If we fail, the light of our civilization goes down in blood, our wives and our little ones will be driven from their homes by the light of our own dwellings. The dark pall of barbarism must soon gather over our sunny land, and the scenes of West India emancipation, with its attendant horrors and crimes, be re-enacted in our own land upon a more gigantic scale.

Just how much more proof do rational people need? How long before that which quacks and walks as a duck is recognized for the mallard it is? How long before apologists for the Confederacy are simply honest enough to admit that their favored symbol, the loss of which seems to threaten their very identity, is indeed no different functionally than the Nazi swastika, and of a piece with its ignoble message? The pathetic need for these stunted souls to cling to such a symbol and heritage as this bespeaks an emptiness, a vacuity of conscience, and a deep-seated identification with white supremacy, whether or not they are courageous enough to simply admit that. At least Dylann Roof, for all his other evils, isn’t a prevaricator on this point. At least he has been honest as to the true meaning of the images that he and so many others find inspiring. At least he is willing to announce his southern partisanship for what it truly is, and proclaim himself a solider in that centuries long battle, without pretense.

But now, and let us be clear on this point: it is time for the rest of us to finish that war, once and for all. It is time to  bury the Confederacy and everything for which it stood; to destroy for all time the white supremacist culture that Dylann Roof and his compatriots so cherish; and this time, completely and without pardon. Not by violence, not by retribution, and not by exchanging hate for hate; rather, we must destroy the culture and system of white supremacy by our resistance to its logic, our opposition to its policies, and our insistence that we can and must do better. We who are white must end white supremacy by our actions of solidarity with our black and brown brothers and sisters, and on behalf of racial equity; by our refusal to remain silent, to collaborate, to put up with the racism of our friends, family or colleagues for even one more second. We must end white supremacy by showing up to insist that Black Lives Matter, not merely as an aspirational slogan but a moral principle, and that we who are white will defend that principle and the principle of multiracial democracy with our voices, our money, our bodies and even our lives if need be.

The next Reconstruction must be permanent.

New Short Clip from Brave New Films: How Media Covers White Riots vs. Black Protest — MUST SEE!

The folks at Brave New Films have just released a powerful new short clip demonstrating the way in which media frames, quite literally, black protesters as “thugs” while de-racializing and actually minimizing violence and riots done by white folks in the wake of sporting events, etc. This is a must see, and something that you can easily send around to those folks who fail to see racism and racial bias in reporting…

Mimicry is Not Solidarity: Of Allies, Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity

In a country where being black increases your likelihood of being unemployed, poor, rejected for a bank loan, suspected of wrongdoing and profiled as a criminal, being arrested or even shot by police, the mind boggles at the decision of Rachel Dolezal some years ago to begin posing as an African American woman. Yes perhaps blackness helps when you’re looking for a job in an Africana Studies department, selling your own African American portraiture art, or hoping to head up the local NAACP branch—all of which appear to have been the case for Dolezal—but generally speaking, adopting blackness as one’s personal identity and as a substitute for one’s actual whiteness is not exactly the path of least resistance in America.

And so, cognizant of the rarity with which white folks have tried to pass as black over the years—and in all likelihood for the above-mentioned reasons, among others—many have chimed in as to the personal, familial and even psychological issues that may lie at the heart of her deceptions. Not possessing a background in psychology I am loathe to spend too much time there, but having said that, it strikes me that there is an important, largely overlooked, and quite likely explanation for Dolezal’s duplicity, and one the importance of which goes well beyond her and whatever deep-seated emotional baggage may have contributed to her actions. Indeed, it has real implications for white people seeking to work in solidarity with people of color, whether in the BlackLivesMatter movement, Moral Mondays in North Carolina, or any other component of the modern civil rights and antiracism struggle. It is one I hadn’t really thought much about until I read something yesterday, a comment from one of her brothers (one of the actual black ones, adopted by her parents), to the effect that while Dolezal had been a graduate student at Howard, she felt as though she “hadn’t been treated very well,” at least in part because she was never fully accepted—she the white girl from Montana who paints black life onto canvas, and quite well at that—at this venerable and unapologetically black institution.

Now, on the one hand, good for her I suppose in not interpreting her lack of full acceptance by the folks at Howard as some kind of “reverse racism” nonsense. At least she didn’t take it there, which is probably where some would have ended up. Yet it appears she may have taken it somewhere just as problematic, if less obviously so, and however much better intended the detour.

You see, allyship involves, at its best, working with people of color, rather than trying to speak for them. And I suspect Rachel discovered at Howard that it isn’t enough to love black culture and profess one’s solidarity with the movement for black equality; that indeed, black folks don’t automatically trust us just because we say we’re down; that proving oneself takes time, and that the process is messy as hell, and filled with wrong turns and mistakes and betrayals and apologies and a healthy dose of pain. And I suspect she didn’t have the patience for the messiness, but armed with righteous indignation at the society around her, and perhaps the one in which she had been raised out west, she opted to cut out the middle man. To hell with white allyship (or as my friends and colleagues Lisa Albrecht and Jesse Villalobos are calling it, “followership”), to hell with working with others; rather, she opted to simply become black, to speak for and as those others. It was her way of obtaining the authenticity to which she perhaps felt entitled just because of her sensibilities, and which she felt had been denied her by those whose approval she sought. It is a more extreme version, to be sure, but of a piece with those white folks who think dabbling in eastern religion makes us more spiritual, that donning beads and dream catchers in our rear-view mirrors makes us indigenous, or that blaring the loudest, brashest hip-hop beats in our stale suburbs renders us hard and street and real, in some way that isn’t possible within the confines of white normativity.

I am quite sure that in her mind, the intentionality of her actions was good; that rejecting whiteness, not merely in the political sense but even in herself was a righteous, perhaps even revolutionary act. But it was neither. It is revolutionary for real black people to rise up against whiteness because they possess a deep and abiding sense of the risk involved in doing so, not from having read about it, but because it is etched in their DNA, in the cell memory passed to them by their ancestors. For real black people to challenge whiteness and the horrific consequences of white supremacy is to demand my people shall live, even if I must die. For white people, the revolutionary act is not blacking up and pretending to share that historical memory; rather, it is demanding that despite one’s whiteness, one places humanity above skin and the conceits of race, to say that my people will live even as white supremacy must die. It is to remain white and yet challenge what that means in society by striving to change that society every day. Conversely, a white person who has lived as an African American since only slightly before the advent of the Obama administration is effectively seven years old in black years, and even then less weathered by what that means than any actual black seven-year old in this country. A mimic perhaps—possibly even a good one—but a mimic nonetheless. And mimicry is not solidarity.

Most disturbing of all, there was another path, however much Dolezal showed no interest in treading it. Whether intended or not, make no mistake, by negating the history (and even the apparent possibility) of real white antiracist solidarity, Dolezal ultimately provided a slap in the face to that history by saying that it wasn’t good enough for her to join. That the tradition of John Brown, of John Fee, of the Grimke sisters, of Anne and Carl Braden and Bob and Dottie Zellner, just to name a few, wasn’t a meaningful enough heritage for her to claim. She wasn’t willing to pay her dues, to follow the lead of people of color. She didn’t want to do the hard and messy work, struggling with other white folks and challenging them, which is, after all, what SNCC told us white folks to do in 1967, and what Malcolm had already said shortly before his death. She wanted to be done with white folks altogether, to immerse herself in blackness; yet, as a white person, she knew she could never do that fully. And so, instead…this.

There is a lesson here for us, for we who are white and care deeply about racial equity, justice and liberation, and the lesson is this: authentic antiracist white identity is what we must cultivate. We cannot shed our skin, nor our privileges like an outdated overcoat. They are not accessories to be donned or not as one pleases, but rather, persistent reminders of the society that is not yet real, which is why we must work with people of color to overturn the system that bestows those privileges. But the key word here is with people of color, not as them. We must be willing to do the difficult work of finding a different way to live in this skin.

That is the crucible of whiteness for us, and trust me when I say, it is more than enough for us to bear, and exactly as much as we must. We need not pretend to the burdens of others in order to get busy making our whiteness, though still visible, no longer relevant to our place in the world.

#WhiteLiesMatter, Part Six: Debunking Racist Apologetics One Fact at a Time

So many lies, so little time to bust them all…

Lie: As the nation’s schools have become “blacker and browner,” they have become more dangerous and violent. Fact:…

Posted by Tim Wise on Sunday, May 24, 2015

Lie: Blacks and Latino/as mostly rely on cash welfare and SNAP (food stamps) for their income, rather than working for a…

Posted by Tim Wise on Sunday, May 24, 2015

Lie: Blacks and Latino/as on cash welfare and food stamps (SNAP) don’t want to work. They’d rather sit around and do…

Posted by Tim Wise on Sunday, May 24, 2015

#WhiteLiesMatter, Part Five (Public Housing Edition): Debunking Racist Apologetics One Fact at a Time

Another little debunking for your consideration…

Lie: Public housing is filled with mostly black single moms and their kids, who live for free, receive cash welfare, and…

Posted by Tim Wise on Friday, May 22, 2015

#WhiteLiesMatter, Part Four: Debunking Racist Apologetics One Fact at a Time

…and more. This is an especially important one. I address it at length in my upcoming book as well (“Under the Affluence”), but here’s a taste…

Lie: Black folks just sit back and collect welfare checks rather than working for a living. Fact: There are only about…

Posted by Tim Wise on Friday, May 22, 2015