I came across a line in a book, in which the historian was arguing that long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other’s, and the revelation to me, of course, was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to theirs. I’d had no idea that we’d ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was—how much more did I not know about myself?
It was because of this text that I decided to study civil rights history, and partially why, after graduation, I picked up the books of James Baldwin, the first of which was No Name in the Street. Baldwin gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself. There was this line:
But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.
And this one:
All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.
And this one:
White Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.
I know why this came as a shock to me then, at twenty-two, and it wasn’t necessarily because he said I was sick, though that was part of it. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American.” In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity; for me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself, which, I hadn’t known, was the most white American thing of all. I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history—the history of white Americans—had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness was dangerous because it exonerated me of responsibility, of history, of a role—it allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk. About this indifference, Baldwin writes:
White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded—about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state … People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning.
Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity, heartache. But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed because of their ignorance and misused power, they might actually be the losers within a greater moral universe. My reaction to this was far different from the normal pain of rejection—it was the pain of suddenly sensing one’s inherent hopelessness, the exact opposite of the endless promise on which a white American life depends. Had not America’s terrible race history already determined my fate? The “Western party is over, and the white man’s sun has set,” was one of the last lines of Baldwin’s book.
In Istanbul—in a somewhat desperate attempt to connect America and the world through James Baldwin—I focused my efforts on finding Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor who first invited Baldwin to Turkey. I still didn’t understand everything Baldwin wrote, I knew there was something that as a white American I was missing, and thus I knew that my ability to understand Turkey and the world around me would be inherently compromised. Baldwin’s books had an effect on my psyche, if only the beginnings of one. The philosopher Jonathan Lear has written that certain books can provoke an ethical transformation in their readers, and in his essay on the subject, he describes the types of people who might be in need of such an ethical transformation as those who live in “unjust societies”:
Unjust societies tend to cloud the minds of those who live within them. Such societies hold themselves together not by force alone but by powerful imaginative structures that instill fear and complacency in the population. Those who, at least on the surface, profit from injustice tend to be brought up in ways that encourage insensitivity to the suffering on which their advantaged life depends. If we are inhabitants of an unjust social order, it is likely that our own possibilities for thought will be tainted by the injustice we are trying to understand. [italics mine]
If people produced by an unjust society wanted to understand the world, they had to accept that they might not be ethical people, that there was something about how their minds worked that was fundamentally unethical. The levers and pulleys worked in an unethical way. The machine had been built by an unethical system, and eroded over time in an unethical environment, and only if people learned to anticipate the grinding of the gears would they be able to confront a world they had spent most of their lives disregarding.
*
BACK THEN, MY DAYS in Istanbul dissolved into the nights, a formless kind of existence. I had no office to go to, no job to keep, and I was thirty years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory and idle phase of late-late youth. Starting all over again in a foreign country—making friends, learning a new language, trying to find your way through a city—meant almost certainly choosing the latter. I spent many nights out until the wee hours—like the evening I drank beer with a young Turkish man named Emre, who had attended college with a friend of mine from the States.
We sat outside in a passageway in Tünel, a neighborhood where the streets were packed with tiny tables, which young Turks filled every night, smoking and drinking beer and having tea. The din rattled off the old buildings until it built into a roar. A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he’d ever met. I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for the AK Party, and he spat back, outraged, “Did you vote for George W. Bush?” until which point I had not realized the two might be equivalent. Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the United States had planned the September 11 attacks.
I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories, as I thought of them, were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, right-wing forces, like the military, bombed neutral targets, or even right-wing targets, so they could then blame it on the left-wing groups, like the PKK. To Turks, bombing one’s own country seemed like a real possibility.
“Come on, you don’t believe that,” I said.
“Why not?” he snapped. “I do.”