History is a friend to white America when it celebrates the glories of American exceptionalism, the beauty of American invention, the genius of the American soul. History is unrestrained bliss when it sings Walt Whitman’s body electric or touts the lyrical vision of the Transcendentalists. History that swings at the plate with Babe Ruth or slides into home with Joe DiMaggio is the American pastime at its best. History hovers low in solemn regard for the men who gave up the ghost at Appomattox and speaks with quiet reverence for the Confederate flags that gleefully waved to secession. Of course all of you don’t sing from the same hymnal. But American history, the collective force of white identity that picks up velocity across the centuries, mouths every note.
Beloved, I must admit that I’ve encountered many of you as white allies who know that whiteness is privilege and power. You know that white skin is magic, that it is a key to open doors. Yet you also know that whiteness for the most part remains invisible to many white folk.
It has been striking, too, to observe whites for whom their whiteness isn’t a passport to riches, whites for whom whiteness offers no material reward. But there is a psychological and social advantage in not being thought of as black; poor whites seem to say, “At least there’s a nigger beneath me.” And it’s a way for poor whites to be of value to richer whites, especially when poor whites agree that black folk are the source of their trouble—not the corporate behavior of wealthier whites who hurt black and white folk alike. It’s a way to bond beyond class. It’s a way for working class whites to experience momentary prestige in the eyes of richer whites. And there are a lot of privileges that white folk get that don’t depend on cash. The greatest one may be getting stopped by a cop and living to talk about it.
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After more than a century of enlightened study we know that race is not just something that falls from the sky; it is, as the anthropologists say, a fabricated idea. But that doesn’t mean that race doesn’t have material consequence and empirical weight. It simply means that if we constructed it, we can get about the business of deconstructing it.
And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes. The idea that whiteness should be abolished, an idea that some white antiracist thinkers have put forth, disturbs a lot of you—especially when you argue that whiteness is not all murder and mayhem. Historian David Roediger has questioned if there is a “white culture outside of domination.” At the University of Minnesota, where he taught for five years, conservative white kids on campus said there was a need for a white cultural center if a black cultural center existed. When he asked his class what they’d put in a white cultural center, he said “there was the longest silence that I have ever experienced in a classroom.” The silence “was broken by a hand going up, and a shout: ‘Elvis!’ And then laughter, that Elvis would somehow be considered unambiguously white.” Of course there was laughter. If ever there’s been what Norman Mailer termed a white Negro, at least in style, and one who’s made money and his reputation off a derivative blackness, it’s Elvis Presley. If Elvis belongs in a white cultural center, then so do Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Beloved, I haven’t given up on your ability to confront whiteness, to give it the old college try, literally. Back at my alma mater Carson-Newman, after being banned for 31 years, and even though I felt the time warp, I also got cause for hope. When I preached in the chapel, I was certainly far more blunt and vocal in challenging whiteness than I had been when I went to school there. I preached about the black prophetic mission and its demand for social change. I riled up some conservative white students. Many got up and walked out. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it was racial déjà vu all over again.
But I also spoke of the need to combat class inequality, gender oppression, and homophobia. I tried to link these ills and thus lighten the load of responsibility that white folk would have to carry alone. But those young conservatives still got mad. I suspected they hadn’t heard a sermon like mine before, hadn’t had to hear it, either, at least not in the school’s chapel or their home churches. Some of the students threatened to protest my presentation later that evening where the entire local community gathered. I told the folk in charge that I didn’t mind that at all, and that I’d be more than happy to entertain their questions and to answer their outrage.
The protest never happened. But one of the angriest young men stayed behind to ask me a question as I signed copies of my books. He wanted to know how I could be a Christian and say the things I do; that I should take into account views with which I disagreed. I assured him that doubting my Christianity put him in good stead with many black folk I know, who, because of my stand against homophobia, count me among the religiously unwashed. Let me be real: my joyful embrace of the secular dimensions of black culture has landed me in trouble. It makes a lot of folk uncomfortable when I taunt the supposed abyss between the sacred and profane. I told the young man that to be black in America means always taking in views we disagree with, not out of altruism, but out of necessity and the impulse to survive. I gently insisted that he take off the blinders to his whiteness. I encouraged him to think of how he was reared and what role that had on his views, and how his rearing had a lot to do with the privileges of whiteness. I knew my crash course in whiteness wouldn’t convince him. But at least he listened. Instead of an angry protest, we shared an open, honest conversation. I asked him to recall an earlier question from one of his classmates in the audience, in whose voice I detected a fellow traveler.
“For a white working class kid, who learned about Western philosophy from reading the sermons and speeches and essays of Dr. King—that was actually how I learned about old dead white people, is through a black man. Given that context, how would somebody in my position be an ally? How . . . do I seek to supplant imperialism, how do I seek to supplant militarism, how do I seek to supplant white supremacy and the patriarchy without perpetuating those very same things through my action?”
Answering this earnest young man, I acknowledged the limitations of our subject positions. I also acknowledged that our lives are constantly in process. I told him that some of the greatest victims of whiteness are whites themselves, having to bear the burden of a false belief in superiority. I told him how I also loved the words of many old dead white men, from Tennyson to Merle Haggard, even though many of those white men would find me troublesome. I asked him not only to challenge white privilege, but also to resist the narcissism that celebrates one’s challenge to whiteness rather than siding with those who are its steady victims. Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding.
It felt at that moment, on that night, that something good might happen. I had no reason to doubt that at many other moments like this, on many other similar nights, hope might prevail. If you, my friends, would make a conscious effort to change. If you would stop being white.
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The Five Stages of White Grief