Let’s face it, you’ve grieved ever since you were forced to share some of your historical shine with the black folk you’d kept underfoot for centuries. You didn’t think we deserved that much attention; you’ve tried to hide us, even bury us, for too long. First we were the enslaved lackeys at your beck and call, then the servants at the family dinner. Later we were the embarrassing kinfolk at the family picnic. We finally made it to the holiday gathering too, but your paternalism relegated us to the children’s table. You were forced to invite us to affairs of state, but you mostly ignored us.
It has been exceedingly tough for you to wrap your minds around the notion that black folk are your equals in any realm. The exception might be sports, but you control the purse strings there, too, so no sweat off your billions. And as long as we know our place, and don’t, for instance, take a knee while the national anthem is played to protest injustice, we are well rewarded for our athletic exploits—gladiators for your titillation and fantasy leagues. But when that fantasy is up, and proper black manhood and womanhood is reclaimed, we know that you revert to your old ways and think of us as not worth the trouble. In most other realms of pursuit you deem us largely incompetent and irrelevant, and yet black folk, and the rest of the rainbow of colors too, keep proving you wrong.
It is being proved wrong that leaves you distressed. There is often sorrow and anguish in white America when blackness comes in the room. It gives you a bad case of what can only be called, colloquially, the racial blues, but more formally, let’s name it C.H.E.A.T. (Chronic Historical Evasion and Trickery) disorder. This malady is characterized by bouts of depression when you can no longer avoid the history that you think doesn’t matter much, or when your attempts to deceive yourself and others—about the low quality of all that isn’t white—fall flat. It’s understandable that you experience mood swings. It bears some resemblance to the five stages of grief a person passes through when they know they’re dying.
You’re determined not to lose the battle to control the historical narrative. After all, you realize that the pressure to broaden the scope of American history pries loose your headlock on the national mythology. Other cultures and other peoples are having their say as well, especially the black voices that have too long been suppressed. So you portray blackness as the enemy of all that is smart, or sophisticated, or uplifting, or worth emulating or transmitting. But the debt American culture owes to black folk can’t be easily erased, so you fight even harder to keep our story from being told in all its unforgiving brilliance and its undiscouraged beauty.
Yet you don’t seem ever, finally, to win the war to keep our history hidden. And the more you lose that battle, mostly because it’s built on lies, the more you kick your defensiveness into higher gears and vent your frustration, resentment, and sadness. So the quicker you admit you’re a (victim of) C.H.E.A.T., that you’ve got it bad and that ain’t good, the better off you will be, and the rest of us will be too. If not treated early on, C.H.E.A.T. leads to other disorders, including F.A.K.E. (Finding Alternative Knowledge Elusive), F.O.O.L. (Forsaking Others’ Outstanding Literacy), and L.I.E. (Lacking Introspection Entirely).
The only way for you to overcome C.H.E.A.T. is to confront the disorder head-on and acknowledge the five stages of white racial grief that you experience as you grapple with the presence of black folk and the history they created—and the very way they have changed American society. You are often stumped by feats of black competence; or you display a tolerance for blackness that slides quickly to condescension. There is resistance and rage too. There is anger at the refusal of the “other” to cave in to whiteness, to see history, American history, the way you see it, anger at our refusal to curtail black agency. During the eighties and nineties and the ballyhooed canon wars, you were fit to be tied when a writer like Toni Morrison, who should have been recognized long ago for her genius, finally got her due as an American master. It upsets you when black folk say that white history dressed up as American history is not a perfect picture of reality.
Beloved, white racial grief erupts when you fear losing your dominance. You get mighty angry at our demand that you live up to the sense of responsibility you say others should have—especially black folk and people of color. You often tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to make no excuses for our failures, and to instead admit our flaws and better ourselves. And yet so many of you, beloved, are obstinate to a fault, intransigent and thin-skinned when it comes to accepting the calling out you effortlessly offer to others. Donald Trump is only the most recent and boisterous example.
The first stage of white racial grief is to plead utter ignorance about black life and culture. It seems impossible to pull off, but many of you appear to live in what the late writer and cultural critic Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia.” When black folk get in your face, or even just expect you to know a little about black life, to take the past into account when speaking about black life, your reaction is often, simply, to forget it. It is a willful refusal to know. So often many of you claim no knowledge of black life, as if it never played a role in your world or made a difference to your existence. But it is no less distressing that you can so easily dismiss the history of a people you share space and time with as you both carve out your destiny together on the same national geography. It is not unlike those explorers and pilgrims who “discovered” America, that is, discovered a land full of native people. Native lives stopped mattering before they ever began to count.