There is more, beloved. If black folk hurt because of race, you say you hurt because of class. Many of you can’t see that race makes class hurt more. And when many of you claim that black folk shouldn’t get affirmative action, that the kids of, say, Barack Obama, or some rich black person, shouldn’t get a bid for a job or a space in a classroom usually reserved for white folk, you miss a crucial fact: wealthy blacks didn’t get a pass from Jim Crow; well-to-do blacks don’t get an exemption from racism. Of course our status mostly protects us from the worst that you can do to most of us, but it doesn’t stop us as a class of folk from being denied opportunities that our smarts and our success should have guaranteed.
Another way you dilute black history is to make yourselves the heroes of our struggles. You argue that there have always been good white folk helping us out. Let’s just call it dilution through distortion. It is the sting of noblesse oblige. Just look at the movies. Films about slavery must feature a sympathetic white character who wants black folk to be free. John Quincy Adams must be the real hero of Amistad, since Cinque couldn’t rebel effectively without help from his great white defenders. Ghosts of Mississippi, about the murder of Medgar Evers, highlights the heroic white prosecutor, Bobby DeLaughter, who fought to open the case, and much less the brave black widow, Myrlie Evers, who fought white supremacy to make sure he paid attention. Mississippi Burning, supposedly about the killing of three civil rights workers in the sixties, celebrates two white FBI agents, heroes in a state where white terror rarely had better allies than silent white law enforcement or brutal local police.
If such portrayals might be laid at the feet of last century’s retrograde racial politics, the present is also flush with white savior movies. In Free State of Jones, Matthew McConaughey plays real-life figure Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County, Mississippi, who galvanized a group of white army deserters and escaped enslaved folk against the Confederacy during the Civil War. And in Freedom Writers, Hillary Swank plays a white teacher in Long Beach in the mid-nineties who educates nonwhite high school students in the midst of inner city hardship. With white friends like that black folk need no heroes of their own.
My friends, we cannot deny that white folk of conscience were of enormous help to the cause of black struggle. Black and white folk often formed dynamic partnerships to combat racial inequality. But too often white folk want to be treated with kid gloves, or treated like adolescents who can’t take the truth of grownup racial history. So we have to spoon-feed you that truth and put your white faces in our stories to make you see them, perhaps like them, or at least to consider them legitimate and worthy of your attention. Appealing to your ego to protect our backsides, that’s the bargain many of us are forced to make.
Beloved, it’s not just on the silver screen where you dilute and distort our history. In everyday life the refusal to engage black folk tells on you through your exaggerated sense of insult where none should exist. Many of you are “shocked, shocked!” that black folk have taken to reminding you that “Black Lives Matter.” Some of you are just peeved, but others of you are enraged. That’s because you’re used to distorting and diluting our history without much frontal challenge. You fail to realize that the nation has already set the standard for determining which lives matter and which don’t. Black lives were excluded from the start. The reason “Black Lives Matter” needs to be shouted is because American history ignored black history, didn’t tell black stories. The founding documents of American society didn’t include black life. When black folk say “Black Lives Matter,” they are in search of simple recognition. That they are decent human beings, that they aren’t likely to commit crimes, that they’re reasonably smart. That they’re no more evil than the next person, that they’re willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did. That they are loving and kind and compassionate. And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of gratitude in return.
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To argue that we matter is not to deny that there are things about us that have always mattered more than they should, especially how we look. Black folk now glory in what was once the source of our grief: our black skin. And yet the phenotypic differences among the races have made our culture stand out. With us, history was altered by color. Our skin, the economy of the epidermis, permits white America to dismiss us by differentiating us. But the world we made together, the history we forged in conflicted congress, bears forever the mark of our offending, yet transformative, blackness.
Our history, black history, has been denied, but it has never really been invisible. In fact we have always been the most visible thing about America. Everyone else, all of your kin, the white immigrants, assimilated. But by virtue of our very skin color, we stood out. Ironically, the very thing that bound us to slavery also made it impossible for us to hide, to assimilate, to pass gently out of an outmoded institution.
American history is the history of black subjugation. The Constitution is a racially hypocritical work of genius. The north and the south are divided because of us. The history of the twentieth century in America is the history of our struggle against white America. And yet nowhere, apart from South Africa under apartheid, is the omission of black folk from history as glaring an omission. Our presence is so saturating, so embedded, so inextricable, that white America’s most reactionary, racist identities revolve around us—the Klan rally is grievous testimony to ineradicable black identity. And the most intimate and industrious spaces in white America, from the kitchen to the construction site, rest on our labor. There is no getting around blackness. In slavery, it was the intensity of our proximity—of white and black—that defined us. In that sense whiteness and blackness are an American invention. Our agency, our story, is linked to your history, your story. Black and white together.
Beloved, you must give up myths about yourself, about your history. That you are resolutely individual, and not part of a group. That you pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps. You must also forcefully, and finally, come face-to-face with the black America you have insisted on seeing through stereotype and fear. Whiteness can no longer afford to hog the world to itself or claim that its burdens are the burdens of the universe. You must repent of your whiteness, which means repenting of your catastrophic investment in false grievances and artificial claims of injury. You must reject the easy scapegoating of black folk for white failures, white disappointments, and white exploitation.
3.
The Plague of White Innocence