Yes, yes, I know many of you are proud to be Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish. And those ethnic groups are as real as any other groups with identifiable cultures, languages, and histories. But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness. That whiteness is slapdash, pieced together from the European identities at hand. But there is a pattern to it all. It helped the steady climb of European cultures to dominance over the long haul of history.
Whiteness forged togetherness among groups in reverse, breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was cut off from the old tongue and connected to the new land. So groups that were often at each other’s throats learned to team up in the new world around whiteness. The battle to become American forced groups to cheat on their old selves and romance new selves. Old tribe for new tribe; old language for new language; old country for new one. The WASPs stung first, but the Italians landed plenty of blows, the Irish fought bare fisted, the Poles grimaced and bore in, and the Jews punched above their weight, all with one goal: to champion their arrival as Americans. That’s how you went from being just Irish, just Italian, just Polish, or just Jewish to becoming white. So please don’t deny this when you approach me to tell me about how your experience as a white ethnic parallels my experience as an African-American. The comparison ends at the hyphen.
My friends, I know reading this frightens many of you. It may even anger you. Please bear with me. Until you make whiteness give up its secrets none of us will get very far. Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are. Of course the paradox is that even though whiteness is not real it is still true. I mean true as a force to be reckoned with. It is true because it has the power to make us believe it is real and to punish those who doubt its magic. Whiteness is slick and endlessly inventive. It is most effective when it makes itself invisible, when it appears neutral, human, American.
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Let me share with you one of the first times I faced this truth as an adult. Last year I returned to Carson-Newman College, my alma mater, for the first time in thirty years. I had bolted from this southern Baptist outpost in Jefferson City, Tennessee—a dreadful throwback to Jim Crow—in 1985 after graduating with high honors and the top prize in philosophy. I had transferred there after spending two years at Knoxville College, a black school thirty miles up the highway that didn’t have enough philosophy courses for my degree.
When I walked onto campus I got mugged by a version of whiteness that seemed to leap straight from a segregated bus in the fifties. Nestled within tree-lined streets, Carson-Newman still has a Mayberry feel all these years later, though Jefferson City isn’t fictional, except in the way that all such towns spring from an innocent white imagination.
I hadn’t been back since the president barred me from campus. It’s not as if I got an official letter; there was no formal edict. But my failure to garner an invitation to return to school even after I gained notice in my vocation was proof enough. When I was a senior, the administration chose six students to make a commercial that would air in the region to promote the college. We had all received fellowships to attend prestigious graduate schools. Mine was the only one in the Ivy League.
The president wasted no time in summoning me to his office. Although the man had no doctorate, he still belonged to a fading southern aristocracy. He demanded that I produce proof on the spot that I’d gotten into Princeton. After all, Carson-Newman’s name was on the line. If I turned out to be a fraud I could damage the college’s reputation. I whipped out my offer letter from Princeton. He wasn’t pleased, but neither was he deterred.
I was especially nervous because I owed the school seven thousand dollars in unpaid tuition. Sneering, the president looked me straight in the eyes and told me that I should get a job and pay my bill instead of going to Princeton. Until I did, my final transcript would be withheld. I quietly seethed.
A Princeton dean later assured me that the school had seen most of my grades and didn’t require the transcript for me to enroll. But at the moment I had no such consolation. All I knew was that I’d made it through the blazing guns and bare-knuckled fists of Detroit and this white man wasn’t going to stop me from getting to the Ivy League. I was desperate and determined. I wanted to tell the president that my straight A’s in philosophy should have brought me more financial aid. But I was in no mood for begging. The moment of truth had arrived, and I was consumed by anger. I was angry that he had slung his invincible whiteness in my face. That anger turned to ice-cold rage and chilling verbal ire. If Ralph Ellison warned against doing brain surgery with a switchblade, I wasn’t in much better shape, attempting heart surgery on my college president with a verbal safety pin, operating on him prick by prick.
“Sir, you must know that for me to take a job and give up a world-class education would be extremely shortsighted,” I said frostily. “You’ve got to know the value of such a degree. But then, I suppose you have no way of knowing since you never earned a PhD.”
He blushed beet red, sensing my contempt.
My defiance didn’t defeat whiteness, but I took pride in giving it a body blow that day. I left his office, and shortly thereafter, the college, never to return, or to be invited back, until he was long gone. Some of my former professors confirmed that as soon as I left the college he heartily embraced the idea that I shouldn’t come back. This was whiteness that demanded total deference to its will and way, a whiteness that demanded respect while offering none in return. The president was angry that I wouldn’t let him ruin my life. He certainly tried.
Here’s something else I learned in the company of white folk: my teachers and fellow students never had to say they were white until someone who wasn’t white showed up. The white people at my college saw me as a trespasser. But I made them see that the whiteness they invested in wasn’t natural. It was, instead, a contrivance, a historical sleight of hand. They swore that their invented history was objective and built on fact. Any other interpretation had to be challenged. Whiteness has only two modes: it either converts or destroys. My black body was a thorn in the flesh of whiteness. My very presence as a black man revealed that whiteness was as artificial as the idea of race on which it rested. And so my flesh, my history, my culture, my mind, my tongue, my being had to be removed.
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