I noticed this line in Andrew Reimer's review of The
Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety by Peter Pierce (sent round
by Trudy on the newsclips):
"The other misgiving is connected with the question of
reconciliation: principally with Aborigines, but in a way with ourselves,
non-Aborigines, too."
Makes you realise who Reimer and/or the SMH see as their audience - the use of "ourselves" is very
telling.
Maybe some sort of explanation is to be found in the article
below, which I happened upon in other www wanderings.
Tim
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Famous Last Words: Exploring the Depths of Racist
Socialization
By T Wise
Every now and then a lesson comes easy. Other times we learn things by
accident, if at all. And inevitably it seems, the lessons that matter most,
often come from the least likely sources, and at the most inopportune
moments. So much so, that if we aren't paying close attention, we'll miss
them altogether. Such was the case last August when my paternal grandmother
died, at the age of 78.
Although the passing of a relative may seem hardly appropriate as the
jumping off point for a political commentary, it is precisely the oddity of
it that makes it all the more poignant and valuable. But first, a slight
preface to what I'm trying to explain.
In the past few years I have had the good fortune to speak before nearly
60,000 people, in forty states, on over 150 college campuses, and to dozens
of community groups, labor unions, and government agencies about racism.
Some audiences respond favorably, others not so much. But the message I
deliver is always the same: those persons called "white" have a particular
obligation to fight racism because it is our problem, created in its modern
form by us, for the purpose of commanding power over resources and
opportunities at the expense of people of color. Furthermore, all whites,
irrespective of their liberal attitudes, "tolerance" for others, and decent
voting records, have to address the internalized beliefs about white
superiority from which we all suffer. No one is innocent. No one is
unaffected by the daily socialization to which we are all
subjected--specifically with regard to the way we are taught to think about
persons of color in this society: their behaviors, lifestyles, intelligence,
beauty, and so on.
Without question, convincing white folks--particularly those dear liberals
who insist every other friend they have is black--that they too have
internalized racist beliefs, even of a most vicious kind, proves the most
difficult in the work I do. You can't prove the point with statistics, or
poll numbers, or by pointing out the wide disparities in life chances which
form the backdrop of American institutionalized racism. Convinced that they
are free from the biases, stereotypes, and behaviors that characterize
"real" racists, such persons inevitably seem the most resistant to the
analysis offered here thus far. It is with this in mind that I return to my
grandmother. For her death--and more to the point, her life, right up until
she died--offers more in the way of proof that racist socialization affects
us all than anything I have experienced in the course of my 30 years.
You see, my grandmother was one of those good liberals. In fact, in many
ways she was beyond liberal, particularly given the time and place in which
she spent most of her life. Born in the Detroit area, she and her parents
moved South in the 1920's. Her father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A
member that is, until the day in 1938 when his only daughter informed him
that she had fallen in love with a Jewish man, and that in addition to that,
his hatred of blacks was unconscionable to her. She then handed him his
robes, and with her mother's approval, asked whether he was going to burn
them, or if she was going to have to do it herself. She challenged him
despite what must have been the palpable fear of standing up to a man who
was none too gentle and most certainly capable of violence. As it turns out,
he would never attend another Klan meeting, and by all accounts changed his
attitudes, changed his behaviors, indeed, changed his life thereafter.
Throughout her life she would stand up to racist bigotry on a number of
other occasions: threatening to commit vehicular homicide on a real estate
agent who sought to enforce restrictive covenants in her family's chosen
Nashville neighborhood; standing up to racist comments whenever she heard
them, from friends, family members, or total strangers. The fear which often
paralyzes whites and makes us unwilling to challenge racism--described by
James Baldwin as the fear of being "turned away from the welcome table" of
white society--was something that played no part in her life. She was a
woman of principle, and although not an activist, in her own way she
nonetheless instilled in her children and grandchildren a sense of right and
wrong which was unshakeable in this regard. She is in no small part
responsible for who I am and what I do today.
But enough for the praise. Heaping accolades on the dead is not my intention
here. There is another part of this story which is less heartwarming, and
yet more instructive and important than anything said heretofore. It is the
part about my grandmother's death.
A few years ago it became obvious that MawMaw, as we knew her, was
developing Alzheimer's disease at a fairly rapid pace. Anyone who has
watched a loved one suffer with this condition knows how difficult it is to
witness the deterioration that takes place. The forgotten memories come
first. Then the forgotten names. Then the unfamiliar faces. Then the terror
and anger of feeling abandoned. And finally, a regression back to a virtual
infant stage of development, complete with the sucking in of one's lips so
typical of newborns. It is a fascinating disease, in that it renders
otherwise healthy persons helpless, eventually causing not only a mental
meltdown, but a physiological one as well. It renders its victims incapable
of reason or comprehensible thought. It saps the conscious mind of its
energy, and therein lies the point of my story.
You see, resisting the weight of one's socialization requires conscious
thought. It requires the existence of the ability to choose. And near the
end of my grandmother's life, as her body and mind began to shut down at an
ever-increasing pace, this consciousness--the soundness of mind which had
led her to fight the pressures to accept racism--began to vanish. Her
awareness of who she was and what she had stood for her entire life
disappeared. And as this process unfolded, culminating in the dementia ward
of a local nursing home, an amazing and disturbing thing happened. She began
to refer to her mostly black nurses by the all too common term which forms
the cornerstone of white America's racial thinking. The one Malcolm X said
was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country. Nigger.
A word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but one which
remained locked away in her subconscious despite her best intentions and
lifelong commitment to standing strong against racism. A word which would
have made her ill even to think it. A word which would make her violent if
she heard it said. A word which, for her to utter it herself, would have
made her, well, another person altogether. But there it was, as ugly, and
bitter, and fluently expressed as it probably ever had been by her father.
Think carefully about what I'm saying. And why it matters. Here was a woman
who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who
her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it
was--and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call
black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked
away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it reasserted
itself and exploded with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed
herself, for God's sake. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She
could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could
recognize a nigger. America had seen to that--and no disease was going to
strip her of that memory. Indeed, it would be one of the last words she
would say, before finally she stopped talking at all.
Please understand my point: Given this woman's entire life, and the
circumstances surrounding her slow demise, her utterance of a word even as
vicious as nigger says absolutely nothing about her. But it speaks volumes
about her country. About the seeds of pure evil planted deep in every one of
us by our culture; seeds which--so long as we are of sound mind and
commitment--we can choose not to water. But also seeds which left untended
sprout of their own accord. It speaks volumes about the work white folks
must do, individually and collectively to overcome that which is always
beneath the surface; to overcome the tendency to cash in the chips which
represent the perquisites of whiteness; to traffic in privileges--not the
least of which is the privilege of feeling superior to others--not because
of what or who they are, but rather because of what you're not: in this
case, not a nigger.
In so many ways that's all whiteness ever meant, and all it needed to mean
for those of European descent. To be white meant at least you were above
them. If you had not a pot to piss in, at least you had that. To call
another man or woman a nigger and to treat them the way one is instructed to
treat such an untouchable is to assert nothing less than a property right.
It is to add value to what DuBois called the "psychological wage" of
whiteness. When my grandmother was strong and vibrant she had no need to
take advantage of these wages, and indeed, often tried hard to resist them.
But in weakness and confusion it became all that her increasingly diseased
mind had left. And she called in the chips.
Maybe all this is why I'm so tired of other white folks trying to sell me
bullshit like: "I don't have a racist bone in my body," or "I never notice
color." See, MawMaw would have said that too. And she would have meant well.
And she would have been wrong.
Fact is, nigger is still the first word on most white people's mind when
they see a black man being taken off to jail on the evening news. The first
thing we think when we see Mike Tyson, Louis Farrakhan, or O.J. Simpson (as
in "that murdering nigger"). Think I'm exaggerating? Then come with me to
America's airports and have a drink with me at the bar the next time an
African American other than Oprah, Michael Jordan, or Colin Powell makes the
news. Take a cab ride with me anywhere in this country, and if the driver is
white (or really anything but black), and the trip more than fifteen
minutes, see how long it takes for the word or its modern-day coded
equivalents to spew forth from their mouth, once they find out what I do.
Ask me what white folks yelled at black students who occupied the basketball
court during a Rutgers/U Mass game a few years back to protest racist
comments by Rutgers' President. Fans who mere seconds before had been wildly
cheering black basketball players, and yet could and did turn on a dime as
soon as they were reminded of the racial battlelines which trump
NCAA-inspired brotherhood every time. And then after that, tell me the one
again about being colorblind. Let's go to Roxbury tonight, or East L.A., or
to the Desire housing projects in New Orleans, or to any MLK Boulevard in
any city in America--and then let's see how hard it is to spot melanin.
Colorblind my ass.
And then once we're all through feeling bad for having been sucker-punched
by racist conditioning just like everyone else, then please, for the love of
God, let's learn to forgive ourselves. Our guilt is worthless, although, it
should be said, far from meaningless. It has plenty of meaning: it means we
aren't likely to do a damned thing constructive to end the system which took
us in, conned us, and stole part of our humanity. And what those women at my
grandmother's nursing home need and deserve--much more than a sniveling
apology from embarrassed family members--is for me to say what I'm saying
right now, and to encourage everyone to be brave enough to say the same
thing. To put an end to this vicious system of racial caste. To spend every
day resisting the temptations of advantage, which ultimately weaken the
communities on which we all depend.
Those nurses knew--and so do I--why my grandmother could no longer fight.
For the rest of us, there is no similar excuse available.
By T Wise
Every now and then a lesson comes easy. Other times we learn things by
accident, if at all. And inevitably it seems, the lessons that matter most,
often come from the least likely sources, and at the most inopportune
moments. So much so, that if we aren't paying close attention, we'll miss
them altogether. Such was the case last August when my paternal grandmother
died, at the age of 78.
Although the passing of a relative may seem hardly appropriate as the
jumping off point for a political commentary, it is precisely the oddity of
it that makes it all the more poignant and valuable. But first, a slight
preface to what I'm trying to explain.
In the past few years I have had the good fortune to speak before nearly
60,000 people, in forty states, on over 150 college campuses, and to dozens
of community groups, labor unions, and government agencies about racism.
Some audiences respond favorably, others not so much. But the message I
deliver is always the same: those persons called "white" have a particular
obligation to fight racism because it is our problem, created in its modern
form by us, for the purpose of commanding power over resources and
opportunities at the expense of people of color. Furthermore, all whites,
irrespective of their liberal attitudes, "tolerance" for others, and decent
voting records, have to address the internalized beliefs about white
superiority from which we all suffer. No one is innocent. No one is
unaffected by the daily socialization to which we are all
subjected--specifically with regard to the way we are taught to think about
persons of color in this society: their behaviors, lifestyles, intelligence,
beauty, and so on.
Without question, convincing white folks--particularly those dear liberals
who insist every other friend they have is black--that they too have
internalized racist beliefs, even of a most vicious kind, proves the most
difficult in the work I do. You can't prove the point with statistics, or
poll numbers, or by pointing out the wide disparities in life chances which
form the backdrop of American institutionalized racism. Convinced that they
are free from the biases, stereotypes, and behaviors that characterize
"real" racists, such persons inevitably seem the most resistant to the
analysis offered here thus far. It is with this in mind that I return to my
grandmother. For her death--and more to the point, her life, right up until
she died--offers more in the way of proof that racist socialization affects
us all than anything I have experienced in the course of my 30 years.
You see, my grandmother was one of those good liberals. In fact, in many
ways she was beyond liberal, particularly given the time and place in which
she spent most of her life. Born in the Detroit area, she and her parents
moved South in the 1920's. Her father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A
member that is, until the day in 1938 when his only daughter informed him
that she had fallen in love with a Jewish man, and that in addition to that,
his hatred of blacks was unconscionable to her. She then handed him his
robes, and with her mother's approval, asked whether he was going to burn
them, or if she was going to have to do it herself. She challenged him
despite what must have been the palpable fear of standing up to a man who
was none too gentle and most certainly capable of violence. As it turns out,
he would never attend another Klan meeting, and by all accounts changed his
attitudes, changed his behaviors, indeed, changed his life thereafter.
Throughout her life she would stand up to racist bigotry on a number of
other occasions: threatening to commit vehicular homicide on a real estate
agent who sought to enforce restrictive covenants in her family's chosen
Nashville neighborhood; standing up to racist comments whenever she heard
them, from friends, family members, or total strangers. The fear which often
paralyzes whites and makes us unwilling to challenge racism--described by
James Baldwin as the fear of being "turned away from the welcome table" of
white society--was something that played no part in her life. She was a
woman of principle, and although not an activist, in her own way she
nonetheless instilled in her children and grandchildren a sense of right and
wrong which was unshakeable in this regard. She is in no small part
responsible for who I am and what I do today.
But enough for the praise. Heaping accolades on the dead is not my intention
here. There is another part of this story which is less heartwarming, and
yet more instructive and important than anything said heretofore. It is the
part about my grandmother's death.
A few years ago it became obvious that MawMaw, as we knew her, was
developing Alzheimer's disease at a fairly rapid pace. Anyone who has
watched a loved one suffer with this condition knows how difficult it is to
witness the deterioration that takes place. The forgotten memories come
first. Then the forgotten names. Then the unfamiliar faces. Then the terror
and anger of feeling abandoned. And finally, a regression back to a virtual
infant stage of development, complete with the sucking in of one's lips so
typical of newborns. It is a fascinating disease, in that it renders
otherwise healthy persons helpless, eventually causing not only a mental
meltdown, but a physiological one as well. It renders its victims incapable
of reason or comprehensible thought. It saps the conscious mind of its
energy, and therein lies the point of my story.
You see, resisting the weight of one's socialization requires conscious
thought. It requires the existence of the ability to choose. And near the
end of my grandmother's life, as her body and mind began to shut down at an
ever-increasing pace, this consciousness--the soundness of mind which had
led her to fight the pressures to accept racism--began to vanish. Her
awareness of who she was and what she had stood for her entire life
disappeared. And as this process unfolded, culminating in the dementia ward
of a local nursing home, an amazing and disturbing thing happened. She began
to refer to her mostly black nurses by the all too common term which forms
the cornerstone of white America's racial thinking. The one Malcolm X said
was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country. Nigger.
A word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but one which
remained locked away in her subconscious despite her best intentions and
lifelong commitment to standing strong against racism. A word which would
have made her ill even to think it. A word which would make her violent if
she heard it said. A word which, for her to utter it herself, would have
made her, well, another person altogether. But there it was, as ugly, and
bitter, and fluently expressed as it probably ever had been by her father.
Think carefully about what I'm saying. And why it matters. Here was a woman
who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who
her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it
was--and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call
black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked
away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it reasserted
itself and exploded with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed
herself, for God's sake. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She
could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could
recognize a nigger. America had seen to that--and no disease was going to
strip her of that memory. Indeed, it would be one of the last words she
would say, before finally she stopped talking at all.
Please understand my point: Given this woman's entire life, and the
circumstances surrounding her slow demise, her utterance of a word even as
vicious as nigger says absolutely nothing about her. But it speaks volumes
about her country. About the seeds of pure evil planted deep in every one of
us by our culture; seeds which--so long as we are of sound mind and
commitment--we can choose not to water. But also seeds which left untended
sprout of their own accord. It speaks volumes about the work white folks
must do, individually and collectively to overcome that which is always
beneath the surface; to overcome the tendency to cash in the chips which
represent the perquisites of whiteness; to traffic in privileges--not the
least of which is the privilege of feeling superior to others--not because
of what or who they are, but rather because of what you're not: in this
case, not a nigger.
In so many ways that's all whiteness ever meant, and all it needed to mean
for those of European descent. To be white meant at least you were above
them. If you had not a pot to piss in, at least you had that. To call
another man or woman a nigger and to treat them the way one is instructed to
treat such an untouchable is to assert nothing less than a property right.
It is to add value to what DuBois called the "psychological wage" of
whiteness. When my grandmother was strong and vibrant she had no need to
take advantage of these wages, and indeed, often tried hard to resist them.
But in weakness and confusion it became all that her increasingly diseased
mind had left. And she called in the chips.
Maybe all this is why I'm so tired of other white folks trying to sell me
bullshit like: "I don't have a racist bone in my body," or "I never notice
color." See, MawMaw would have said that too. And she would have meant well.
And she would have been wrong.
Fact is, nigger is still the first word on most white people's mind when
they see a black man being taken off to jail on the evening news. The first
thing we think when we see Mike Tyson, Louis Farrakhan, or O.J. Simpson (as
in "that murdering nigger"). Think I'm exaggerating? Then come with me to
America's airports and have a drink with me at the bar the next time an
African American other than Oprah, Michael Jordan, or Colin Powell makes the
news. Take a cab ride with me anywhere in this country, and if the driver is
white (or really anything but black), and the trip more than fifteen
minutes, see how long it takes for the word or its modern-day coded
equivalents to spew forth from their mouth, once they find out what I do.
Ask me what white folks yelled at black students who occupied the basketball
court during a Rutgers/U Mass game a few years back to protest racist
comments by Rutgers' President. Fans who mere seconds before had been wildly
cheering black basketball players, and yet could and did turn on a dime as
soon as they were reminded of the racial battlelines which trump
NCAA-inspired brotherhood every time. And then after that, tell me the one
again about being colorblind. Let's go to Roxbury tonight, or East L.A., or
to the Desire housing projects in New Orleans, or to any MLK Boulevard in
any city in America--and then let's see how hard it is to spot melanin.
Colorblind my ass.
And then once we're all through feeling bad for having been sucker-punched
by racist conditioning just like everyone else, then please, for the love of
God, let's learn to forgive ourselves. Our guilt is worthless, although, it
should be said, far from meaningless. It has plenty of meaning: it means we
aren't likely to do a damned thing constructive to end the system which took
us in, conned us, and stole part of our humanity. And what those women at my
grandmother's nursing home need and deserve--much more than a sniveling
apology from embarrassed family members--is for me to say what I'm saying
right now, and to encourage everyone to be brave enough to say the same
thing. To put an end to this vicious system of racial caste. To spend every
day resisting the temptations of advantage, which ultimately weaken the
communities on which we all depend.
Those nurses knew--and so do I--why my grandmother could no longer fight.
For the rest of us, there is no similar excuse available.
