Dear White People: Let Us Have This

Being black, I’ve found, often means being the face white America sees when it looks at its sins. When most white Americans see my skin, they are usually reminded of every dark blot in our history. The problem of slavery, of segregation, of the drug war, of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, union discrimination, sentencing discrimination…I am the reflection of that.

That’s the best way I can interpret all this hand-wringing self consciousness whenever I talk about those events. Even if I am talking about the triumph of my heritage, it is truly startling, every time, how often white people make it about them.

In a way I get it. Blackness is the fear that there will be a reckoning, the guilt, the denial of the scars and of the pus-draining open sores across the body of this nation.

We will never fully move forward, I think, as long as a part of America insists on lily-white purity and refuses to look at this country’s sins.

They have to accept the problem. Dead on.

I think they use “blackness” to distance themselves, and they assign the label to me to localize the concept in a physical space they can distance from more easily.

But it’s a lie.

You have assigned me your problems, your baggage, your creation, with the word, “black.”

I only deal with it because I have to.

But fundamentally, the problem is not mine.

When I look in the mirror, I feel pride. I feel like the challenges today are ones that can be fought, because of the ones who fought against them yesterday.

You see Thomas Jefferson; I see the slaves he did not free. If you can celebrate July 4th, I can celebrate Frederick Douglass’s legendary speech “What to the Slave Is The Fourth Of July?” –check out this excerpt:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

This came from a black slave who had escaped, a fugitive from the law, who had been badly abused growing up…such rhetoric. Such poise. Such courage, to say those words the day after the 4th of July.

You see Abraham Lincoln, and I respect his efforts…but more than that, I respect people like Harriet Tubman. Check out this badass:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTf1GFjCd8[/youtube]

And I’ll celebrate W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black person to earn a PhD from Harvard and one of the key founders of the NAACP. And Langston Hughes, the legendary poet who wrote stuff like this:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

Indeed. You can’t send this blackness to the kitchen. You can’t dismiss it. You’ll have to admit it — me, and the entire heritage.

And then Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, outstanding historian and anthropologist who partnered with Franz Boas, who debunked the myth that race determines intelligence. And then Martin Luther King, Jr., who brought the US to its knees through economic pressure, as well as the courage and dignity Malcolm X gave us — way over and above Thomas Jefferson. The wisdom of James Baldwin. The bravery of Rosa Parks. The words of Toni Morrison and Cornel West and Anthony Pinn and Barak Obama. And so on. Like…there is a powerful history here, with a lot of heroes. People who defied racism to create an influential voice.

It’s a different tradition than a lot of white America loves to recognize, but it’s deeply, distinctly, profoundly American. I wish more white people saw our legendary history when they saw my skin, because I know that as I studied it…my image of myself changed. I began to feel Proud. I began to feel empowered. And yet, it’s hard to tell most white people, because they automatically think it’s about them and their precious white tears. It’s like Great Britain making July 4th into a big debate as to how guilty they should or shouldn’t feel, or resenting our singing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” without realizing that it’s not all about them; it’s about our heritage.

I am not a Problem, and I knowing the history of blackness in America empowers me to no longer see myself as a Problem when I look in the mirror, even if you or others treat me as if I am. My ancestors were the solutions to the problem of discrimination of American citizens several times over.

I healed my own wounds when I realized it wasn’t about white tears — trying to assuage them, or feeling self-conscious about them, or seeing them in the reflection in the mirror, or being the embodiment of a debate over how “proper” white tears are. My black skin has been worn by a long list of my heroes. It gives me pride. It empowers and informs my view of myself and of American history.

And this scares most white (though #notallwhitepeople, obviously) people deeply. As James Baldwin once warned:

When you look the world in the face like you had a right to be here — when you do that…without knowing it, you have attacked the entire power structure of the white world.

If I, one fine day, discover that I have been lied to all the years of my life, and my mother and farther were being lied to; if I discover that though I was bought bred and sold like a mule, that I never really was a mule; if I discover that I was never really happy picking all that cotton and digging all those mines to make other people rich; and if I discover that those songs the darkies sang and sing were not just the innocent expressions of a primitive people but extremely subtle and difficult and dangerous and tragic expressions of what it felt to be in chains…then by one’s presence, by the attempt to walk from here to there, you’ve begun to frighten the white world.

They’ve always known that you are not a mule.

They’ve always known that no one wishes to be a slave.

They have always known — that the bales of cotton and the textile mills and entire metropolises built on Black labour — that the Black was not doing it out of love.

He was doing it under the whip, the threat of the gun, and the even more desperate and subtle the threat of the bible.