White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son Page 2

  The notion of privilege is a relative concept as well as an absolute one, a point that is often misunderstood. This is why I can refer to myself as a “privileged son,” despite coming from a dysfunctional family that was not even close to wealthy. Relative to persons of color, whites receive certain head starts and advantages, none of which are canceled out because of factors like class, gender, or sexual orientation. Likewise, heterosexuals receive privileges relative to LGBT folks, none of which are canceled out by the poverty that many straight people experience. So too, rich folks have certain privileges on the basis of wealth, none of which vanish like mist just because some of those wealthy persons are disabled. While few of us are located only in privileged groups, and even fewer are located only in marginalized or oppressed groups—we are all occasionally privileged and occasionally targets—the fact remains that our status as occasional targets does not relieve the obligation to address the ways in which we receive unjust advantages at the expense of others. As my friend and colleague Jacqui Wade puts it, “We all have a couple of nickels in the quarter.” This book is about my nickels. They are not the only ones, but they are the only ones over which I can take ownership.

  There would be nothing wrong with someone writing a book like this and dealing only with male privilege, straight privilege, class privilege, Christian privilege, or able-bodied privilege. Likewise, those in other countries could write about privilege and oppression systems there: Japanese privilege vis-à-vis ethnic Koreans and the Buraku caste in Japan, upper-caste privilege in India and the oppression of the Dalits there, or Jewish privilege in Israel and the institutionalized mistreatment of the Palestinians. Those would all be illuminating. But this book is about white privilege in the United States, because it is real and must be confronted. It is not more important than the other types of privilege, but it is important enough to merit its own examination.

  Once again, I would like to thank my loving, supportive, and patient wife, Kristy, for all she has brought to my life. Also, I have to thank our two wonderful daughters, Ashton and Rachel. I hope that in my desire for a better world for all, I haven’t neglected the world that is closest to home and to my heart. In that regard, I will try to do better.

  I also need to thank a number of other people, including my parents, LuCinda and Michael Wise, and my friends, most notably Albert Jones, my best friend for roughly thirty-five years, for all of your support and wisdom, and for serving as a sounding board for my politics all these years. And finally, thanks to everyone who has inspired, supported, and influenced my work as a writer, activist, and aspiring antiracist ally. These include, in no particular order: Bob Zellner, Dorothy Zellner, Anne Braden, Lance Hill, Larry Powell, Ron King, Ron Chisom, Barbara Major, David Billings, Diana Dunn, Marjorie Freeman, Sharon Martinas, Chris Crass, James Bernard, Francie Kendall, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, Kevin Powell, “Coach” Jimmy Coit Jackson, Angela Davis, Ray Winbush, Molly Secours, Betita Martinez, Felicia Gustin, Jean Caiani, Lauren Parker-Kucera, Catherine Wong, Eddie Moore Jr., Victor Lewis, Michael Benitez, Hugh Vasquez, Joe Feagin, Ted Quandt, Kimberle Crenshaw, Peggy McIntosh, Jesse Villalobos, Judy Watts, Donna Johnigan, Olayeela Daste, Haunani Kay-Trask, Justin Podur, Brian Awehali, Richard Davis, Mab Segrest, Horace Seldon, Paul Marcus, Robert Jensen, Randall Robinson, Paul Kivel, Rose Jackson, Caroline Blackwell, Rev. Johnny Youngblood, and the entire St. Paul Community Baptist Church family in Brooklyn.

  BORN TO BELONGING

  “People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.”

  —JAMES BALDWIN, “THE WHITE MAN’S GUILT” Ebony, August 1965

  IT IS NOTHING if not difficult to know where to begin when you first sit down to trace the story of your life. Does your life begin on the day you came into this world, or does it begin before that, with the lives of your family members, without whom you would never have existed?

  For me, there is only one way to answer the question. My story has to begin before the day I entered the world, October 4, 1968, for I did not emerge onto a blank slate of neutral circumstance. My life was already a canvas upon which older paint had begun to dry, long before I arrived. My parents were already who they were, with their particular life experiences, and I was to inherit those, whether I liked it or not.

  When we first draw breath outside the womb, we inhale tiny particles of all that came before, both literally and figuratively. We are never merely individuals; we are never alone; we are always in the company of others, of the past, of history. We become part of that history just as surely as it becomes part of us. There is no escaping it; there are merely different levels of coping. It is how we bear the past that matters, and in many ways it is all that differentiates us.

  I was born amidst great turmoil, none of which had been of my own making, but which I could hardly have escaped in any event. My mother had carried me throughout all of the great upheavals of that tumultuous year, 1968—perhaps one of the most explosive and monumental years in twentieth century America. She had carried me through the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, through the decision by President Johnson not to seek re-election in the midst of the unfolding murderous quagmire in Southeast Asia, and through the upheaval in the streets of Chicago during that year’s Democratic Party convention. I think that any child born in 1968 must, almost by definition, be especially affected by the history that surrounded him or her upon arrival—there was too much energy floating around not to have left a mark.

  Once born, I inherited my family and all that came with it. I also inherited my nation and all that came with that; and I inherited my “race” and all that came with that too. In all three cases, the inheritance was far from inconsequential. Indeed, all three inheritances were connected, intertwined in ways that are all too clear today. To be the child of Michael Julius Wise and LuCinda Anne (McLean) Wise meant something; to be born in the richest and most powerful nation on earth meant something; and to be white, especially in the United States, most assuredly meant something—a lot of things, truth be told. What those inheritances meant, and still mean, is the subject of this inquiry, especially the last of these: What does it mean to be white in a nation created for the benefit of people like you?

  We don’t often ask this question, mostly because we don’t have to. Being a member of the majority, the dominant group, allows one to ignore how race shapes one’s life. For those of us called white, whiteness simply is. Whiteness becomes, for us, the unspoken, uninterrogated norm, taken for granted, much as water can be taken for granted by a fish.

  In high school, whites are sometimes asked to think about race, but rarely about whiteness. In my case, we read John Howard Griffin’s classic book, Black Like Me, in which the author recounts his experiences in the Jim Crow South in 1959 after taking a drug that turned his skin brown and allowed him to experience apartheid for a few months from the other side of the color line. It was a good book, especially for its time. Yet upon re-reading it ten years ago, one statement made by the author, right at the beginning, stuck in my craw. As Griffin put it:How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth . . . The best way to find out if we had second-class citizens, and what their plight was, would be to become one of them.

  Though I hadn’t seen the trouble with the statement at sixteen when I had read Black Like Me during the summer before my junior year, now as an adult, and as someone who had been thinking about racism and white privilege for several years, it left me cold. There were two obvious problems with Griffin’s formulation: first, whites could have learned the truth
by listening to real black people—not just white guys pretending to be black until the drugs wore off; and second, we could learn the truth by looking clearly at our own experiences as whites.

  Although whiteness may mean different things in different places and at different times, one thing I feel confident saying is that to be white in the United States, regardless of regional origin, economic status, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, or sexual orientation, is to have certain common experiences based upon race. These experiences have to do with advantage, privilege (relative to people of color), and belonging. We are, unlike people of color, born to belonging, and have rarely had to prove ourselves deserving of our presence here. At the very least, our right to be here hasn’t really been questioned for a long time.

  While some might insist that whites have a wide range of experiences, and so it isn’t fair to make generalizations about whites as a group, this is a dodge, and not a particularly artful one. Of course we’re all different, sort of like snowflakes. None of us have led exactly the same life. But irrespective of one’s particular history, all whites born before, say, 1964 were placed above all persons of color when it came to the economic, social, and political hierarchies that were to form in the United States, without exception. This formal system of racial preference was codified from the 1600s until at least the mid-to-late ’60s, when the nation passed civil rights legislation, at least theoretically establishing equality in employment, voting, and housing opportunity.

  Prior to that time we didn’t even pretend to be a nation based on equality. Or rather we did pretend, but not very well; at least not to the point where the rest of the world believed it, or to the point where people of color in this country ever did. Most white folks believed it, but that’s simply more proof of our privileged status. Our ancestors had the luxury of believing those things that black and brown folks could never take as givens: all that stuff about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Several decades later, whites still believe it, while people of color have little reason to so uncritically join the celebration, knowing as they do that there is still a vast gulf between who we say we are as a nation and people, and who we really are.

  Even white folks born after the passage of civil rights laws inherit the legacy of that long history into which their forbears were born; after all, the accumulated advantages that developed in a system of racism are not buried in a hole with the passage of each generation. They continue into the present. Inertia is not just a property of the physical universe.

  In other words, there is enough commonality about the white experience to allow us to make some general statements about whiteness and never be too far from the mark. Returning to the snowflake analogy, although as with snowflakes, no two white people are exactly alike, few snowflakes have radically different experiences from those of the average snowflake. Likewise, we know a snowflake when we see one, and in that recognition we intuit, almost always correctly, something about its life experience. So too with white folks.

  AT FIRST GLANCE, mine would not appear to have been a life of privilege. Far from affluent, my father was an on-again, off-again, stand-up comedian and actor, and my mother has worked for most of my life in marketing research.

  My parents were young when they had me. My father was a few months shy of twenty-two and my mother had just turned twenty-one when I was conceived, as legend has it in a Bossier City, Louisiana, hotel. Interestingly, my parents had opted to crash there during one of my father’s stand-up tours, because having first tried to get a room in nextdoor Shreveport, they witnessed the night manager at a hotel there deny a room to a black traveler. Incensed, they opted to take their business elsewhere. Little could they have known that said business would involve setting in motion the process by which I would come into the world. In other words, I was conceived, appropriately, during an act of antiracist protest.

  My parents had dated off and on since eighth grade, ever since my father knocked over a stack of books that my mom had neatly piled up in the middle school library. My mom, having little time for foolishness, had glared at him, her flaming red hair and single upraised eyebrow suggesting that he had best pick them up, and then perhaps plan on marrying and starting a family. The relationship had been rocky though. My mom’s folks never took well to my dad, in part because of the large cultural gap between the two families. The Wises were Jews, a bit too cosmopolitan and, well, Jewish, for the liking of the McLeans. This is not to say that my mom’s parents were anti-Semitic in any real sense. They weren’t. But as with their views on race, the McLeans were just provincial enough to make the thought of an interfaith relationship difficult to swallow.

  So too, they also worried (and in this they couldn’t have been more on the mark), that my father simply wasn’t a very suitable suitor for their little girl. Besides being Jewish, the problem was him. Had he been an aspiring doctor or lawyer, the McLeans might well have adored him. But a man whose dreams were of performing in comedy clubs? Or acting? Oh no, that would never do. And his father, though a businessman, owned liquor stores, and according to rumor, he might know and even be friends with mobsters. After all, weren’t all booze-peddlers mafiaconnected, or in some way disreputable, like Joe Kennedy?

  In 1964, right before my parents were to begin their senior year of high school in Nashville, my mom’s folks moved the family to West Virginia, at least in part because West Virginia was far from Mike Wise. After graduation, my mom went to a two-year women’s college in Virginia, while my dad went West and obtained entrance to the prestigious acting program at Pasadena Playhouse. But within two years they were back together, my dad having given up on California when he realized that being discovered took time and more effort than he was prepared to put in. They married in May 1967, and spent the better part of the next year traveling around the country while my dad did comedy, finally ending up in that Bossier City Howard Johnson’s, where their bodies and the origins of my story would collide. My mom pregnant, it was time to move home and begin a family, and so they did.

  All throughout my childhood, my parents’ income would have fallen somewhere in the range of what is politely considered working class, even though their jobs were not traditional working-class jobs. Had it not been for the financial help of my grandparents, it is likely that we would have been forced to rely on food stamps at various points along the way; most certainly we would have qualified for them in several of my years as a child. For a while my father had pretty consistent work, doing comedy or dinner theatre, but the pay was rotten. By the time I was in second grade, his employment was becoming more spotty, forcing my mom into the paid workforce to help support the family.

  I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a perfectly acceptable but inadequately maintained 850-square-foot apartment with dubious plumbing, a leaky air conditioner, certainly no dishwasher or washing machine, and floor-boards near the sliding glass door in my bedroom that were perpetually rotting, allowing roly-polies or slugs to occasionally find their way inside. The walls stand out in my mind as well: thin enough to hear every fight my parents ever had and to cave in easily under the weight of my father’s fists, whenever the mood struck him to ventilate the plaster, as happened with some regularity. But even before the busted-up walls or leaky faucets at the Royal Arms Apartments, there had already been quite a bit of family water under the proverbial bridge. Examining the source of that stream provides substantial insight into the workings of privilege, and the ways in which even whites who lived in modest surroundings, as I did, had been born to belonging nonetheless.

  Even if you don’t directly inherit material advantages from your family, there is something empowering about the ability to trace your lineage back hundreds of years, as so many whites but so few persons of color can. In 1977, my third grade teacher encouraged us to trace our family trees, inspired by the miniseries “Roots,” and apparently unaware of how injurious it might be for black students to make the effort, only to run head first into the
crime of slavery and its role in their family background. The exercise provided, for the whites at least, a sense of pride, even rootedness; not so much for the African American students.

  Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot. Genealogy offers a sense of belonging and connectedness to others with firm, identifiable pasts—pasts that directly trace the rise and fall of empires, and which correspond to the events we learned about in history classes, so focused were they on the narratives of European peoples. Even when we personally have no desire to affiliate with those in our past about whom we learn, simply knowing whence you came has the effect of linking you in some great chain of mutuality. It is enabling, if far from ennobling. It offers a sense of psychological comfort, a sense that you belong in this story known as the history of the world. It is to make real the famous words, “This land is my land.”

  When I sat down a few years ago to examine my various family histories, I have to admit to a sense of excitement as I peeled back layer upon layer, generation after generation. It was like a game, the object of which was to see how far back you could go before hitting a dead end. Thanks to the hard work of the fine folks at Ancestry.com, on several branches of my family tree, I had no trouble going back hundreds, even thousands of years. In large measure this was because those branches extended through to royal lineage, where records were kept meticulously, so as to make sure everyone knew to whom the spoils of advantage were owed in each new generation.

  Understand, my claim to royal lineage here means nothing. After all, since the number of one’s grandparents doubles in each generation, by the time you trace your lineage back even five hundred years (assuming generations of roughly twenty-five years each), you will have had as many as one million grandparents at some remove. Even with pedigree collapse—the term for the inevitable overlap that comes when cousins marry cousins, as happened with all families if you go back far enough—the number of persons to whom you’d be connected by the time you got back a thousand years would still be several million. That said, I can hardly deny that as I discovered those linkages, even though they were often quite remote—and despite the fact that the persons to whom I discovered a connection were often despicable characters who stole land, subjugated the masses, and slaughtered others in the name of nationalism or God—there was still something about the process that made me feel more real, more alive, and even more purposeful. To explore the passing of time as it relates to world history and the history of your own people, however removed from you they may be, is like putting together a puzzle, several pieces of which had previously been missing; it’s a gift that really can’t be overstated. And for those prepared to look at the less romantic side of it all, genealogy also makes it possible to uncover and then examine one’s inherited advantages.