Dear White America (14 page)

When one's illusions are shattered, it is never a pretty thing. To come to realize that everything we assumed about our society was a lie is nothing if not discomfiting. That people of color almost always saw things for what they were points out another irony of the current moment: the fact that the folks being hit hardest by the downturn (who are indeed still people of color) are perhaps the most prepared to deal with it, cope and survive; meanwhile, those who had been able to count on the system more or less working for them may be the ones least prepared to do so.

It brings to mind the Great Depression, during which it was never the poor or folks of color who went to the tops of buildings and threw themselves off, unable to face the prospects of financial ruin. Rather, it was the white and wealthy who saw a bump in suicide rates, so unprepared were they to deal with setback. Likewise, consider the way that adult children of parents who decide to divorce after forty years of marriage so often take the news harder than even the pre-teen whose parents do the same. The pre-teen has had nowhere near enough time to construct a mythologized image of his or her parents, or their love for one another. But when you have grown up assuming the sanguinity of the home in which you were raised, only to learn that perhaps things were not as they seemed, it can seem as if the whole world is collapsing.

This, it appears, is where many of us find ourselves now: unmoored, untethered, adrift on a sea of shattered illusions. Interestingly, had the society been less committed to the myth than to creating a reality of equity and opportunity for all, perhaps what Jeremy and millions of us are experiencing right now would never have come to pass. Had the culture not set white men up to expect the world, precisely because they were deemed superior to everyone else, the mental anguish and esteem-battering currently under way could have been prevented. Perhaps if we had been serious about making the deed match the word, and had we encouraged the kind of unity needed to make a society livable for all, things would have been different. If we had understood our job to be the achievement of our national promise as a real and living thing, rather than merely the recitation of a handful of platitudes, devoid of animation, much pain could have been circumvented altogether.

One thing is certain: we will have to allow ourselves to wake up now to the harsh realities that we have been so assiduously encouraged to ignore. For a long time, and for most of us, life was a matter of simply following the directions on a roadmap, confident that if we paid close enough attention and followed them religiously, we'd likely end up at our preferred destination. Play by the rules, work hard, study hard, plan for the future and put away some reserve monies for a rainy day. But the truth is, we never believed in rainy days, I mean never
really
believed in them, and never
this
much rain. People of color knew the weather, made sure in fact never to leave home without at least a metaphorical umbrella close at hand, but we didn't. Rain was what happened to others, but not to us. Or if it did touch us, it was but a temporary shower, just sufficient to remind us to stay on our toes, but never enough of a downpour to make us question the larger forecast we'd been given by the meteorologists of our culture.

Now, as the economy implodes and the future creeps up on us as thick and murky as chowder, those directions we've been following seem no longer to suffice. They are akin to the instructions barked out at us from a GPS device sitting atop our dashboard, but which, sadly, were programmed long ago, before the terrain had changed. So now we're doing as the stern voice suggests we should, but we're finding ourselves lost, realizing that the turn she told us to take hasn't brought us to the place we thought it would. There are new roads, new subdivisions in the society we thought we knew, detours that hadn't existed before, dead ends that now choke off the path that just a few years earlier seemed so simple and straightforward.

Of course, our first inclination when led astray by an outdated GPS is to curse the machine, forgetting that it was programmed by fallible people just like us, who thought they knew every twist and turn but had actually missed the changes about which we would have done well to know. At some point, we realize, and hopefully not too late, that we have to look inward and question our reliance on the machine in the first place. The GPS does what the GPS was made to do. It has no brain separate and apart from those of the men and women who built it. It will pick the route and instruct us to take it, and even if it manages to give us multiple choices—the shortest path or perhaps the one with the least traffic or the one that is the most scenic—it can only do this because some flesh-and-blood human being told the machine which options existed, which is to say, the machine is merely selecting from a pre-prepared set of possibilities provided by a person whose own horizons may well have been limited. The machine cannot, literally, choose.

But we had a choice. We have one now. And that choice is whether we are going to continue to rely uncritically on an outdated set of directions, barked at us by a machine of our own making, or perhaps question those directions, perhaps create a new set of instructions for how to thrive and arrive at that destination of personal and collective accomplishment we euphemistically call the “good life.” Perhaps we can fashion a set of collective goals that will move us toward the place we were meant to be, toward the promise that has always been this nation, however unfulfilled and half empty the promise has long been.

I know this much: if we, white America, do not quickly relinquish the remaining grip exercised by the national mythology, it will continue to batter us, to insult us, to mock our hard work and suffering, and to reinforce the self-loathing that has been its primary product for generations. And it will render our nation utterly unworkable in years to come. How, after all, can the United States remain an economically viable nation if we get to that place thirty years from now where people of color are half of the population, and yet still twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and three times as likely to be poor? How can we remain an even remotely productive and functioning society when half of our population has nine years' less life expectancy, double the rate of infant mortality and children born with low birth weight, and one-twentieth the net worth, on average, as the other half? The answer is that we cannot, and will not. Equity is the last, and only, remaining hope for this experiment we call the United States.

The good news is that we
can
change. Redemption, both for us as white folks and for the nation as a whole, is possible. In fact, the path for that change has already been laid out before us, long ago and for many generations, by some within our own group, following the lead of people of color and working in solidarity with them to build a better and more just society. However much we may have been unaware of this path, it is incumbent upon us to discover it, or rediscover it, now.

Imagine how different the racial dialogue might feel for us if we knew and had been taught from a young age of the history of white allyship and anti-racist resistance? If as children we had been introduced not only to the black and brown heroes and sheroes of the antiracist struggle—like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and of course Dr. King—but also to those white freedom fighters who stood beside them? What if we learned of the alternative tradition in our history, the one in which members of
our
community said no to racism and white domination, said no to unearned privilege and inequality, said no to racial hegemony and
yes
to justice?

What if we had learned of those persons of European descent who stood with their African counterparts during Bacon's Rebellion, recognizing that they had far more in common with most blacks than with the white elite for whom they toiled? What if we had learned of those whites who opposed enslavement and segregation precisely because they realized not only the moral evil of such systems, but also because they saw both as cynical manipulations intended to divide and conquer working people, to keep them at each others' throats while the rich and powerful continued to hoard the wealth that they, the workers, had created?

The fact is, we know almost nothing of that alternative tradition at present. In addition to the typically pathetic and piecemeal way our history books address the contributions of people of color, even the whites we learn about are from a narrow and cramped range of human experience: founding fathers, military heroes and wealthy industrialists. Rarely is much attention paid to the average, everyday whites who stood in opposition to the actions of so many of the leaders in our own community, and when such persons are discussed it is usually only within the context of the martyrdom that many attained, killed for their efforts to destroy slavery or segregation. But for each one who died, more still survived to tell the story and continue the struggle. What if we knew about
them
?

In this moment of white anxiety and profound social change—in which our normalcy and
a priori
claim on Americanness can no longer be taken for granted—how helpful might it be (in terms of lessening our anxiety and allowing us to embrace the multiracial and multicultural future) if we knew about the history of white antiracism, multiracial solidarity and allyship? How much less stressful might the current moment of societal transformation be, if we knew the names and stories of Jeremiah Evarts, William Shreve Bailey, John Fee, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Robert Flournoy, George Henry Evans, Matilda Gage, Catherine Weldon, Lydia Child, Anne Braden, Will Campbell, Virginia Foster Durr, J. Waties Waring, Constance Curry, Bob and Dottie Zellner and Mab Segrest, along with literally thousands of others, who in their own way and in their own communities have demonstrated that there was more than one way to live in this skin? People who have demonstrated that the human values of equity, fairness and justice are not merely modern contrivances but rather timeless guideposts that have historically been betrayed, bringing dishonor to our nation. Their stories call upon us now to do better. It strikes me as almost self-evident that were we to know of their stories, to embrace them as examples for our own lives, to model our commitments after theirs, to rally to the kind of nationhood that
they
envisioned, much about our current troubles would be different. We would perhaps begin to imagine a different world, in which the divisions of color that have so long roiled us would be the stuff of history, rather than current events.

And no, I won't tell the stories of the people whose names I've rattled off above. Some homework has to be done alone. For starters, all should read Herbert Aptheker's majestic history of white antiracism from the colonial period to the civil war,
Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years
.
158
From there, we can discover or deepen our understanding of the proud tradition of white allyship during the civil rights struggle, chronicled in dozens of books and documentaries. This tradition I speak of is ours to claim, ours to follow, ours to emulate. If we let it, the tradition can inspire us, motivate us, transform us and transform the society in which we live. It is a tradition that fits with the best of the American ideal, and one that is capable of elevating that ideal to a place more stable and concrete than it has been heretofore.

Or, alternately, we can continue unimpeded on the current path of uncertainty, anxiety, resentment and trepidation. We can continue to hold on to a fictional, nostalgic past, longing for a return to it, and unable to embrace the changes that are as inevitable as the coming of the new day's sun. We can jealously seek to hold on to our current advantages, be they material or merely psychological—our own sense of betterness, belonging, or perhaps superior character—and squander the opportunity to grow, individually and collectively, into the full members of a democratic polity that we were meant to be.

One thing is certain though, we cannot hold onto the old ways and move into the future at the same time. Something in this equation will have to give. As James Baldwin once explained, many years ago, but even then anticipating this moment:

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free—he has set himself free—for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
159

Tim Wise is among the nation's most prominent writers and educators on issues of racial justice. He is the author of five previous books on racism and has contributed essays or chapters to more than twenty additional volumes. Wise has spoken to more than a million people on more than 750 college and high school campuses across the United States, and has trained teachers, employers, nonprofit agencies, physicians and others on methods of dismantling racism in their institutions. He has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs to discuss racial issues, and his writings are taught in colleges and universities worldwide. Wise lives in Nashville with his wife and two daughters.

OTHER BOOKS BY TIM WISE

Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity
(Open Media Series /
City Lights Books, 2010)

Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama
(Open Media Series /
City Lights Books, 2009)

Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections from an Angry White Male
(Soft Skull Press, 2008)

White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
(Soft Skull Press, 2005, revised 2008)

Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White
(Routledge, 2005)