White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (31 page)

By the time Nicol and I had moved to Houston, the ordinance had passed (though it had been altered a bit, placing the burden of proof on those who would claim they had been discriminated against), and four old-line krewes had decided to take their toys and go home like children, announcing they would no longer parade, rather than abide by the new law. While we were gone, I hadn’t kept up very much with public reaction to the ordinance, but by the time Mardi Gras season arrived in early 1993—the last year before the law was due to go into effect—the anger on the part of whites was still palpable.

On the one hand, it was never surprising that the uptown blue bloods would be upset about the rule. The sense of entitlement and untouchability that has long animated them all but ensured that outrage would meet any attempt to regulate their activities, or even to criticize their private practices as being bigoted in the first place. Rich people rarely take well to being told by the rabble that occasionally, their shit does indeed stink.

But what was disconcerting about white hostility to the antidiscrimination ordinance was how quickly and completely it emerged among the kind of white people who would never in a million years be invited to join an elite Mardi Gras krewe. When working class whites without a pot to piss in begin defending the prerogatives of wealthy folks who
hate them too,
you know instantly that something troubling is going on. And that was what we were witnessing—low-income whites in Metairie, holding signs on parade routes that read, “Hands Off Mardi Gras,” and which pictured Dorothy Mae Taylor in grotesque caricature, with exaggerated lips and bulging white eyes against a coal black face (despite Taylor’s far lighter complexion).

This is what Marx had no doubt been thinking of when he talked about “false consciousness” on the part of working people, ultimately causing them to identify more with their bosses and the owners of capital than with others in their own class, with whom they had far more in common. And surely it was what black scholar and socialist, W.E.B. DuBois had meant many decades later when he discussed the “psychological wage of whiteness,” which allowed struggling white folks to accept their miserable lot in life, so long as they were doing better than blacks. To the white masses in Duke country, they had more in common with the multi-millionaires along St. Charles Avenue and on Audubon Place (the wealthiest street in the city) than with African Americans, struggling for opportunities much as they were. Racial bonding took priority over class unity, or in this case, common sense.

Of course, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising. The same thing had animated white voting behavior during the Duke campaigns. It had been lower-income and working class whites who had made up the bulk of Duke’s support base, despite the fact that none of his policy proposals would have helped them. He had promised to hold the line on taxes for wealthy homeowners and corporations, and had no plan for job creation, except for forcing welfare recipients to work off their checks, which actually would have displaced currently employed lowskilled labor (including a lot of his white supporters), to make way for those persons being required to work off their measly $168 per month average income support.

Rich whites, on the other hand, had overwhelmingly rejected Duke, not so much because they disagreed with his views about black people—they were likely every bit as privately racist as anyone else—but because a Duke victory would have reflected badly on the Republican Party. A Duke victory would have made it more difficult to distance the party from the racism that had animated so much of its previous thirty years of political activity—from Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation to Nixon’s exploitation of “law and order” themes so as to scare whites about big city crime to Reagan’s deft use of stories concerning mythical black “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs to the food stamp office. Conservatives, especially rich ones, placed a premium on keeping up appearances, and Duke would have ripped away the veil making the subterfuge even remotely believable.

So for the past several years, struggling white folks had cast their lot with racism—all so as to make themselves feel superior to somebody,
anybody
—even as the wealthy had remembered how the game was played. In the process, Louisiana had served as something of a metaphor for the history of race relations in the United States. This, after all, had been exactly how racism and white supremacy had taken root in the colonies to begin with: with the elite passing laws to divide and conquer workers, and convince indentured servants from Europe (who were only one level above slaves) that they had more in common with the rich who abused them than with the African slaves next to whom they often worked. It would be the same process that southern elites would use to convince poor whites to support the Confederacy despite the open admission by the aristocracy that the purpose of secession had been to preserve the institution of African slavery, which institution actually
harmed
the wages of lower-income whites, by forcing them to compete with no-cost labor. It would be the same process that would animate the attempt by labor unions to exclude blacks from membership, even though doing so weakened organized labor relative to the bosses from whom they often sought to force better wages and working conditions. However pathetic, by 1993, the process had become entirely predictable.

As a side note, a few years later, I’d really come to understand the impact of the psychological wages of whiteness during an online exchange with a young white college student from South Carolina. He would be agitated by an article I’d write, criticizing the continued flying of the Confederate flag. We would go back and forth over the course of two days, he insisting that the flag was an honorable symbol of the South, and I trying to explain why it wasn’t. After I pointed out to him the way the South had been harmed by racist thinking, and how our economic vitality had long been sapped by white supremacy, with wages being held down due to opposition to unions—opposition predicated on a fear of racial wage equality—he replied that although I was probably right, it didn’t matter. As he put it, “I’d be willing to work for one dollar an hour if we could just go back to segregation.”

The exchange would teach me something else about white people; namely, that some of us are just too damned stupid to save.

1994 WAS AN
all-around terrible year. The Republicans took over Congress, catapulting Newt Gingrich to the position of Speaker of the House, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein released
The Bell Curve
—five hundred plus pages of nonsense proclaiming white-black differences in measured IQ to be the result of inferior black genetics—and I couldn’t find steady work to save my life. Nicol and I also broke up in May, although because we would continue to live together until January of 1995, the full emotional weight of the split wouldn’t hit me for several more months.

At the outset of the year, I was still working with Walter on the trade and development stuff, sponsored by the New School for Social Research, in New York. However, I was growing steadily frustrated. First, there was the tedium of the subject matter. I simply wasn’t excited by data tables about the differences between the Asian model of development (or AMOD, as the ever-original Walter liked to call it) and the European model of development (predictably, EMOD, in Walter’s terms). Apparently, my lack of excitement was shared by others, as none of the work we were doing for Walter was ever published or taken seriously by anyone, an outcome that can’t be blamed on our efforts, but rather and only on the uselessness of his own theories. Then, there was the larger matter of Walter’s personal ambitions to become accepted into the nation’s foreign policy establishment, which required, by definition, accepting that the U.S. was an unquestioned force for good in the world, and in his case pontificating about the fundamental oxymoron known as “Jacksonian Democracy,” and that mythical creature so worshipped by Sarah Palin, known as American “exceptionalism.” Finally, there was the shitty and inconsistent pay, about which Walter seemed utterly unconcerned. Living in his phat Royal Street apartment, paid for either by the same New School that refused to pay his research staff on time, or perhaps by his parents, Walter had a way of making us all feel guilty for expecting something approaching a living wage for the work he was asking us to do. I began to drift away from the project by February, ultimately resigning, preferring the uncertainty of unemployment to the sure drudgery of the previous seven months. Although I would be brought on to conduct research for a progressive tax policy organization in Baton Rouge in May, the next three months would see me bounce around in a number of jobs that were decidedly non-political.

By then Nicol had taken a position with a management firm that operated one of the city’s malls on the west bank of the river. Needing help with various things from time to time, she hired me to set up displays, co-plan and DJ a fashion show, and even to dress up as the Easter Bunny and hand out candy to about three hundred children during the weekend before the celebration of Christ’s proclaimed resurrection. Needless to say, later that year when I would be deposed in the Jimmy Jackson case as an expert witness on racial discrimination, I would neglect to mention my professional stint as the beloved holiday mascot. Of course, I
had
told Jimmy that he should probably call Cornel West, who likely wasn’t having to moonlight in this fashion, so it’s not as if he hadn’t been warned.

After two months with the Louisiana Coalition for Tax Justice, I was let go, in part because the Board didn’t see the value of a position that involved only research and no direct community organizing, and in part because some of the Board members thought I was having an inappropriate romantic relationship with the boss. Neither she nor I had any idea what they were talking about, but in any event, the deed was done, and I was once again out of work.

Three more months of unemployment were followed by my being hired to write grants for the Louisiana Injured Worker’s Union: a wonderful bunch of mostly oil and chemical workers—as well as poultry plant processors and former employees of a local sugar refinery—who were fighting for a more fair and just worker’s comp system in the state. Sadly, I was horrible at writing grants, procuring only about ten thousand dollars for the group over the next eight months. As a result, I did very little good for them, and even less for myself. In my continuing downward financial spiral, I was now earning only $150 weekly, which was my draw against the 15 percent commission I was being paid for any grant monies I brought in. By the time I secured the one grant, I was into my draw well beyond the fifteen hundred I was owed, so I would receive no payout. Now earning even less than I had made eight years earlier bagging groceries in Nashville, and seeing very little prospect that things would get better any time soon, I sank into a deep emotional funk.

As 1995 began, I felt certain that things could only get better, and although they would, within a few days I came to understand what people meant when they say that sometimes things have to get worse first. On January 4, Nicol and I had a huge blow-up, which ultimately made it impossible for us to live together for even another day. Because the fight had been my fault, she demanded that I vacate the premises while she arranged to move her things out over the next two days. I agreed. I had no money for a hotel, so the first night I crashed on a friend’s sofa; but the second night, self-conscious about intruding on anyone else’s space, I opted to sleep in my car, despite the fact that the weather was going to dip down below thirty degrees. Aware of how often cars got broken into in the city when parked on poorly-lit side streets, I parked on St. Charles, right in front of Tulane (about thirty feet from where I had spent two weeks camped out during the anti-apartheid struggle five years earlier). Afraid of being rousted by police, I slept no more than forty-five minutes all night on January 5, 1995, my mother’s fortyeighth birthday.

The next day I went back to the house, Nicol having finished moving out, and was confronted by how bad things had really gotten. As I climbed up the back stairs and opened the door to the apartment, I was met by an almost entirely empty eighteen hundred square feet of living space. Other than a sole mattress on the floor in the bedroom, all that remained was my desk, a side table on which sat a phone in the hallway, a sofa that we had previously put in storage because it was so stained, intending to ultimately throw it away, a steamer trunk, a stereo, a portable seven-inch black-and-white television, a tennis ball, and my dog. When I entered the house, Bijoux looked at me like he was afraid he had been totally abandoned. Realizing this wasn’t the case he became instantly excited, went and grabbed the tennis ball, and brought it to me, apparently presuming that with all this open space, we’d now have the perfect abode for playing catch. As I sank down onto the floor and grabbed the ball from his mouth, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The absurdity of it all—and the recognition of what emotional rock bottom looked like—left me with no alternative but to engage in a bit of self-mockery. I laughed until I cried, and then fell asleep on the filthy sofa, hoping that when I woke up, things would be better.

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