Recitatif
Preface
There should have been no reason why George Floyd’s was the name which jolted us to consciousness. He was not the first Black person deliberately murdered by a racist police officer who took cues from a white supremacist state. His death by asphyxiation is not the first to have been captured on film (Eric Garner’s murder springs to mind), nor was he the youngest victim of a senseless police killing of late (this may have been Makiah Jackson, the three-year-old killed alongside her six-year-old brother Michael Angelo in 2015).
On the one hand, there is no reason why the catalyzing name could not have been Tamir Rice’s, Breonna Taylor’s, Ahmaud Arbery’s, or Natasha McKenna’s. Yes, there were those who noted the steadily mounting police brutality in our country and acted without hesitation. Unfortunately, still more of us could have mobilized sooner were it not for the desensitization on which American life depends.
On the other hand, the circumstances of George Floyd’s killing felt especially gruesome. Perhaps the fact that a high school senior filmed it makes it all the more harrowing. Perhaps it was the cop’s cavalier brutality--as Charles Blow noted on the first night of Oprah’s two night spotlight on the incident and its aftermath, the officer’s sunglasses never left the crown of his head. It would seem that as far as the cop, his balding head, and the sunglasses were concerned it was business as usual, another day another dollar, a perfect occasion for shades. There appears to be no regard for the disproportionately violent response to a miniscule crime, no reverence for life, no concern about first trespassing against and next forcibly overcoming another human body. I do not remember where I was when I heard that George Floyd cried out for his mother not once, but two times, and was denied reprieve. I do not recall where I was when I learned that the pressure was so intense that he bled from the nose. I will not see the video; there are other ways to bear witness. But I remember the blunt ache at my sternum which came quickly and never left. I remember watching an essential worker at Whole Foods weep silently at their register. I remember nodding, leaving my cart full of groceries, and sobbing all the way home.
In truth, we should not have needed any of these names to start the revolution: Activists have called to defund the police, abolish the prison system, and decolonize social work as long as these institutions have been in place. The central issue is not that we were not heard, but that we were not believed.
White folk: You should have believed and protected us during Reconstruction, when we told you that even the Freedmen’s Bureau couldn’t save our men, women, and children from the newly-formed KKK. You should have believed us in the 1930s, when we explained that the New Deal, despite providing notable federal support, would all but ensure our further subjugation without sufficient explicit protections. You should have believed us in the 1960s, when we asked for the ballot, fair housing, integrated schools, and fair wages and we instead got voter suppression, ghettoization and white flight, gerrymandered school districts, and a stultifying racial wage gap in which Black men and women make 13 and 21 percent less than their white peers, respectively. You should have believed us in 1992, when the Black community of Los Angeles cried out for justice for Rodney King and Latasha Harlins and were vilified in popular media for demanding it when the city failed them. Twenty-eight years later, you have been granted the opportunity to believe us again.
It bears repeating: If you have ever wondered what you might have been doing during the Holocaust or the Freedom Rides or the March on Washington--look around. You are doing it now.
People of the global majority: We are hurting on the world stage. This is not just a Black fight, or an American problem, but yet another facet of our collective struggle and progress. I am proud of us for seeing--perhaps as we have not before-- that we are a people stronger together than we are divided, and that even such rigidly codified systems as the medical industrial complex and public policy can (and often should) be changed overnight. I am proud of us for fearlessness. I am proud of us for perseverance. I am proud of us for holding space to honor both our elders and our future leaders. I am proud of us for marching, donating, keeping our networks fed and housed, and making space for laughter amidst the pain. I am proud of us not for our powers of endurance but for those of subversion. May we never lose sight of one another.
This piece is for anyone who has ever (recently or long-since) been Black while running, or been Black while holding a cell phone in their own backyard, or been Black while sleeping peacefully at home. It is for anyone who has borne witness to the struggles of those who have been Black while teaching, been Black while educating their children on why and how not to shoplift, or been Black while seven years old. It is for those who have ever wondered where there will be space for accountable friendship in revolution, those whose journeys to radicalism are well underway with still plenty of work to do. It is also for those who are ready to listen now but are new to the fight. We are writing for anyone and everyone willing to digest an exercise in unpacking quotidian race relations in small town America, because they are precisely who these issues affect.
Jabulile
Recitatif
When I was eleven years old, the most astute thing I could say about myself was that I was nothing. I didn’t mean this in the pejorative sense – I thought good things about myself, was proud that I’d written a story on ten sheets of college-ruled paper, proud that I could run the fastest in my class, proud that I could multiply fractions, proud that my parents were smart and kind. I was praised by my teacher, a woman typically too distracted by her divorce to take much notice of her students’ work, and reminded daily by my mother that I was very sensitive and that this made me special. Yet one day I sat pruning in the bath and looked at my hands, nail beds scrubbed clean, fingers splayed, and thought to myself, “I am nothing.” When I thought this, I was thinking for the first time about the color of my hands, which was white, which was really nothing.
This was the first thought I had about living parallel to reality. I didn’t have another one for many years, because it is unlikely that one will think about living parallel to reality when she is operating under the assumption that she is living in reality and being shown no evidence to the contrary. I would persist in this delusion for many years, and I would feebly stoke its flames with embarrassment, guilt, and denial in aspiration to “goodness.” This “goodness” being the state or quality of enlightened civility, well-meaning politeness, political “wokeness” – of not addressing the reality of centuries-old wounds.
To be “something” was to stick out in some way, to receive special (read: negative) attention, to object to things I found unproblematic. A girl in my class had held the “flesh-colored” crayon up to my face one day and then held it up to hers and said, “This one’s not for me.” I thought she had been making a joke, so I laughed, and then she laughed and found the cocoa-colored crayon and held it up to her face and said, “It’s like my mom at the makeup store.” I had no idea what she meant by this, but I thought about it then in the bath as I looked at my hands and identified myself as nothing. I required no special attention. The crayon was for me.
I learned without realizing it that I was a cypher. According to books, movies, and TV, I could be anything: a junior astronaut-in-training who runs laps around her school, a kid who morphs into a dog to bite bad guys, a precocious scientist who turns the lunch lady radioactive, a young superhero who fights off a menacingly animate pile of slime, a roller-blader with a bunch of surfer friends, an orphan who solves a supernatural mystery. A nothing can assume any persona it wants, unquestioned. A nothing can be thought of as special by virtue of its talents and hard work and intellect – can be thought of as talented, hardworking, and intelligent even in the cases it may not be. A nothing exists in a place parallel to the place in which everyone else exists, in which the world is safe and everyone is reasonably well-compensated and the police really do protect and serve. I grew into a moody adolescent. I was a student, a runner, a loather of my creepy AP US History teacher, a class clown, a writer. A cypher in a parallel reality.
* * *
Mise en place: It’s any small-town Denny’s at 4:00 am. Our server wears thick eyeliner and has dyed her hair jet black, which offsets her pale skin. Her shirt is coffee-stained, her nails bitten to their quicks. The diner smells of eggs, syrup, and stale bread. My friend and I are blinking ourselves awake, awaiting a greasy spread. Everything is accounted for. I had expected mine to be the only brown face for miles, but when we’d arrived there’d been a gaggle of beautiful Black twentysomethings so thoroughly blocking the entry, laughing and shouting, that we’d had to shove our way in. One of them took offence--shook his golden locks and pursed his carnelian lips.
We go through the motions. Ignore the shouting. Small-talk the server, order our coffee. Isn’t it nice, we say, to be here together? Ignore the shouting. My ears burn. Isn’t it customary to be taught the concept of “inside voices”? Am I classist to think so?
“Must be a good night,” I half-shout to my friend, feigning a smile. What I think is, “Go home, don’t make a bad name for the rest of us,” and--with equal conviction--is this...Black joy circa 2020? Am I one rung up the respectability ladder, caping for clean lines and quiet assembly? Or is it something normal to expect fellow adult humans to comport themselves at a reasonable volume?
The pitch rises and falls. Spotlight on a lone shouting match between one woman and, by her account, a balding, poorly-endowed lout of a man who deserves to be publicly shamed. A few tables across, three women who’d been heretofore peacefully enjoying their pancakes become embroiled in a screaming match with two other women with whom they had apparently gone to high school. According to the two women themselves (and a chorus of male onlookers), the pancake ladies had been staring at them as they stood at the counter, causing offence. It escalates quickly, with the women at the counter snatching their earrings out, tying their hair, challenging the three sisters to a parking lot duel, calling the others to witness. A different server--a man with a high and tight capping his scalene head--comes over to refill our coffees and apologize.
“Oh, no,” we say. “Nothing to even apologize for. Honestly, sorry you have to deal with this.”
“Well I’m almost outta here to head to my second job,” he says. “So I’ll be all right.”
He goes back to his lookout and folds napkins. The women are still at it; the grate of chairs scraping the floor bounces off the dingy walls as the pancake ladies take to their feet. A volley of crayons aimed at the sisters flies out of a cup one of the sisters is holding. The wall of sound briefly parts to let in a scream, an onslaught of insults, then closes to the same deafening frenzy of a few moments before.
My friend looks at once flushed and pale, gives me a nod and says shakily, “They’re going to call the cops.”
Soon the cup crosses the room in much the same fashion as the crayons, the three sisters tie their hair and take their earrings out, too, and amidst the clangor our server comes to assure us that the police will be called soon.
I am wrapped tightly in a sheet of fear, unable to move or speak. All I know is that cops everywhere send Black bodies home in bags/ that I am more than a body/ that if I’m implicated, the twentysomethings themselves will have blood on their hands, because they are raucous, because they should know to be quietly Black like the rest of us/ that being quietly Black never helps anyway, that we could all in an instant be the next Nina Pop, the next Sandra Bland, the next.../ that we probably will be/ that I fear for my sisters, my brothers, my people, the ones who have damned us by being too free in a small-town Denny’s on a Saturday night/ that this shouldn’t be a punishable offense/ but where was the line anyway?
The doors open. Cop One is white, mid-thirties, stark bald, wearing a wedding band. The rest follow -- three of them -- much the same. Why are there so many of them? It’s quiet save for my staggered breathing, Cop One’s voice, and the squeak of his shoes as he paces the host stand. I can’t hear what he’s saying but it registers that Big Lawman Means Business. We are in jeopardy.
“Absolutely nobody move,” he says. A teenaged Black boy who has been sitting quietly with his friends rises and crosses the room to pick up a fork. I notice my nails cutting into my palms, the other onlookers equally tense save for Cop One, who, for his part, seems not to notice. He turns to the women, who loudly explain their situation, mocking him for good measure (“Carbondale’s finest!”), seemingly unaware of the fragility of their own lives and the power of his. His hand is not near the gun, I pray. It occurs to me now that I’m sweating. My friend looks over to me, her face vacant, her thoughts likely racing as quickly as mine. Her panic has dissolved into an air of remarkable chill: she looks now to be in almost another dimension entirely, in a diner with civility and smoothies in spades, someplace with ambiance--certainly not this one. We text.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, assuming my friend must feel immobilized as I do.
“Holding up, but you--how are you?”
“I’m like, terrified, but all right. You know.”
She sends me something funny to take my mind off the drama, but I don’t see it. My back is flat on the wall when the cops order everyone into the parking lot. I tighten. My friend’s fingers go limp on the table, her profile’s chiseled venetian marble likely concealing a tangle of dread and responsibility. I have no idea. What do responsible young white women think in moments like these?
* * *
In 2014, after a grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown, the novelist Brit Bennett wrote an essay called “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People.” In college and grad school, Bennett had been surrounded by “goodwhiteness.” The kind of white people who put #BlackLivesMatter in their Twitter bios, who want to show how “enlightened and aware” they are by deleting racist family members or performing small acts of kindness to Black people. “What a privilege,” Bennett wrote, “to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.”
In 2020, my friend comes to visit me in Carbondale, IL, the rural town where I teach creative writing at the university. We like staying up late: we get breakfast in the middle of the night at the local Denny’s, when it’s almost morning, talking about our lives -- our jobs, our families -- ordering more than we can eat. My friend, enviably pink-haired and knuckle-tatted (her knuckles read LOVE MA because, she tells me, she loves her Ma), is in the middle of an anecdote about her stepson, whom she thinks will grow up to be gender-nonconforming. He comes down to breakfast in a dress and elbow-length gloves and, my friend says, it’s like “Motherfucking high tea! I love it!” When the server arrives to tell us they’re out of smoothie mix and would I mind ordering something different, I grow petulant. Fuck this smoothie-less Denny’s, I think but don’t say. I am tired, unlike myself. My friend tells the server we’ll need a minute.
In that minute, something sours in the group of jubilant Black patrons behind us. It’s obvious that they’ve just come from a party, something the white server has told us “isn’t uncommon” before he told us about the smoothie mix. (I wondered what he meant by this -- whether it wasn’t uncommon that this particular group “comes from a party” or whether he meant to say something broader, more indicting -- and why he felt the need to explain this to us in the first place.)
A woman pulls tight at the collar of her leather jacket and insults a man, presumably her boyfriend: he can’t please her, he isn’t worth shit. We laugh and quietly cheer her on -- nothing wrong with a man getting dressed down by his girlfriend. And then another man wearing rings on every finger breaks off from the group and slouches towards a table of Black women who have been eating peacefully apart. He stands behind the chair of one of these women, rubbing her shoulders like a boxing coach, murmuring something to her that angers her. She stands up. They all stand up. Apparently the women who had been eating pancakes had gone to high school with the women in the jubilant group and there’s some dispute left unsettled among them. Or the women who had been eating pancakes don’t like the way the other women are looking at them. Words are flying fast and I struggle to keep up with what’s being said. One of the women, the one who had been coached by the ring-fingered man, grabs a carton of children’s crayons on her table and pitches it in the direction of the jubilant group, in the direction of another woman specifically. The other woman, insulted, marches towards her.
I am worried. Confused and worried. Conworried, as Tourettic private eye Lionel Ergoss often is in Motherless Brooklyn. This Denny’s, like so many places in this small town -- in the white world, namely the anti-Black world, namely the world at large -- is a site of repression and civility, not a container for strong emotions. I am conworried by the whole situation, confused about how it began and worried about how it will end. The server who broke the news about the smoothie has retreated to the kitchen along with two others, all white. I notice a Black cook bowing his head at the stove, trying to avoid eye contact with everyone. I look at my friend and tell her, “I think they’re going to call the cops.”
“What I feel when I am told my neighborhood is dangerous,” Eula Biss writes in Notes from No-Man’s Land, “is not fear but anger to the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live within a delusion -- namely that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.”
As of 2019, Carbondale was reported to be 62% white, 27% Black, 6% Asian, and 5% “other.” The town is segregated, with the Black population living mostly in the northeast quadrant. There are streets “to be avoided” and streets that are “safe” -- the delusion Biss describes persists hundreds of miles away from her Chicago neighborhood, not only in small-town Carbondale but in towns and cities across the US. But where is the real danger? The university I teach at is similarly white, with Black students composing roughly 15% of the population. A Black student once came to my office hours to tell me that he didn’t “speak like the people in class” and that this intimidated him. I tried to reassure him that he could speak however he spoke and still be respected, but the minute I said these words they rang hollow, utopian. So I told him I would respect him, but I’m not sure how much difference that made to him. An environment in which you are outnumbered can read as hostile, strange. How many warnings are circulated among people of color about our majority white classes, schools, towns? Don’t go there. It’s dangerous.
Our server tells us the cops have been called. I look down at my phone: my friend is texting me. She asks me if I’m OK and I ask her if she’s OK -- the status of her okayness, I feel, is more important than mine. (Why didn’t I text first? I will wonder later, naming the ways in which I had failed her. I should have texted her first.) This is the beginning of a feeling completely different from conworry: a feeling of forced resolve. I will need to be calm, I tell myself. At the very least, I will need to affect calm.
The cops enter and my resolve wavers: they are white and I am white and together we are a group of aggressors. If I behave as I am supposed to behave -- complacent, quiet -- then I will not be hurt by this encounter: I am no different from them in this way. I return to looking at my phone, thumbing through my text history with my friend. I keep flipping to Twitter. Will I need to tweet about this? Film it?
A cop says, “Nobody move.” Both hands are on his belt. My friend’s back is to the wall; she is not moving. I am not moving. We are both not moving, in different ways. Here before me is the same deadly pageantry that gets re-enacted time and time again: Black people live, commune, suffer, laugh, grieve, rage, and then white people enter onto the scene and Black people die. But now it’s happening in front of me. I am a bystander. It is clear as it never has been before that this is not happening to me, that I have persisted in a delusion that if I am “good” and “woke” I can somehow keep the world from ending for millions of people. This is Black imperilment for white consumption: look on and see what happens when Black people try to exist in a white space. Do you want to be complicit? Do you want to be a savior? Will you acknowledge the ugly truth of the situation: that you are at a remove, at a parallel, a person-of-uninterest, a non-entity?
I text my friend again, How are you now? A stupid question, the kind of question you text someone after they’ve gotten out of a job interview or a breakup or taken a particularly difficult test. I want for her to feel safer, to let her know that I will do what needs to be done to keep her safe, and my mind whirrs, trying to express how I will do this. I want to tell her she is loved. On impulse, I send her a GIF of SpongeBob hugging Patrick -- this, I know, is also stupid. Then I look at her. Her phone is on the table in front of her. She is watching the cops’ every move.
* * *
Once in second grade, I flipped my upper lip to expose the melanin on my top gums and turned to face Allison Lauer. She pointed and laughed. Maybe she thought I was making a funny joke, but since then I have always trusted white people to be kind until they are moderately inconvenienced. Then all bets are off. After all, the crayons are for them.
Two months ago, as we sat in a Denny’s watching four white cops confront a group of Black twentysomethings, my friend told me she felt a sense of disconnect, of parallelism--that whatever violence might happen wasn’t intended for her, that her recourse to prevent said violence was limited at best. When she said this, I imagined she saw the situation as a tableau vivant, the sufferers trapped behind bulletproof glass, the expendability of Black lives transformed into a wretched ballet. You can imagine my lack of surprise that for white people in America, seeing Black lives jeopardized by the presence of a police force which serves and protects white safety and power feels no more immediate than watching Black bodies dance gracefully across a well-set stage. In that moment I felt my friend typically untrustworthy, harmful yet well-intentioned, white like the rest of them.
How old were you when you realized that for your white friends, their parents, and the parents before them, safety and power are understood interchangeably? This is why predominantly white neighborhoods are considered “safe” and predominantly Black/brown neighborhoods are purportedly “high risk” regardless of crime rate differentials or police presence. In areas where the image of whiteness holds no clout, white people find themselves in scenarios at once rare and ecstatic: their white bodies do not serve as the spatialized loci of law and power they usually are. Instead they step briefly into political Blackness, languishing, like the rest of us, in existential precarity. Here they are subject to a set of unfamiliar norms, customs, and power relations to which they cannot lay claim without either explicit or implicit assimilation or force.
I was 15, a straight-B student, a cheerleader, well-liked and moody. My mother was miles away at a conference, or attending the Honda Campus Challenge with her students’ quiz team, or at office hours. We lived in a modest house in a predominantly Black neighborhood on a suburban Ohio street. I had invited my best friend and my boyfriend over for lunch, thinking nothing at all of their whiteness and my Blackness. My boyfriend was running late. My best friend, who had been over countless times before, made her way to the kitchen and poured us glasses of water, grabbing a couple of flavored ice cubes from the tray in the freezer. My boyfriend, who had never been over, called to ask whether this was my street. Did he have the right one? I asked if he was on Leslie, and when he said yes, I instructed him to drive to the top of the hill and hurry inside. The Squid and the Whale was on IFC and we didn’t want to miss the opening lines.
Moments later, he arrived and followed me downstairs. We drank our water, ordered a pizza, got through the flick with commercials, and opened a bottle of wine. Again, he expressed incredulity that I lived here, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this house. “I guess I just thought, things were, you were...different. I don’t know how.”
“Oh, so you’re kind of a racist,” my friend said, unashamed.
I visibly blushed, explaining that he’d never been over before, that maybe he meant that the street had been hard to find, or he’d never seen a drive-thru convenience store--like the one two blocks down. I didn’t know. But he left quickly, leaving my appaloosa-freckled Irish-American friend to explain to me, as best she could, how exactly he’d thought things had been “different.”
When he picked me up at Tri-County mall the next day, I noticed the paint on his ‘01 Ford Taurus was stained and mottled. We broke up uneventfully that night: I told him he was weird and I didn’t want to date him anymore. He asked me to explain, and I declined. He grabbed his keys and turned to leave, but not before letting it slip that a gaggle of middle schoolers had looked on while he’d surveyed my street the day before. I knew exactly the kids, pop-eyed and precocious, like they’d seen shit, lived through a full episode of The Wire and returned to retell it, always armed with the necessary tools of young terrorism: barbed compliments, toilet paper, endless cartons of eggs. They had heard him, followed him up the hill, and descended upon his car. He’d been too afraid to tell me.
* * *
Many years after the realization that I was nothing, I had convinced myself that I no longer lived in a parallel reality. I recognized and apologized for my privilege and sought strategies to leverage it for good. What I neglected to admit was that these strategies had little benefit for anyone but myself. I sat in rooms with other septum-pierced and hyper-attentive white people and spoke politely about Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” I read and shared articles about white hegemony in the literary world, in the fashion world, in the art world, in the leftist community. I became obsessed with the idea of “goodness,” with appearing “better” than other white people, with positioning people of color as judges of my superlative nature. Every conversation with a friend of color was an opportunity to demonstrate my goodness to them, my wokeness, my wholeness. Yes, white people can travel fluidly among cultures, appropriating whatever they see fit for personal profit. Yes, white beauty standards unfairly define self-worth for women around the world. Yes, genocidal white supremacy and global capitalism go hand-in-hand. “Trust me, I understand the bitter legacy of white brutality,” I assured them. “I mean, I know you have no reason to trust me. I know I don’t deserve your trust.” I said all this in service of winning people of color’s trust.
A few years into my tenure as a whole and woke person, my phone’s screen lit up with a panicked message from a friend. You’ve been subtweeted she wrote. She then sent me a screenshot. A former friend from whom I’d grown apart in college, a woman of color, had written that a privileged person – apparently me – had trivialized her trauma by comparing it to their own experience of being bullied at an expensive private school. After the accused had done this, she wrote, they had gone on to attend an MFA program. The replies, I’m told, (I was too shy to read them), were filled with comments along the lines of “eat the rich” and “fuck them and fuck MFAs” and “glad you’ve stopped talking to white trauma vultures.” The friend who texted me was mad about this, and other friends grew mad as well: the accusation that I had acted in bad faith was false, they felt. One suggested that I mount a response so as to prevent myself from being “found out” and canceled. I couldn’t remember if I had actually trivialized this woman’s trauma by comparing it to being bullied at my expensive private school – as I recall, I hadn’t been bullied there, but had been when I switched schools in the eighth grade – and if I had, I couldn’t remember if I had really intended to downplay whatever she had told me or had been trying to sympathize, however clumsily, and misunderstood the consequence of what I was saying. But these things didn’t seem to be the entire point of the subtweet. The subtweet seemed also to be saying that I am privileged (white, middle class, and well-educated), and that these were bad things to be. In fact, these were the things my friends were worried I’d be canceled for: it was one thing to stumble in a conversation, but it was another thing to be white, middle class, and well-educated while doing so. In wanting me to clear the air, my panicked friends insisted that I reveal myself as more than these things – that I apologize for any harm I may have caused and then point to, for instance, my mental illness or addiction or the homophobia I have experienced as evidence of my having suffered as well – so that I would no longer require the special attention of this woman or the group of followers who had responded to her subtweet. To my friends’ disappointment, I let the woman’s subtweet go unanswered.
This was not because I wasn’t sorry for having caused this woman whatever pain I had caused her. I am. Nor was it because I was taking some kind of principled stance against an “attack” on the white, middle class, and well-educated: it is impossible to be discriminated against for having these, or any, social privileges. Rather, I had come to realize that I had spent the past few years obsessed with goodness, and was now being called upon to demonstrate my goodness in autobiographical form, and that I no longer believed in this obsession nor in social approbation for my suffering nor in my potential to be “good” in these ways at all.
* * *
To my acute relief, everyone shuffles out of the diner obediently, if disgruntled. The cluster spreads into the parking lot. Life in the diner continues as normal. The server with the dyed-black hair brings over our Grand Slams and refills our waters. The server with the scalene head exits through the side door and walks to his car, presumably off to punch into his second full shift of the night. Outside the window, no one has their hands up. No one is asked to walk a straight line. I see Black men smirk and get into their cars and drive safely into the night, Black women embrace--incredulous--and get into theirs unharmed. There are to be no follow-ups to Stephon Clark, no new names in a long list of women like Atatiana Jefferson, unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (or even, as we know too well, at the right place at the right time), nose to a gun’s muzzle. They are not trailed, questioned, or cited. It appears that no license plate numbers are documented. For perhaps the first time in recent U.S. history, a patrol squad arrives on a disorderly scene and leaves things no worse than they found them. Sure, there is shouting; the cops seem to feel that a certain level of condescension is necessary to enforce the law on its subjects. But everyone makes it.
The reality of white supremacy at large implies that we are locked in an airtight container of racial hegemony as socio-historical fact. This is, quite loosely, a portion of Charles Mills’s theory of racial contract and the subject of his 1997 book of the same name, in which he accounts for the various aspects of racialized political subjection in remarkable detail. Later, when my friend confessed to me that she felt as if she’d been watching the scene in that Denny’s from behind bulletproof glass, and when I described to her my own classist disdain for the shouting, I was reminded of Mills’s words on the equipollence of racism: “Racism as an ideology needs to be understood as aiming at the minds of nonwhites as well as whites, inculcating subjugation.” This is to say plainly that racism leaves parallel lines of equal length and direction in the sand for both whites and the others among them: the lines which divide us, the ties which bind us to our own prejudices, to one another, point insistently at white rule, Black/brown death, and the extra juridical laws which codify them. Racism carries us all in the direction of white supremacy without exception, even as we remain separated. Yes, this poisons white powerlines. We know why my friend sat motionless, feeling powerless to curb impending injustice. And we know now that I both blamed and prayed over the twentysomethings for the same reason that warranted a change in structure to Richard Wright’s haikus: internalized oppression. Inescapable as a global citizen in the container, the racial contract both “prescribes [to persons of color] nonwhite self-loathing and racial deference to white citizens.”
We pay -- tipping the bill -- cross the parking lot, and sink into the car’s heated seats. My mind races, my speech coming fast while my friend’s comes slow and methodical, as though she were traversing a minefield, the space between us galaxy-wide. As we sit there talking intergalactic race relations, I realize that I have seen freedom and let knots take seed in my gut. Of jealousy? Resentment? Fear? I resent the Black twentysomethings’ freedom as it eludes me, precisely because it does so, and I resent them for laying claim to Black bliss as I look on politely, as I lay ontologically dying. I acquiesce to the limits of American Blackness, not acting beyond the racist syllogism, not lifting a finger to antagonize the social order which subjects and destroys me. I had sat there complacent, not even angry.
* * *
"He's kissin' yo' foot and 'tain't in uh man tuh kiss foot long. Mouf kissin' is on uh equal and dat's natural but when dey got to bow down tuh love, dey soon straightens up"
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God
Her beloved Janie has had a boy come courting, and for not the first time fear must have welled up in Nanny’s heart for her innocent granddaughter. This man was kind, gentle, fair—too accommodating. Having lived through her share of patriarchal relationships, Nanny knew too well that he would inevitably tire of bowing and scraping. Would Janie be beaten? Cheated? Neglected? Nanny’s timely words are a circumspect warning to those of us who fancy ourselves champions of social justice. Contemporary white [cis/male/straight] allyship has come to look a lot like Hurston’s foot kissin’, with the inevitable straightening looking a lot like cop-outs, betrayal, and abandonment.
When I was in college, two white friends attempted to “protect” me from the harsh reality of my ex-boyfriend going missing for a weekend. (As it turned out he was lost in a snow drift, licking his wounds after I’d refused to take him back, fancying himself the next Elliott Smith.) I’d happened upon these friends discussing his disappearance one morning in an empty stairwell and asked what was going on. They lied when I asked what was wrong, telling me “nothing,” later admitting that they had lied to keep from unnecessarily worrying me. In the process, they unwittingly robbed me of the ability to determine what was or was not a threat to my safety. When I later called them on it, they spun it against me: Suddenly I was the problem, guilty of “scaring” them, of inflicting the full extent of my terrifying darkness on their white bodies by exposing their lie. This is not the first time that the hackneyed trope of the Angry Black Woman, of the foreboding dark other, has been leveled against me by people I called my friends. Nor was it the last.
Two years later I received a heartfelt text which transformed the narrative of that days’ events from failed allyship into an exercise in humanity. “So firstly I wanna say I’m sorry…” it began, ending in an invitation to divulge my half of the story. Yes, the events of that morning were shameful. They were also an open door. The maturity to apologize, the wherewithal to own culpability and make a good faith attempt to move forward renders this friend’s part in the story ruby-rare. I now count her among my closest and most trusted friends.
What would it look like to have less bowing and scraping? In short, less “goodness” and more reality. By “goodness,” I mean the type of approval-seeking which apparently means well but makes little impact. I mean the solidarity which springs from white guilt and aims primarily toward absolution. I mean being publicly angry at the right things at opportune historical moments, saving face, and striving to be the kind of white person who scores an invite to “the cookout.” Less goodness would mean authenticity. Like, whatever organic response arises at times of injustice is the one that gets play. Sure, we point ourselves in the direction of the good, but we trust that if our hearts are aligned with radical love and justice, our minds and bodies will follow. We will begin as sisters rather than as white missionaries bent on elevating, saving, or empowering an inconstant native soul. We will fuck up and get called in and cry and cringe and be ugly. And it will be human.
* * *
“And now, gentlemen, let me press this one thing on your minds: you all know how dear life is to you, and how dear your lives are to your friends. And in remembering that, consider that the lives of others are as dear to them as yours are to you.”
-- John Brown prior to his raid on Harpers Ferry
On October 16, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown raided the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia in an attempt to start an armed slave revolt. The guerrilla group was small -- just 22 men -- but they managed to round up a sizable collection of hostages and arms. The next day, the group was overrun by a company of marines led by Robert E. Lee. Ten of Brown’s followers were killed, including two of his sons.
Incredibly, it was not in any of his militant abolitionist acts that Brown died, but by execution. Before he was hanged, he handed a slip of paper to the guard standing outside his cell: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
I told a friend, a professor of Africana philosophy and Critical Genocide Studies, that I believed if white people were truly committed to combating white supremacy, we would give up half our incomes to reparations en masse and protect people of color against the state at all costs, even if that meant sacrificing our own safety. He shook his head. “That’s crazy,” he said. “We don’t need John Brown-crazy.”
A strange, selfish part of me still wanted to be “John Brown-crazy.” A guerrilla. A martyr. This seemed a surefire way to get around the nasty dialectical problem of whiteness, the constant negotiations of privilege and power and guilt. Become a revolutionary, wipe the slate clean.
But I am no revolutionary. I am the friend of a person whose body is always imperiled, not just now, and we’re sitting in a Denny’s in Southern Illinois and a cop tells nobody to move and a Black teenager rises to get a fork.
This is by far the worst moment of the night. We watch him walk to get the fork. I think he should be saying, “I am walking to get a fork,” but what good will this do him? And when he gets the fork maybe the cop will decide it’s a weapon, and maybe the cop will appear before a grand jury years later and say, “I feared for my life.”
“Do not take the life of anyone if you can possibly avoid it,” John Brown had told his men, “but if it is necessary to take life to save your own, make sure work of it.” In Kansas, years before the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown and his sons had attacked three cabins belonging to proslavery militants along Potawatomie Creek, killing five men and inciting a summer of guerrilla warfare. Even after Brown’s execution, Frederick Douglass referred to him as “Captain Brown.” Over a century later, in a 1964 TV interview, Malcolm X would say the following to his white interlocutor: “In the face of the brutality our people encounter, it’s not unjust to teach a Negro to have a shotgun or a rifle in his house.”
Incredibly, the teenager gets the fork and sits back down. I exhale. The cops are questioning the women about their fight. Then the entire group -- cops, women, and men -- file out into the parking lot. The women who almost fought shake their heads in bewilderment -- the one who’d been pressured to incite the fight scowls and walks at a purposeful distance from the ring-fingered man. Then they all get in their cars and leave: no licenses run, no arrests made.
I look at my friend. She breathes heavily, as if she has just run a marathon. In a way, she has.
We decide to tip the bill -- out of guilt, I presume, though I resist an investigation of why exactly we should feel guilty -- and walk to my car, where we sit and I turn on the seat warmers at my friend’s request. She speaks quickly: that was terrifying, incredible it had gone so well, it could have gone so much worse. The lameness of my response flattens my chest with an awful pressure.
“I didn’t know what to do,” I confess. “I felt like I was behind bulletproof glass the entire time. Like my body wasn’t there. I know that’s messed up.”
She looks at me, silent.
“I wanted to help. I would have intervened somehow if it came to that.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, and turns to look out the window.
What I have just done, and did in the Denny’s, and fear I will continue to do, is damage. I have taken an ice pick to our love, shattered it. But equally shattering, I know, would have been my old narcissistic goodness. As far as I can see, I have two bad options: paper over the nastiness or admit to it.
I look at her looking out the window. The urge to say something better than what I have just said rattles my body on a chemical level. This is white inaction. White complicity. White mediocrity. Something bad -- centuries-old -- that I cannot make better. A nothing doing nothing.
I realize then that she is watching the few remaining Black twentysomethings say goodbye in the parking lot. As they drive off, she turns her head to follow their cars. She is obviously not thinking about our conversation. Not thinking about me. And, really, why should she be?
* * *
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison writes of her realization that white writers use Black characters as a method of self-exploration: “It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl – the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface – and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.” The bowl, the narcissism, the reality-parallelism, seemed to me a kind of willful delusion. A delusion for which the sufferer-plunderer must claim responsibility.
How to claim responsibility? There are certainly donations to community bond funds to be made, protests demanding prison- and police-abolition to participate in, literature, music, and art to consume, voices to amplify. But it’s possible to do all these things and persist in the delusion -- to think that self-hatred and guilt are easily navigable by means of goodness and the approval of people of color. When really such goodness is illusory, and such approval is abstract and very well impossible to grant. There is an entire world -- a dangerous world, an apocalyptic world -- happening beyond the detached houses and carports and front lawns of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “the Dream,” a world in which people of color are routinely imperiled by the police, denied wealth, education, and health. There is a moral void to stare into, a set of brute facts about what makes the Dreamers’ summer camps and organic food and good grades possible, a stymieing of the Dream itself. This is the backbone of anti-oppression work, and the day-to-day claiming of responsibility is what needs to follow.
When I lost the desire to be good, I made an honest accounting of my life, and I told myself I would have self-compassion while doing so. In the midst of battling mental illness and addiction, I have done things that would have led to the curtailment of my freedom had I been a person of color, perhaps even the curtailment of my life. I have had run-ins with the police. I have been in possession of Schedule I narcotics. I could have fallen so far, but the Dream held me up. The Dream kept me in a Potemkinesque world, a beautiful parallel reality designed to mask its disturbingly misbegotten origins. I didn’t hate myself for this, because who would benefit from that hate? Instead, I had to find some way back to the real world, if only just to pause and look around, to assess things, to be present with the people I love.
Things have come to a boil in America. I would find myself obsessing over the subject matter of this essay with what I told myself was rigor but was in fact worry and anger. In my indecision and panic and ultimate inefficacy in that Denny’s, I had revealed how easily well-meaning white people can become complicit in the structures that imperil Black lives. We were lucky nothing happened that night, and the world has been devastated by what has happened since: the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Oluwatoyin Salau, Dominique Fells, and others who should never have died. I have learned over and over again about my safety from the insidious white apparatus that denigrates Black lives. At protests since I have used that safety to participate in white barricades between Black protestors and the police. I do this not because I am good but because I am practically speaking inert and immune, an obstacle, a giant stone over which the cops will trip before they can reach Black people. I am a foot soldier who takes her orders from the Black youth organizing this movement. Since the seal was broken in that Denny’s, I now know what I am: not a “good white person,” but a white person interested in justice, doing the work to preserve Black lives that any reasonable person regardless of political allegiance should be doing.
* * *
“My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world….to expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological right to existence into question.”
Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas”
For Levinas, the concept of “face” entails a fuller account of humanity’s struggle and progress than many are accustomed to seeing. The face, as he describes it, is the social presence of the other, undoing my right as the subject to self-preservation at all costs by staring me down and demanding an answer. The face displays the “precariousness” of the other in that to respond to it means to fully grasp what is vulnerable, unstable, and helpless in the other. (Not by way of identifying my own experience with the other’s, but by exploring the precarious truth of the other on its own terms.) Although it is not exclusively human, the face calls us back to our own humanity by throwing us into the lockstep of being and dying, ethics and questioning, of the instinct to ask and the compulsion to answer. To encounter the face is “to expose myself to the vulnerability” of the other, thereby exposing myself as no longer ontologically prime, set above and apart, beholden to nothing. The face decenters even my ego, setting “its right to exist...over my own.”
There are countless ways to bear witness to the face of the other. Levinas says that in the face, the other asks me “not to let him die alone,” implying that “to do so were to become an accomplice in his death.” To bear witness to the other’s passing is a defiant act of love quite literally reminiscent of Ramsay Orta filming his friend Eric Garner’s murder, of the #SayHerName movement holding space for Black women and femmes nationwide.
It should go without saying that acts of love vary contextually: there is no panacea for issues of social inequality. So what exactly does it mean to “put my ontological right to existence into question” in the context of love and justice?
That was the last night I spent in Carbondale. My friend and I drove home, exhausted, and fell asleep together on the couch. I roused early, called a Lyft, and turned to her. “Guess I’ll head out,” I said without waking her, meaning “I love you.” Meaning “Thanks again for being honest and brave.” As I turned to leave, I saw her as she had always been: human and fallible, guileless. She was not a ransacker of cities, not a plunderer bent on my extinction, my childrens’ undoing, my mother’s shame. She was a nexus of privilege, compassion, fragility. A lover of swimming, of her mother, of dogs.
It was a long train ride and the coffee was weak. I nodded off musing on Levinas, asking myself again and again how to challenge my right to existence in the presence of face. I realized that I had seen firsthand the power of genuine friendship. And that the world needed people, not agents of change. We had been two friends sitting in a diner talking, unpacking our invisible knapsacks in real time. In those moments – even the ugliest of them – we had been truly ourselves. We had above all attended to the friendship.
Of course, we know that “doing the work” requires decentering privilege by questioning one’s right to wield it at all, then committing to a radical phenomenological ethics of care by using one’s gifts in service of liberation. This can mean lots of things, like teaching tech bros to read their own tarot, baking for the displaced, or writing Black love into American pop fiction. It could mean directing the next Laramie Project. Or producing another queer makeup tutorial. The challenge here lies not in obscuring nastiness and maintaining civility but in striving for interrogation, truth telling, and tenacious self-scrutiny, in eschewing goodness in favor of the fundament of humanness that is looking at one another--face to face--and affirming the life we find there.
Jabulile Mickle-Molefe is a diviner based in Chicago who writes poems and essays that are often rooted in myth or philosophy. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Petrichor Journal, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She is an MFA candidate at Ashland University. This is her first nonfiction publication.
Rebekah Frumkin's fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and criticism have appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Their novel, The Comedown, came out from Henry Holt in 2018 and SEM Libri in 2019. They are a professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University.
