White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (11 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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OF COURSE, THERE
were a few exceptions to the racialized tracking scheme at Stokes and throughout the Nashville public schools. Typically there would be one or two black females in the enrichment classes but rarely ever a black male. One of the black females in particular is worth reflecting upon, as her experience demonstrates quite clearly the absurdity of racism as a national and even global phenomenon. During that fifth grade year, she was the one black student who was consistently placed in the advanced track. Her name was Rudo Nderere, and she and her family had recently come to the United States from Zimbabwe, arriving, if memory serves, before it actually became Zimbabwe—when it had still been Rhodesia, a racist, white supremacist and apartheid state, much like South Africa.
White teachers
loved
Rudo, and on several occasions I would hear them commenting upon how intelligent she was (which was true), and how articulate she was (also true), and how lovely her accent was (absolutely inarguable, as the Southern African accent is among the most pleasant in the world). But of course there were also native-born blacks in that school, and in those same teachers’ classrooms, who were every bit as brilliant and articulate. But the teachers rarely saw that, which is why their astonishment at Rudo’s articulateness was so implicitly racist: it suggested that such a characteristic was somehow foreign to black people, that the ability to speak well was a white trait that no black person had ever managed to possess before.
In any event, what was fascinating about the way Rudo was viewed in that Nashville middle school is how utterly different the perception of her—the very same her, with the same intelligence, accent, and ability to string words together in coherent sentences—would have been, and indeed
had
been in her native country. In Rhodesia, from which place she had just recently departed, she would have been seen as inferior, no matter her genius. She would have been a second-class citizen, her opportunities constrained, all because of color. But in America, she could be viewed as exotic, as different, as capable. She could be contrasted with local black folks who were perceived as less capable, as aggressive, as uninterested in education, as inferior.
Many years later I would realize the process at work here—the way that foreign-born blacks are often played off against native-born African Americans in a way that has everything to do with racism and white supremacy. Reading a story in my local paper about a white church in town that had been working with Sudanese refugees to help them find jobs, child care, and various social services, I was struck by one of the statements made by the church’s pastor. When asked why the church had gone to such lengths to help African migrants, but had never done similar outreach with local black families in need of the same opportunities, the pastor noted that in some ways it was probably because the Africans were so
grateful
to be here. They had chosen to come, after all. They had wanted to be
like us
, like Americans. Native-born black folks on the other hand had made no such choice, and they regularly contested the dominant narrative about what America means and has long meant. African Americans, in other words, were pushy and demanding, and felt entitled (imagine that) to the fruits of their prodigious labors throughout the generations. But African immigrants were joiners, wanting nothing more than the opportunity to partake in the American dream. They serve as validation for the greatness of the country; they give the lie to the notion that the U.S. is a place where racism still exists. After all, were it so, why would any of them move here? That Irish and Italian and Jewish migrants had long before come to America, despite the prejudices they knew they might well face in their adopted countries—in other words, they had come for economic opportunity, racial and ethnic bias notwithstanding, much as Africans sometimes do now—seems to escape us.
That one place may be preferable to another in terms of opportunity says little about whether that first place is as equitable as it should be. But for many white Americans, like those teachers at Stokes, the presence of someone like Rudo confirmed everything they needed to believe about their nation. She was like a soothing balm, allowing them not only to push away concerns about institutional racism, but also to avoid confronting their own biases, which played out against the other black students in their classes every day.
MIDDLE PASSAGE
 
1980 WAS A
horrible year for a lot of reasons, only one of which had to do with the election of Ronald Reagan that November—itself a cause for sincere political mourning in the Wise home.
Only twelve days into the year, my mom’s father died at the relatively young age of sixty five, ending a life that had been of miserable quality for the past half-decade thanks to several strokes that had rendered him unable to care for himself. A few months later, one of my dad’s old theatre colleagues died on stage, the victim of a massive heart attack. The next month, another family friend was killed in a car accident, and one of my classmates, Roger Zimmerman, was killed when a drunk driver plowed into him while Roger had been riding his bike.
And then there was life with my father. In May, dad and I started working on a few scenes from the play “A Thousand Clowns,” which we would perform during my school’s spring theatre showcase. Ultimately the show went well, but he had shown up to dress rehearsal so blindrunning drunk that I had a complete emotional breakdown on stage. Even as I glared at him through a literal cascade of tears, he failed to comprehend the meaning behind the melancholy, incoherently mumbling something about how brilliant I was for being able to make myself cry, just like the character in the scene was supposed to. I guess he also thought my silent seething on the ride home was just a matter of staying in character, rather than what it really had been: the expression of profound embarrassment that he had exposed his illness for so many of my friends to see. Needless to say, as sixth grade came to a close, the combination of my tenuous connection to my father, my parents’ combative relationship, and all the deaths in our little corner of the universe had left me far more exhausted than any eleven-year-old should be.
Summer made things a bit better. Although my baseball team had muddled through another miserable year, I had enjoyed a fantastic season individually, making the city’s all-star team. My dad had been out of town for much of the summer, doing a play in Atlanta, which meant not only that he wouldn’t be showing up to my games loaded (as he had for much of the previous season), but that evenings at home with my mom would be blessedly quiet. We would get together on many of those evenings to watch old Alfred Hitchcock movies, or
Twilight Zone
reruns, the latter of which were among my favorite things to watch on TV.
By July, baseball season was over (this was long before the days of traveling teams and forty-game summer schedules), and I was enjoying doing nothing. I’d sleep in late, go swimming in the apartment’s pool most of the day, and then spend the rest of my time reading, adding to my baseball card collection, or hanging out at the local game room, trying to master Pac-Man, which had been released just two months earlier.
There were exactly eight weeks left before the start of Junior High School, that morning of July 6, when I was woken by the sound of my mother opening the apartment door to retrieve the Sunday paper from the hallway. Though I’d heard the door open, I tried not to wake up, preferring to linger in bed a while. I closed my eyes, hoping to fall back asleep, only to be shaken a minute later by my mother’s cry.
“Oh no,” was all she said.
I instantly knew that whatever was wrong had something to do with the newspaper she had just opened, and that whatever it was didn’t concern national politics or the Iran hostage crisis, which was in its ninth month. I scrambled out of bed and opened my door, afraid to learn what had happened, but curious. When I got to the living room I saw my mother crying. She turned away, hardly able to look at me.
“What happened?” I asked, as my stomach tightened, clenching around an abdominal hernia I’d had since infancy. My heart was pounding so hard that I could feel its beat, throbbing throughout my body. Before she could answer, a ringing sensation began in my ears, as if my body was somehow trying to prevent me from hearing the reply to my question.
She looked up, her eyes welling with tears, and delivered the news.
“Bobby Bell is dead.”
I heard her but somehow the words failed to register. It simply made no sense that Bobby, with whom I’d been friends since preschool at TSU, could be dead. It wasn’t conceivable that Bobby, the twelve-year-old who had coined that word, “douche ’n’ push,” to describe the middle school theatre teacher’s car, could be gone.
Bobby was one of the people I’d liked best all through school. We’d become close friends by fourth grade, and by sixth we were constantly to be found in class, the halls, or the lunchroom playing “pencil break” or “thump,” the latter of which was a typically absurd boy game, in which you’d coil back your middle finger in the crook of your hand and then flick it forward into your opponent’s clenched fist over and again until one player conceded the match due to pain. Bobby had these wonderfully fat knuckles, which made an almost drum-like noise when you’d thump them. And while the fleshiness of his hand probably provided extra protection to him, it also protected the thumper, since hitting a bony knuckle by accident when aiming instead for the meat below could be painful. How could this child, my thump rival, be dead?
In fact I was so sure it wasn’t the same Bobby that I immediately asked about another Bobby Bell we knew, who was a few years older than me, and a local Little League legend.
“You mean Fruit?” I asked, that being the nickname of the other Bobby Bell.
“No Tim, Bobby,
your
Bobby,” she said.
“How?” was all I could think to ask, still completely unwilling to get my head around the loss. The answer would be even harder to accept.
“He was killed last night at his dad’s store. Somebody shot him,” she explained.
And that’s when I knew it was real. It made sense, however horrifying. Bobby often helped his dad at one or the other of his father’s stores: convenience markets that also sold some of the most incredible barbecue in town. Bob Bell’s Market on Twelfth Avenue had not been held up even once in the eight previous years since its opening. Not once. But on that muggy July evening in 1980, part of the busy Fourth of July weekend, it would be. And although Bobby had done everything the robber had asked—stuffing money in a bag quickly even as he cried the frightened tears that any child would shed, looking down the barrel of a gun poised mere feet from his face—he was shot in the head anyway, at point blank range, and died in front of his father. As he fled the store, the shooter, Cecil Johnson—later identified by Bob Sr. and other witnesses—shot and killed two other men in a taxi outside.
Angry and confused I spun around and shoved my fist into the wall. Luckily, right before my hand met plaster I had started to ease up on the punch so that when contact was finally made it wouldn’t hurt so much. I was so numb that I couldn’t cry, and I would stay that way for days, weeks, months, even years. In fact the first time I think I ever really let myself cry about Bobby wasn’t until five years later, when I would talk about what had happened during a speech class, in which the assignment would be to discuss something emotionally painful that we had experienced growing up.
Both Bobby and his killer were black, the former the victim of, and the latter a practitioner of, a kind of racial self-hatred that has sadly claimed the lives of far too many African Americans over the years. Only someone who had long since given up on the notion of brotherhood could do something like this. Only someone who had long since concluded that human life was disposable—in this case black human life much like his own—could think to fire a .45 caliber weapon at a child while his father watched, all for two hundred dollars and some change. And in turn, the state of Tennessee (represented by D.A. Thomas Shriver, whose daughter Susan was a classmate of ours) would return the favor, seeking and obtaining a death sentence for Cecil Johnson, a rare occurrence when the racial identity of both perpetrator and victim is black. Studies have long found that death sentences are far more likely when whites are killed, especially by blacks. And in Davidson County, no death sentence had been obtained between 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the constitutionality of capital punishment, and the time of Cecil Johnson’s trial. But in this case, the death of such a caring and loving child, helping his dad from whom he had been inseparable, was enough to justify, in the eyes of the jury, ending the life of Cecil Johnson.
I cared deeply for Bobby, and was grieved by his death. So too, I understood why his father so steadfastly supported a death sentence for the man who had taken his only son from him right in front of his eyes. But even then, at the age of eleven, I never wanted Cecil Johnson to die. And even now, though I would want to kill, personally, anyone who murdered one of my children, I steadfastly believe that no matter how much a person may deserve to die, the bigger question is whether the state deserves to kill. And that calculation—given the inherent class and racial biases embedded in the justice system—is considerably trickier than a simple consideration of what a murderer has earned for him or herself.
On December 2, 2009, nearly thirty years after Cecil Johnson murdered three people, including my friend, the state of Tennessee intravenously delivered to him a lethal cocktail of drugs, ending his life, and bringing to a close this chapter in mine. The night of Johnson’s execution, as I thought about the waste of four lives—Bobby’s, the other two victims, James Moore and Charles House, and his own—I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of a society we are that so readily inculcates the notion of human disposability, whether in individuals who commit such senseless crimes, or in the body politic, which believes against all evidence to the contrary, that by ratifying that same mentality, it will somehow render its citizens safer.

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