White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (15 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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DEBATE WASN’T THE
only arena for white privilege in high school. There was also the entirely Eurocentric curricula, the ability to get away with cheating, or even skipping school in ways no student of color could likely have done, and of course, there was partying.
only arena for white privilege in high school. There was also the entirely Eurocentric curricula, the ability to get away with cheating, or even skipping school in ways no student of color could likely have done, and of course, there was partying.
I can’t even remember, because there are simply too many to recall, the number of parties I attended in high school at which hundreds of underage kids, including myself, were drinking and taking various types of drugs. These were parties with up to five kegs of beer, where guys were taking cover charges at the end of the driveway and stamping people’s hands, right on the road, in plain view of everyone, including the police cars that would occasionally cruise by to make sure the noise wasn’t getting too loud. On more than a few occasions the cops would even come onto the property in response to a noise complaint, and tell us to cut the music down. There is simply no chance that the officers didn’t know alcohol was being served; likewise, they had to have been able to detect the smell of marijuana in the air. Yet not once did they arrest anyone, or even tell us to get rid of the booze and the weed, so as to warn us that next time we wouldn’t be so lucky. Indeed, next time we
would
be that lucky, and the next time, and the next time, and the time after that, always.
would
be that lucky, and the next time, and the next time, and the time after that, always.
These parties were at the homes of white people, surrounded by other homes lived in by white people, and attended almost exclusively by white people. There would always be a few people of color around, but for the most part, these were white spaces, which immediately gave law enforcement officials reason to cut us slack. Had these house parties been in black neighborhoods they would never have been allowed to go on at all, as large as they were, even without a single illegal substance on the premises. But for whites, in white neighborhoods, everything was different. Our illegality was looked at with a wink and a nod.
Criminal activity was also regularly overlooked on the debate circuit. When debaters at Nashville’s prestigious boy’s prep school, Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA), were caught destroying law journals at Vanderbilt University’s law school in 1984, by using razor blades to cut out important evidence rather than take the time or spend the money to make Xerox copies, they faced no criminal penalties. Their parents probably repaid Vanderbilt for the damage, or perhaps MBA paid the bill, just to keep the activities of their elite team quiet. But whatever the case, no one ended up with a record, and MBA as an institution meted out no collective punishment either: no grounding their teams from competition for the year, no public
mea culpa
. With the exception of those of us in the Nashville area who knew the MBA debaters and considered some of them friends, most folks on the national circuit probably knew little of what had happened. Needless to say, if an urban team made up of black or Latino kids went into the library of their local college and defaced private property, things would go a bit differently.
mea culpa
. With the exception of those of us in the Nashville area who knew the MBA debaters and considered some of them friends, most folks on the national circuit probably knew little of what had happened. Needless to say, if an urban team made up of black or Latino kids went into the library of their local college and defaced private property, things would go a bit differently.
When it came to drugs, the debate circuit was probably the best place to score. So everyone could identify the noise when the briefcase of one of MBA’s top debaters accidentally opened up in the auditorium at Emory University in 1985, spilling its contents in front of 500 students waiting to hear which teams had advanced to elimination rounds. The clinking of dozens of nitrous oxide canisters upon the stage—canisters used for doing “whippets,” an inhalant with a nasty habit of causing seizures and heart attacks—was hard to mistake for anything else. Everyone knew what the noise signified, and no one did anything but laugh, as the debaters scrambled to put the evidence of their recreational activity away.
That summer, I attended debate camp at American University in D.C. Upon arriving, I checked in, put my bags on the floor next to my bed, and spent the next two hours in the room of arguably the best debater in the history of the activity (who also, interestingly enough, went to MBA) getting baked into oblivion. Everyone knew what was going on in that room, yet no one did a thing. Even if you couldn’t smell the weed, you couldn’t miss the aroma of burning cologne—entire bottles of it—that had been poured out just inside the door and set on fire to cover up the real action that was taking place inside. No seventeen-year-old kid wears that much Polo.
And then there was alcohol.
When it came to drinking, I would venture to guess that pretty much every white student at my school who wanted a fake ID had one, many of them because of my own entrepreneurial efforts. Tennessee, lucky for us, had at that time what was probably the easiest driver’s license in the country to fake. The state had only switched to a photo ID in 1984, so many of my classmates were able to use their paper licenses—the alteration of which took all of about fifteen minutes, a razor blade, and some glue—until their expiration dates; but even when the picture IDs came in, they were simple to replicate. All you needed was a poster board, some black art-supply-store letters for the wording, an orange marker for the TENNESSEE background at the top, a light blue piece of paper for the subject to stand in front of, off to the side of the board, and a clear piece of acetate (like for an overhead projector) onto which you could stencil the state seal, copying it from the encyclopedia. You would then place half of the seal on the bottom-left side of the board, and stand with your shoulder just behind the other half, hanging off the board, giving the appearance that the seal had been computer generated and stamped onto the picture. Although the methods and materials were crude, they worked.
I began my fake ID business out of my home, shuttling people in and out of my parents’ apartment, with their knowledge I should add, occasionally a dozen in one afternoon. The process was simple: You brought a package of instant film, along with twenty dollars. I would take an entire roll. However many seemed usable were yours to keep, but you had to let them sit for 24 hours before cutting them to license size so that the chemicals in the paper would dry—otherwise, the paper would separate and the ID would fall apart. Then you had only to apply a white sticker to the back of the otherwise black instant camera film so as to mimic the plain white backing on a real license. Simple. Tennessee didn’t laminate licenses in those days, so all you had to do was pop your fake into the little plastic holder that the state had provided you for your real driver’s license and you were pretty much able to get into any club you wanted, and to drink at most bars.
My fake ID business provided me with a modest but welcome stream of revenue, and of course every one that I made was punishable by a five hundred dollar fine and up to sixty days in jail. Likewise, every occasion when I used one myself—which would have been probably three hundred times between the age of sixteen and the time I was finally able to drink legally in my senior year of college—was similarly punishable. That I thought I could get away with such an enterprise had everything to do with the cavalier way in which white youth view law enforcement in most cases. Because we know we can get away with drinking, and drinking and driving so long as we aren’t hammered, and passing fake ID, we do it without so much as a second thought. The worst that’s going to happen, we figure (usually correctly), is that we’re going to get turned down by someone who knows that we’re passing a phony. But they aren’t going to call the cops. It’s like the guy for whom I made an ID right before he left to go to college (he of the whippet canisters mentioned above), who tried to pass off my artwork at the door of some club in Georgetown, only to suffer the indignity of the bouncer taking the picture out of its plastic sleeve and bending it back and forth. It fell apart within seconds, owing not to my own shoddy work, but to the unfortunately crappy quality of instant film. The bouncer told him to get lost, but my client knew he wasn’t going to jail that night. In fact, we both laughed about it when he had the occasion to tell me what had happened a year later.
I even showed my fake ID to cops on two different occasions, as did plenty of other folks I knew, and never got busted, even when I showed a phony Iowa license to a cop who was originally from Iowa and had to know the ID was phony, since I had just made up the template off the top of my head and it looked like crap. That was the same night that another of my friends, also white, showed the same cop an ID that was real, but which belonged to a guy who was in his late twenties or early thirties (my friend Rob was eighteen), with red hair (his was brown), and a beard (he was clean shaven). Not even close, but good enough for white boys.
IT WAS ALSO
in high school that I began to develop my political sensibilities, aided in that process by the research I was doing for debate, but also by the influence of punk music. Having spent several years listening to music hardly at all, by high school I had begun to gravitate to punk, in part because it spoke to the sense of personal alienation I felt, still ensconced as I was in my dysfunctional home situation, and also because it resonated with my growing politicization.
in high school that I began to develop my political sensibilities, aided in that process by the research I was doing for debate, but also by the influence of punk music. Having spent several years listening to music hardly at all, by high school I had begun to gravitate to punk, in part because it spoke to the sense of personal alienation I felt, still ensconced as I was in my dysfunctional home situation, and also because it resonated with my growing politicization.
Not all punk was political to be sure, and even the punk that was wasn’t always progressive. Bands like Fear had a deliberately offensive right-wing tilt to their lyrics, and the Ramones, who I loved, were an amalgam of two warring political factions—one led by Joey, the New York Jewish liberal, and the other by Johnny, the far-right military brat who stole Joey’s girlfriend, inspiring the song “The K.K.K Took My Baby Away.” Punk had always had a bit of this political tension present, with members of early punk acts occasionally sporting Nazi insignia on their clothing or instruments just for shock value, though typically this was more in keeping with the “fuck you” ethic of punk than due to any real political sensibilities. That said, most punk acts leaned pretty clearly to the left, at least if they had any discernable politics at all.
It was through punk records that I first became aware of any number of burning issues at the time, especially those concerning United States’ foreign and military policy. After reading a political zine stuffed in a two-record punk sampler—which I’d picked up at the only record store in Nashville where you could find punk music (and even then, only in the import bin)—I was instantly riveted to the growing anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The zine discussed, albeit briefly, the history of U.S. support for the white racist government there—which although representing only six percent of the population, oppressed the black majority viciously—including Commerce Department approval of the sale of “shock batons” to the South African Defense Forces for use on black prisoners. It was also therein that I learned of the death of activist and apartheid foe Stephen Biko, in police custody in 1977, which then led me to seek out Biko’s collected essays,
I Write What I Like
, which remains among the most influential books in my own political and antiracist development.
I Write What I Like
, which remains among the most influential books in my own political and antiracist development.
In fact, I liked that title so much that I adopted it as a personal mantra of sorts. Though obviously I had never faced—nor would I ever experience—oppression the likes of that which Biko had endured to the end, the concept that one should write fearlessly and speak one’s truth no matter the consequence was incredibly liberating. Of course, locally there were no injustices to combat that could rival what was happening in South Africa. But when you’re sixteen, outrage comes easy. Soon enough, I’d discover an injustice about which to become animated. By comparison to matters of life and death—or even, frankly, the various forms of white privilege and racism that manifested at our school—the issue that emerged was minor. But all activists start somewhere I suppose.
And so in spring of 1985, when Hillsboro’s administration suspended a freshman by the name of Anton Young for wearing a skirt, and threatened disciplinary action against any students who came to his defense, I put pen to paper and composed my first political screed: a short, sweet, 350-word polemic blasting the school’s dress code and standing up for freedom of speech. Yes, Anton had been deliberately provocative—it was his style, and what made him such an iconoclastic element in the student body—but he hadn’t been offensive. The skirt came down below his knees, and was more like a kilt than anything else, as I recall. The fact that there was another student (our resident skinhead wannabe) walking around daily with a leather jacket festooned with a swastika, and yet the administration had neither said nor done anything about
that
, seemed to indicate that the policy was not only horribly arbitrary, but enforced in a way suggesting that school officials were more concerned with ambiguous sexuality than racism. Not to mention, to threaten those who spoke out against the suspension of Anton was clearly an abrogation of our Constitutional rights.
that
, seemed to indicate that the policy was not only horribly arbitrary, but enforced in a way suggesting that school officials were more concerned with ambiguous sexuality than racism. Not to mention, to threaten those who spoke out against the suspension of Anton was clearly an abrogation of our Constitutional rights.
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