White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (23 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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WITH A NEW
batch of activist students ready and fired up about the divestment struggle, those of us who had been leading the charge for two years tried to once again jumpstart the movement. In the fall of 1989, our alliance—now renamed Tulane Students Against Apartheid because of the University’s threat to sue us if we continued to call ourselves the Tulane Alliance, thereby implying (supposedly) official university endorsement—once again took over a board meeting. Facing several hundred demonstrators, and with the divestment petition having grown to include the names of over 3,500 students, staff, and faculty, the trustees finally agreed to negotiations with the protestors.
At our first meeting to discuss divestment with the board, it became obvious that the university’s wealthy white policymakers had no intention of taking the issue seriously. First, we noted that the university already had an ethical investment policy in place, passed in 1985, which prohibited it from investing in companies that contributed to human rights violations. It seemed apparent that continued investment in the twenty-five corporations in South Africa was a violation of the board’s own policy. Upon being issued this challenge, one of the board members—either Sybil Favrot or Virginia Roddy (rich white women all look alike to me)—responded.
“Well, how do we know if those companies are actually contributing to human rights violations?”
Putting aside the argument that any corporate investment in South Africa would automatically bolster apartheid and thus contribute to human rights abuses, I posed a hypothetical.
“Imagine,” I asked, “that we were invested in Shell Oil” (which given the powerful presence of the petroleum industry in and around New Orleans seemed reasonable, though we couldn’t be certain given the school’s refusal to open the portfolio). “Since Shell recently called in South African security forces to shoot rubber bullets at striking workers, would that, in your mind, constitute a human rights violation sufficient to trigger the policy with regard to ethical investment?”
“Well,” she began, before clarifying beyond any doubt that money and ethics bear no necessary relationship to one another, “I guess it would depend on why they were striking.”
I am rarely at a loss for words, but this was to be such a time. Suffice it to say that the rest of the meeting didn’t go much better.
Fast forward to winter break. I was home for the holidays when I stumbled upon a book detailing the connections between university investments and political and economic repression in South Africa and Central America. In the book’s index, the author provided a summary of several companies involved in human rights abuses, and the names of some of the schools that held stock in those companies, along with the number of shares held at the time of the book’s writing. Tulane was listed several times, and was invested in about a dozen companies that had contributed everything from oil-refining technology to the South Africans, to military helicopters to the dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador. It was the material we’d been looking for.
Upon returning to campus in January, we called a press conference to release the list of Tulane’s “dirty dozen” corporations, and to demand that the school follow its own policy with regard to ethical investment by divesting itself of stock in those firms and any others about which we were unaware. The board, in response, announced they were breaking off negotiations with the anti-apartheid group, because the release of the information indicated we were acting in bad faith—this, coming from people who needed to know why workers were on strike before they could say, definitively, that shooting them might be objectionable.
In the third week of March, we again built shanties, but this time on the lawn in front of the administration building (Gibson Hall), facing the streetcar line on St. Charles Avenue. By bringing the protest to the exterior of the campus, in front of its most visible structure, we hoped to heighten the public’s awareness of the school’s practices, and to force divestment, or at least the opening of the portfolio to full scrutiny. A week into the protest, when Jesse Jackson came to campus (for an unrelated speech) and called for the university to heed the protesters’ demands, we figured we were on our way to victory. That evening I announced that several of the group’s members, including myself, would begin a hunger strike the following Monday if our key demands, short of divestment itself, were not met by that time. Needless to say they wouldn’t be, and so the hunger strike started on schedule.
On the fourth day of the strike we received word that the university had agreed to five of the ten demands, including those we had insisted upon in order for the action to end and for negotiations to resume. These included the opening of the portfolio and a commitment to bring in ethical investment experts to help plan future directions for the management of the school’s general fund.
Though we celebrated this outcome as a victory for the movement, deep down everyone knew there was something unsatisfying about it. Apartheid was, thankfully, in its waning days, as signaled by the release of Nelson Mandela in February. As a result, the board had recognized that before it would really have to make any changes, the situation in South Africa would probably change, and with it, there would be no more need to clean out its portfolio. Tulane was going to hold out longer than the racists in Pretoria, which was saying a lot.
But what the divestment effort taught me about the moral compasses of the Tulane Board of Administrators would prove to be among the more unimportant lessons of the campaign. Far more intriguing would be the lesson I would learn about myself and even the best-intended of activist efforts; specifically, the lesson I would learn about how even in our resistance to racist structures we can reinforce racism and collaborate with the very forces we claim to be opposing.
Though I saw none of this for most of my time at Tulane, the closest I ever came to having one of those “lightbulb moments” that people always ask about was during that period, on the second night of the hunger strike. That evening, with only a month or so left in my academic career, we had a public debate on campus against representatives of the New Orleans Libertarian Party. The Libertarians would argue that investment in South Africa was a good thing for blacks because it provided them with jobs, however unequal those jobs might be, and that if companies pulled out, black South Africans would suffer most. It was an argument with which we had been contending from the outset and which all of us knew how to pick apart. By the time the debate was over, virtually everyone in the crowd of three hundred or so was on our side. Confident that we had made our point, Eldann Chandler and I leaned back during the question-and-answer period, expecting to further drive home the moral imperative of divestment to the audience. Most of the questions were pretty routine and were directed at our opponents, rather than us.
And then it happened. The moderator for the evening called on a young woman in the dead center of the small but packed auditorium, who would get the last question of the night. Because she was black, I assumed that she would be on the side of divestment. She was, of course, but she hadn’t come that evening to praise the movement. After identifying herself as a first-year student at Xavier University—the nation’s only historically black Catholic college, located about two miles away—and prefacing her question by noting that as a New Orleanian she was embarrassed that Tulane was still invested in these companies, she got to what was on her mind. In the process, she dropped the bomb that would, more than anything, alter the way I understood my own relationship to privilege.
“Tim,” she asked. “How long have you lived in New Orleans?”
“Four years,” I replied.
“Okay,” she continued. “Then tell me, in that four years, what one thing have you done to address apartheid in this city, since, after all, you benefit from that apartheid?”
She crossed her arms in front of her, and stood, and waited.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi.... The seconds crept by, each one pounding like a drill into my skull. By now, the air had been sucked out of the room, she having asked the one question for which I had been unprepared, the only one I had never anticipated, and the only one that, at the end of the day, really mattered.
Three Mississippi, four Mississippi.... It seemed like hours since she had asked her question, and I briefly considered the possibility that we had been sitting there overnight waiting for my answer. I’m sure no more than a few seconds had passed, but in those seconds, enough truth was revealed to last a lifetime.
I began to have the sensation that I was in my car, speeding away from town, and suddenly saw the blue lights flashing in my rear view mirror—the lights that say, “Gotcha!” But unlike the last time I got a ticket, I wasn’t going to have thirty seconds to come up with some story that could get me out of whatever trouble I was in. This time the officer was at my window, badge out, gun drawn, and it was now or never that I would offer an answer. So I did.
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat before the silent audience, “I mean, um, ya know, um, we all pick our battles.”
Oh.
Shit.
No. He. Didn’t.
Yes, I had, and as soon as the words tumbled from my lips, I knew something significant had happened. More to the point, so did just about everyone else.
The young lady uncrossed her arms and smiled a knowing smile, her expression betraying a mix of satisfaction and disgust at how easy it had been to expose me.
A buzzing started behind my ears, coupled with a strange warmth that made me fear my head might explode like that guy on the stage in that sci-fi flick
Scanners
. I started having flashbacks to all those dreams—I’m sure you’ve had them too—where you suddenly find yourself naked in front of your third-grade class or at prom or something.
An earthquake could have hit at that moment—thinking back to it, I probably wished that one would have—and had it done so, I likely wouldn’t have noticed. I don’t remember another thing from that night, so shaken was I by her question and my answer, not because I had been in possession of a better answer that I had simply forgotten to offer, but because I had had no answer at all. That had been it. I had told the truth, and now had to confront what such disturbing honesty suggested.
Over the next few days, the administration would partially cave to our demands, the shanties would come down, and the hunger strike would end. But even after I began to replenish my body with the nourishment I had been denying it, the pit in my stomach remained, because it had nothing to do with food. I tried to put the whole thing behind me but couldn’t. I kept coming back to the fact that I had been doing all this work against racism half-a-world away, but frankly had done nothing to speak of in opposition to the racism in the town where I had been living. I had done nothing in answer to the
de facto
apartheid conditions that existed in New Orleans—conditions that, as the young woman that night had pointed out, had benefited me as a white man who could count on my privilege to insulate me from their impact.
I began to remember all the things I had ignored or downplayed as I focused on the racial oppression that was occurring on another continent: Harry Lee and racial profiling in Jefferson Parish, or Tulane’s lack of recruiting in New Orleans schools, being two of the most obvious.
And there was one more, even worse, which had just transpired under our noses and about which we had said and done nothing. Three days after our shanty siege had begun, New Orleans police killed a black man named Adolph Archie, suspected of killing a white police officer. When police caught him, beat him, and took him to the hospital, a lynch mob of additional officers had gathered, after broadcasting open death threats over their police scanners. Instead of entering the hospital with Archie, they drove him to a precinct station and over several hours beat him so badly that every bone in his face would be broken. He would die at the hospital after police got tired of brutalizing him, and although his death would be ruled a homicide “by police intervention,” no officers involved in his killing would ever be punished.
As Adolph Archie was being pulverized by New Orleans cops, my comrades and I had been sleeping the sleep of the just (or at least the self-righteous) uptown, in shacks of our own construction, protected by Tulane police around the clock for the entire two-week period of the protest. We had never even discussed the killing of Archie, never connected the all-too-obvious dots, never supposed that perhaps there might be something similar about the way police operated in New Orleans and the way they operated in Soweto. Remember,
we all pick our battles.
I had been completely oblivious to the way in which my own privilege and the privilege of whites generally had obscured our understanding of such issues as accountability, the need to link up struggles (like the connection between racism in New Orleans and that in South Africa), and the need to always have leadership of color in any antiracist struggle. It’s the same lesson still not learned by white activists in most cases, whether in the anti-sweatshop movement, the justice for Darfur movement, or the anti-war movement. Too often the same mistakes are made: mostly white radicals, who have the luxury of picking and choosing issues on which to get active (unlike people of color who also care about different issues but have to deal with racism as a matter of survival), refuse to connect the dots between the oppression taking place in another country, and the oppression going on down the block.

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