White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (44 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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SPEAKING OF WHITE
victimhood, forget New Orleans, forget Bermuda; all you really need to do is take a look at Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
I went there to speak at the University of Illinois during the spring semester of 2007. While there, I had the occasion to meet with a number of different groups: residence hall advisors, fraternity and sorority members, student life personnel, faculty, staff, and students of all types. The timing of my visit couldn’t have been better, or worse I suppose, depending on your perspective. For the previous year, Illinois, like many other schools, had been under intense pressure from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to no longer caricature American Indian peoples, by way of their team mascot: Chief Illiniwek. The chief had been a staple of U of I athletics for over eighty years, at least thirty-five of which had involved protests of the mascot from indigenous students and their supporters. As with Indian mascots around the country, the chief had come under fire for making a mockery of Indian traditions, reducing Indian peoples to a stereotypical image of warriors or “noble savages,” and papering over the very real oppression faced by indigenous persons, past and present, in the United States.
In the case of Illiniwek, the chief had always been played by a white man (most recently a very blue-eyed, blonde-haired white man at that), and he wore an outfit that bore no resemblance to what actual Illini Indians would have worn prior to being driven off the land where the college now stood. Furthermore, the dance performed by Illiniwek at halftime shows, though touted as a traditional “fancy dance,” was, in truth, a mix of inauthentic Indian dance moves and gymnastics, and had been largely created by remnants of the local Boy Scouts, early in the twentieth century.
The NCAA, in 2005, had announced that schools with Indian mascots would no longer be allowed to host basketball tournament games. Some schools complied and changed their mascot names while others, like Illinois, dug in and tried to challenge the NCAA in court. But by the time I arrived on campus in early 2007, the governing board of the university had decided to give in, realizing that continued legal opposition to the NCAA’s move would likely prove fruitless, and concerned about the loss of revenue that would follow from enforcement of the new regulations.
A few weeks prior to my time at the U of I, the chief had done what was billed as his “final dance,” during the halftime of the Illinois-Michigan basketball game. A somber, tight-lipped white man, in a regionally inappropriate headdress, covered in buckskin, gesticulated around the gym floor, on national television, while thousands of white Illinois fans (especially the ones with the big Greek letters on their chests, signifying fraternity or sorority membership) wept openly in the stands. The sight was nothing short of amazing; here were white people having an existential meltdown in front of millions of television viewers, all because they weren’t going to be allowed to play dress-up anymore. It was as if someone had cut off the limb of a parent, or killed a small puppy in front of their eyes. They were being victimized, to hear them tell it, by political correctness.
There were young women, cute little scrunchies in their hair, tears flowing down their cheeks, standing next to young men with backward baseball caps, wearing looks of icy, future-corporate-executive rage on their faces. These were people who had likely never spent one second of their lives crying over the fact that indigenous peoples had lost some ninety million souls, their traditional cultures, religions, and almost all of their land to make way for folks like themselves, but who couldn’t help but sob at the thought of losing a few seconds of entertainment.
Tradition. It was the word on the lips of just about everyone I met at Illinois. For those defending the chief, and who were beside themselves at the thought of losing him, tradition was being ripped apart and discarded, all to make a handful of militant Indian activists happy. What were the feelings of native peoples compared to tradition? Tradition, to these folks, was a noble and worthy thing, in need of being defended and carried on, though for reasons they could rarely articulate. To the opponents of the chief, tradition was also an important word, though one spoken with far less reverie. Tradition, to these folks, was something used to oppress, to vilify, to spread racism, and to further marginalize students of color on the campus.
Yet, what neither group seemed to realize was that tradition is a choice we make. In other words, there are many traditions in our culture, and the ones we choose to venerate are not foregone conclusions but are the result of conscious and volitional acts, for which we have to be responsible. By ignoring this aspect of tradition—which ones we choose to discuss and remember, and which ones we discard—the rhetorical combatants at the University of Illinois fell into a trap from which extrication seems highly unlikely. If defenders of the chief feel as though there is only one tradition to which they can cleave—the tradition of impersonation, or what they like to call “honoring” Indian peoples—and if the opponents feel that that, too, is the only thing meant by the term tradition, then both sides dig in, and the development of constructive resistance to racism becomes less likely. To abandon or preserve tradition becomes an all-or-nothing gambit for both sides in the debate.
But what if students had understood that there was another tradition they could choose to uphold? What if they had been made aware long before, and during their time at the university, of the tradition of resistance—resistance to Indian genocide and racism, not only by people of color, but also whites?
What if they knew about, and had been encouraged to identify with, Europeans like Bartolomé de Las Casas, who wrote eloquently against the crimes of Columbus, having traveled with the “peerless explorer” and having witnessed his depraved treatment of the Taino on Hispaniola? What if they knew of and had been encouraged to identify with whites like Helen Hunt Jackson, Matilda Gage, or Catherine Weldon, all of whom spoke out forcibly against the mistreatment of indigenous persons in the mid-to-late 1800s? What if we were encouraged to follow the example set by Lydia Child, who not only demanded justice for Indian peoples but was also the first white person to write a book calling for the abolition of slavery? What if whites knew of and had been encouraged to emulate the bravery of Jeremiah Evarts, a white man who spearheaded opposition to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act and the forcible expulsion of the Cherokee peoples from the Southeast?
But we haven’t been taught these histories. We know nothing, by and large, of these alternative traditions; and so we are left, all of us, but especially white folks, with a pre-fabricated and utterly inaccurate understanding of what our options are. Whites like those at Illinois seem to feel as though the only or best way to “honor” Indian peoples (to the extent they honestly think that’s what they’re doing) is to portray them, to dress like them, to act as we assume they act, or once did.
Yet if the alternative tradition were the one to which we had been exposed, we might choose resistance, as other whites have done, and commit our schools to something more meaningful than symbolic representation by way of mascots. We might uphold that alternative tradition by pushing for the quadrupling or quintupling of indigenous students on our campuses, or by working towards the establishment of well-funded Native American studies programs. Even better, we could uphold tradition—the tradition of folks like Weldon and Evarts—by partnering with organizations that work with indigenous peoples, so as to improve the economic and educational opportunities available to such folks, on and off campus.
Tradition is, after all, what we make it. The definition of the term is simply this: “a story, belief, custom, or proverb handed down from generation to generation.” There is nothing about the word that suggests tradition must be oppressive, or that it must necessarily serve to uphold the status quo. It is simply the narrative we tell ourselves, and as such, could just as easily involve resistance to oppression or injustice, as the perpetuation of the same. But if we aren’t clear in articulating the alternative tradition, we can hardly be surprised when persons don’t choose the direction in which it points, having never been appraised of its existence.
In the South, for instance, too many white folks cleave to the tradition of the Confederacy, and one of the battle flags most commonly associated with it. But that is not because the Confederacy
is
southern history, or synonymous with the South. Rather, it is because of an ideological choice those white southerners make to align themselves with that tradition as opposed to the other, equally southern traditions with which they could identify. White southerners who wave that flag are choosing to identify with a government whose leaders openly proclaimed that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of their existence, and who over and over again made clear that the maintenance and extension of slavery into newly stolen territories to the west was the reason for secession from the Union.
But white southerners could choose to identify with and praise the forty-seven thousand whites in Tennessee who voted against secession—almost one-third of eligible voters—or the whites in Georgia whose opposition to leaving the Union was so strong officials there had to commit election fraud in order to bring about secession at all. We could choose to remember and to celebrate abolitionists in the South like Kentuckian John Fee, a Presbyterian minister, who was removed from his position by the Presbyterian Synod for refusing to minister to slaveholders, so unforgivable did he consider their sins. Instead of venerating Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, we could praise the brave women who marched on Richmond in 1863 to protest his government and the war, shouting, “Our children are starving while the rich roll in wealth,” and who Davis then threatened to shoot in the streets if they didn’t disperse. Instead of identifying with soldiers who perpetrated atrocities against black Union forces—like Nathan Bedford Forrest (for whom there is a garish statue a few miles from my home, and with whom one of my relatives fought, sadly, at the Battle of Sand Mountain)—we could proudly note the bravery of those one hundred thousand or more white Southern troops who deserted the Confederate forces, many because they had come to see the battle as unjust. Or the thirty thousand troops from Tennessee alone who not only deserted the Confederacy but went and joined the Union army, so changed did their beliefs become over time.
White southerners could choose to venerate the tradition of the civil rights movement, which rose from the South and lasted far longer than the confederacy. We could choose to valorize the tradition of historically black colleges and universities, which grew throughout the South as a form of institutionalized self-help because of the denial of educational opportunity to persons of African descent. We could choose to identify with the tradition of resistance to racism and white supremacy by black southerners to be sure—John Lewis, Ella Baker, Ed King, Amzie Moore, Unita Blackwell, Fannie Lou Hamer, or E. D. Nixon, to name a few—but also by white southerners: persons like Thomas Shreve Bailey, Robert Flournoy, Anne Braden, Bob Zellner, Mab Segrest, and hundreds, if not thousands of others throughout history.
That we are familiar with few of these names, if any, leaves our ability to resist compromised, and limits us to playing the role of oppressor, or at least quiet collaborator with that process. It is always harder to stand up for what’s right if you think you’re the only one doing it. But if we understood that there is a movement in history of which we might be a part, as allies to people of color, how much easier might it be to begin and sustain that process of resistance? For me, I know that such knowledge has been indispensable. And what I know also is this: the withholding of that knowledge from the American people, and especially white folks, has been nothing if not deliberate.
AS THE PRESIDENTIAL
campaign began to heat up early in 2008, it became obvious that race was going to be in the picture, however much folks did or didn’t want to speak of it. Though most voices tried to mute the racial element of the campaign, occasionally the underbelly of racism made itself known.
Dozens of You Tube clips emerged in which white supporters of Republican candidate, John McCain, slung blatantly racist derision at Barack Obama: saying they would never vote for “a black,” or that if Obama were elected he was going to “enslave white people,” or that he was a “secret Muslim” who “hated whites.” They said he wasn’t born in the U.S. and was a terrorist. Some said we should “bomb Obama,” and paraded with stuffed monkey toys, intended to symbolize the Illinois Senator and Democratic Party candidate.

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