White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (8 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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As a student in TSU’s early childhood program, my classmates would be principally the children of faculty or families living in close proximity to the college, which is to say, they would be mostly black. Indeed, I would be one of only three students in the classroom who weren’t black, out of a class of roughly twenty kids. Although several of the teachers who ran the program were white, the ones I remember most vividly were African American women. They seemed quite clearly to own the space. It was their domain and we all respected it.
I can’t remember much about my time at TSU, although I can vividly recall the layout of the class, the playground, and the drive to and from our Green Hills home each morning and afternoon to get back and forth. But despite the vagueness of my TSU memories, I can’t help but think that the experience had a profound impact on my life, especially as I would come to understand and relate to the subject of race. On the one hand, being subordinated to black authority at an early age was a blessing. In a society that has long encouraged whites to disregard black wisdom, for a white child to learn at the age of three to listen to black women and
do what they ask of you
, and to believe that they know of what they speak, can be more than a minor life lesson. It would mean that a little more than twenty years later, listening to African American women in public housing in New Orleans tell me about their lives and struggles, I would not be the white guy who looked them square in the face and inquired as to whether it might be possible that they had lost their minds. I would not be the white guy who would assume they were exaggerating, making things up, or fabricating the difficulties of their daily routine. I would go back to that early imprinting, and remember that people know their lives better than I do, including those whom the society has ignored for so long.
Attending preschool at TSU also meant that I would be socialized in a non-dominant setting, my peers mostly African American children. Because I had bonded with black kids early on, once I entered elementary school it would be hard not to notice the way that we were so often separated in the classroom, by tracking that placed the white children in more advanced tracks, by unequal discipline, and by a different way in which the teachers would relate to us. At Burton Elementary, with the exception of the African American teachers, most of the educators would have had very little experience teaching black children, and in some cases, very little interest in doing so. At one point in my first grade year the teacher would actually pawn off the task to my mother, who had no teaching background, but who knew that unless she intervened to work with the African American students they would receive very little instruction in the classroom.
While few white children at such an age would have noticed the racial separation going on, I couldn’t help but see it. These were my friends, a few of whom I had been at TSU with. Even the black kids I hadn’t known before were the ones with whom I would identify, thanks to my TSU experience. Although I hardly had a word to describe what was going on, I knew that whatever it was came at a cost to me; it was separating me from the people in whom I’d had some investment. Although the injury was far more profound to them—after all, the institutional racism at the heart of that unequal treatment wasn’t aimed in my direction, but theirs—I was nonetheless the collateral damage. My mother had never tried to push me into whiteness or put me into a socially-determined space. But what she would not do, the schools would strive for, from the very beginning.
WHATEVER RACIAL SEPARATION
the school system sought to reimpose, even in a post-segregation era, it was something against which I struggled for years. I had a few white friends, but very few. Albert Jones, who is still my best friend to this day, was among the only white classmates with whom I bonded at that time. Frankly, even that might have been a case of mistaken identity. Though white, his dad worked at TSU in the School of Education, so even he had a connection to the black community that made him different. But other than Albert, pretty much all of my friends at Burton were black.
Yet, as I would discover, interpersonal connections to racial others say little about whether or not one is having experiences similar to those others. Even when a white person is closely tied to African Americans, that white person is often living in an entirely different world from that of their friends, though we rarely realize it.
It would be early 1977, in third grade, that I received one of my earliest lessons about race, even if the meaning of that lesson wouldn’t sink in for several years. The persons who served as my instructors that day were not teachers, but two friends, Bobby Orr and Vincent Perry, whose understanding of the dynamics of race—their blackness and my whiteness—was so deep that they were able to afford me the lesson during something as meaningless as afternoon recess.
It was a brisk winter day, and Bobby, Vince, and I were tossing a football back and forth. One of us would get between the other two, who stood at a distance of maybe ten yards from each other, and try to intercept the ball as it flew through the air from one passer to the next. Football had really never been my game. Though I was athletic and obsessed with sports, I was also pretty small as a kid; as such, I saw little point in a game that involved running into people and being tackled. I preferred baseball, but since baseball season was several months away, the only options that day during P.E. class were kickball or football. Normally, I would have chosen kickball, but when Bobby and Vince asked me to play with them I had said yes. Because we were so often separated in the classroom, I treasured whatever time I could carve out with my black friends.
Our game began innocently enough, with Bobby in the middle, usually picking off passes between Vince and me. Next it was Vince’s turn, and he too picked off several of the passes between Bobby and me, though the zip with which Bobby delivered them often made the ball bounce off of Vince’s hands, too hot to handle.
When it came time for me to be in the middle, I frankly had little expectation about how many passes I could intercept. My size alone virtually ensured that if Vince and Bobby wanted to, they could simply lob the ball over my head, and so long as they did it high enough and fast enough, there would be very little opportunity for me to pull the ball down. But strangely, I caught every one. Each time they would pass just a bit beyond my reach and I would jump to one side or the other, hauling their efforts into my breast, never dropping a single one or allowing even one pass in thirty to make it past me.
At first, I reveled in what I assumed must be my newfound speed and agility. What’s more, I beamed with childish pride at the smiles on their faces, assuming that Bobby and Vince were impressed with my effort; and I continued to interpret this series of events as evidence of my own abilities, even as they both began to repeat the same refrain after every pass, beginning with about the tenth throw of the series. As the ball left Bobby’s throwing hand and whizzed toward its destination in Vince’s outstretched arms, only to be thwarted in its journey time and again by my leaping effort, they would repeat, one and then the other, the same exclamation.
“My nigger Tim!”
Pop! The ball would once again reverberated as it hit my hands and was pulled in for another interception.
“My nigger Tim!”
I would toss it back, and we would repeat the dance, Bobby moving left, Vince right, me following their steps and taking cues from their body language as to where the ball would be going next.
Pop! Another catch.
“My nigger Tim!”
After the first dozen times they said this, each time with more emphasis and a bit of a chuckle, I began to sense that something was going on, the meaning of which I didn’t quite understand. A strange feeling began to creep over me, punctuated by a voice in the back of my head saying something about being suckered. Not to mention, I instinctively felt odd about being called a “nigger” (and note, it was indeed that derivation of the term, and not the more relaxed, even amiable “nigga” which was being deployed), because it was a word I would never use, and which I knew to be a slur of the most vile nature, and also, let’s face it, because I was white, and had never been called that before.
Though I remained uncomfortable with the exchange for several minutes after it ended, I quickly put it behind me as the bell rang, recess ended, and we headed back to class, laughing and talking about something unrelated to the psychodrama that had been played out on the ball field. If I ever thought of the event in the days afterward, I likely contented myself with the thought that although their word choice seemed odd, they were only signifying that I was one of the club so to speak and had proven myself to them. Well, I was right about one thing: they were definitely “signifying”—a term for the cultural practice of well-crafted verbal put-downs that have long been a form of street poetry in the black communities of this nation.
As it turns out, it would be almost twenty years before I finally understood the meaning of this day’s events, and that understanding would come while watching television. It was there that I saw a black comedian doing a bit about making some white guy “his nigger,” and getting him to do whatever he, the black comic, wanted: to jump when he said jump, to come running when he was told to come running, to step ’n fetch’ it, so to speak. So there it was. On that afternoon so many years before, Bobby and Vince had been able to flip the script on the racial dynamic that would, every other day, serve as the background noise for their lives. On that day they were able to make me not only
a
nigger, but
their
nigger. The irony couldn’t have been more perfect, nor the satisfaction, I suppose, in having exacted a small measure of payback, not of me,
per se
, since at that age I had surely done little to deserve it, but of my people, writ large. It was harmless, and for them it had been fun: a cat and mouse routine with the white boy who doesn’t realize he’s being used, and not just used, but used in the way some folks had long been used, and were still being used every day. Today Tim,
you
the nigger. Today,
you
will be the one who gets to jump and run, and huff and puff. Today we laugh, and not with you, but
at
you. We like you and all that, but today, you belong to us.
As I thought about it, however, I was overcome with a profound sadness, and not because I had been tricked or played for a fool; that’s happened lots of times, usually at the hands of other white folks. I was saddened by what I realized in that moment, which was very simply this: even at the age of nine, Bobby and Vince had known what it meant to be someone’s nigger. They knew more than how to say the word, they knew how to use it, when to use it, how to contextualize it, and fashion it into a weapon. And the only way they could have known any of this is because they had either been told of its history and meaning, had been called it before, or had seen or heard a loved one called it before, none of which options were a lot better than the others.
Even as the school system we shared was every day treating Bobby and Vince as that thing they now called me—disciplining them more harshly or placing them in remedial level groups no matter their abilities—on the playground they could turn it around and claim for themselves the power to define reality,
my
reality, and thereby gain a brief respite from what was happening in class. Yet the joke was on them in the end. Because once recess was over, and the ball was back in the hands of the teachers, there were none prepared to make
me
the nigger.
It had been white privilege and black oppression that had made the joke funny in the first place, or even decipherable; and it would likewise be white privilege and black oppression that would make it irrelevant and even a bit pathetic. But folks take their victories where they can find them. And some of us find them more often than others.

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