What informs the world to see my anger as a threat to white stability, if not the privileged narrative.
It's not unusual to encounter a white person, say, in an elevator or in a grocery store line, someone I've never encountered before, and catch that look. It's one of concern. Dare I say-- fear. No matter how I feel: happy or thoughtful. Now, in that face I see someone I'm meant to be-- regardless of who I think I am or what I've experienced. Continue to experience. Even in that moment"
I'm safe?
That's what the look means. The apprehension on the individual's face is sometimes enough to anger me. It's an invasion of my right to exist-- outside of this white person's fantastical myth of him or herself. And me.
My building manager has already decided that she isn't safe-- not with me around.
James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time , writes of his determination to "never" make "peace" with whiteness . If a white feels intimidate, well, then, that's their problem. He, on the other hand, would rather die and "go to Hell before" letting a "white man spit" on him. Before accepting his "'place' in this republic"!
Baldwin refused to become comfortable on the lower rung of that proverbial hierarchical ladder.
The narrative of whiteness creates that lower rung as it creates the higher rung where the privileged don't worry about systemic injustice. They aren't committed to knowing the truth.
Where I live, in "middle America," I can't engage in a conversation with a white and inform them of what they've done to my people, to the Indigenous. I can't inform them that migrants are actually less violent than Americans. I can't remind them that America is the biggest drug dealer. The biggest seller of weapons of mass destruction. I can't mention how I feel strangled, prohibited from breathing or crying out. I can't even strike out, but must hold steady. Try to smile.
There's Baldwin, decades ago, walking into an O'Hara Airport bar with two Black friends, only to be told by the bartender that they, all in their thirties, "looked too young" to be served. "It took a vast amount of patience," writes Baldwin, "not to strangle" the bartender."
The bartender is new, said the manager in defense of the bartender. He's yet to learn how to "distinguish between a Negro boy of twenty and a Negro "boy" of thirty-seven"!
It's still too real to be laughable.
There are plenty of wicked folks, writes Baldwin; however, they don't destroy a civilization. It's not the "wicked people," the dictators and self-appointed leaders, autocrats. Instead, it's the "spineless" ones. The people who remain silent or just carry out orders or, as historian Timothy Snyder suggests. The people who make room for the incoming destruction of democracy by obeying before an order is even given. They obey-- in advance !
" Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."
When I encounter these appeasers, I want to ask a question of them, however I never do. I almost always know the answer. I see the look as if I have offended them, assaulted them with some monstrous thing they belief they had already destroyed. Or at least, placed in a box or kept hidden in a vault.
I would like to ask the individual if she has ever read a book, a literary or historical work, written by a Black author? Has she ever read Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Diane Nash, Baldwin or Morrison? If the answer is, as I suspect, that she has never read any Black writer or historian, then I would like to know, how is it that she presumes to know me?
I come to this moment knowing this person sees themselves as innocent and has no way of escaping this myth without Douglass, Truth, Nash, Baldwin, or Morrison.
And the burden is on me to make this white American, this white man to feel safe from a nightmare they've created and perpetuated. Feed life into it at every crisis when people of color threaten to destroy it" And yet, the individual standing beside me or sitting across from me mustn't see any evidence of my anger at this situation. A situation that my ancestors and I have been asked to accept and deal with since before the founding of this nation.
And if I'm honest, I'm angry because I can't express that anger about the ignorance that envelopes this white American, like a child wrapped in a blanket, allowing this person to believe all is well when really it isn't!
" To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time-- and in one's work," writes Baldwin. "And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it's what's happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance."
And so, yes, I'm lucky to have the work, to be able to express that rage while sitting at a laptop, a distance from the racist neighbor, of course. It's anger that has me here in the basement of the administration building of the senior complex where I live while my neighbor is still asleep. Noon. And she is the one who opened her window and yelled out to a friend of mine, that I was crazy! I, she informs my friend, had been in jail when I've never been to jail or prison. But then, I must be a criminal!
And my building manager defends the spineless like her!
In the 21 st Century, the spineless still defend white supremacy like good, obedient soldiers while I'm characterized as the angry Black woman. Someone reflecting back to the white American their fear. Because it's fear. My anger reveals my refusal to obey, to be the bringer of fantastical peace . Instead, I'm a roadblock, a barrier to white America's image of peace .
It is, writes the late Cultural Theorist bell hooks in Killing Rage: Ending Racism , "the assertion of subjectivity colonizers do not want to see, that surfaces when the colonized expresses rage." hooks goes on to talk about having to witness close up the "willful ignorance" firsthand and "the impact of race and racism," followed by the pain of white "denial." As "long as black rage continues to be represented as always and only evil and destructive, we lack a vision of militancy that is necessary for transformative revolutionary action."
The racism is as real as the backlash that follows our forward movement toward freedom from this tyranny of hate. The lawyer, writer, and legal commentator, Elie Mystal, writes that "if you tell [white America] they can't be racist in once way, they'll find some other way to achieve the same racist results" ( Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution ). It's evident of the energy it takes to be blindly spineless"
" I had white people," Mystal continues, "tell me with a straight face that I'm not even allowed to judge whether a white person has been racist to me personally ."
I'm talking about, and Mystal is talking about, people who believe they know you. Who believe that you are less than. Even criminal. Have never read anything about you and the experience of being Black in the US. Have never read the history of this country, it's foundation in conquest and enslavement and the necessity to steal and exploit the labor of others also deemed less than, and criminal, globally. I'm talking about a people who believe I shouldn't sit in judgment of other whites, particularly those who tell others that I'm crazy and have been to jail! I shouldn't assume or presume, they've told me, expecting that I will, once, realize how much easier it is to simply obey . Go with the flow! I should just accept and see how high I can jump when ordered to do so.
I think we are in the post-King era. Those of us who remember the Civil Rights era, remember when it came to an abrupt end on April 4, 1968. The bullet that struck Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. on that Lorraine Motel balcony seemed to have silenced our collective ticking clocks. We have been watching the rise of the conservative, right-winged, Christian Nationalist era, ushered in by Richard Nixon to replace the movement for freedom from anti-Blackness. The movement for democracy.
Maybe professor Eddie Glaude is right that the day King was assassinated devastated many Black Americans, including Baldwin, But maybe it was different for white America"
In my own family, Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement was never mentioned. I was aware of the movement of Black Americans because I was attracted to Malcolm and Hampton. I knew of Stokley Carmichael and Huey Newton.
On the afternoon of April 4, 1968, I thought the DJ at radio station WVON in Chicago was joking since he had been capitalizing on April Fools Day. But, then, in a much somber voice, he announced again. King has been shot. He is dead !
I hurried to me mother and told her. I don't recall her saying anything or even acknowledge the tragedy the next day. All the clocks had stopped, it seemed, except the ones in my home. In my home, for the first time, I felt isolated and alone. I would soon be a member of SCLC and Operation Breadbasket's Youth Division, but, then I was an uninformed teenager, who, until the announcement, saw King an "old" man, with outdated ways.
I went to the bathroom, and wept. I found it hard to breath. The boat had stopped rocking, and not just at that location I thought of as home.
Glaude, quoting Baldwin: "King's death had revealed the bitterness at the bottom of the cup."
I still didn't know enough to know that when I headed to California, with a bachelor's degree in hand, the Flower Children were on their way back home. Exchanging jeans for three-piece suits, I encountered them in passing. They told me about potential journalist positions and wished me luck.
A different movement had replaced the one in which Huey Newton had called for a "revolution." Success was in and corporation greed was good. On the other hand, Black political prisoners in particular could be chased across state lines, arrested and sentenced to long prison terms. Others died on the street, in gun battles with police while others still, died miles away from home in exile. Some of us had to go into "exile," being careful never to mention Angela Davis or George Jackson, or even King's name. Revealing ourselves meant that there would be finger pointing and a gathering of the like-minded to hiss and call us out to the authorities.
Only two days had passed after King's assassination, writes Glaude, when 18-year-old Bobby Hutton, Black Panther in Oakland, is shot and killed by police. It's a funny feeling to be alive but everyday being erased by those living their best lives.
King, writes Glaude, struggled with America's belief that white matters more. "I must honestly confess," King admitted, "that I go through moments of disappointment when I have to recognize that there aren't enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege."
The other day, I was in the office of a Latina women when a white man, a neighbor of mine, came in. At one point, he mentioned George Washington. He admired George.
I was thinking, a slaveholder . And, waiting, I thought, maybe the neighbor will mention this fact. Maybe I'll not sink any lower on the proverbial hierarchical ladder"
Sitting beside him, I glanced at the Latina woman. It was her office. I refused. I said, Washington was a slaveholder .
Silence!
The trouble some Black people insist on being! We just won't go away.
In the unwillingness to turn and say, you are right. You are right ! I forgot , I felt rage-- but also, liberated! Dare I speak the truth!
Baldwin recognized in white American men the unwillingness to "'believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened.'" Glaude writes that Baldwin recognized that white America would rather invent "'a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications,'" a system that destroys reality.
Anti-Blackness has the George Floyd Justice in Policing act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act lying on slabs in the morgue! It's so unreal that it takes every bit of energy and strength to hold on and not slip into sitting on a boat going nowhere.
I remember listening to an interview in which Baldwin became visibly angry recalling how so many people suggested that he "relax" once he finally had a few books published. Relax now !That's all I hear. Relax. As if the work is merely a means of becoming "successful." Accumulating money. Cars. Things.
Join the spineless and relax !
Who can relax who knows?
I refuse to go gently in that night where America resides, always choosing, as Glaude writes, to remain racist. I'll remain alive and autonomous. An angry Black woman, "almost all the time," Uncle James. "Almost all the time."
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