This Black History Month, I’m reflecting on books I’ve read that have helped me confront racism, including my own.
I must admit, I’m suspicious of “how to” guidebooks like Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller How to Be an Anti-Racist, which view racism as a choice.
The way I learned about racism as a social, historical, and political problem is that racial prejudice requires institutional power for it to be racism.
In other words, racism is white supremacy; reverse racism isn’t real; and every white person, regardless of character, ideas, and actions, is racist.
Many interpret a statement like the latter as a value judgment against white people. It’s not. I’m not at all saying that every white person is evil; I’m saying that relative to every person of color, white people—or more accurately, people constructed as white—have the privilege of what I call ostensible racelessness. A white person is treated as an individual by police officers where Black people are seen as belonging to a race, and the ever-growing numbers of incidents of police brutality—by cops of any race—prove this.
I don’t call myself an ally—it’s not my place to—but I do work to be critical of myself and my actions in the service of anti-racism, especially through reading, learning, listening to others, and questioning the norms from which I benefit. It’s not enough, though, to contemplate privilege; I can be complacent, so I need to keep myself in check.
So, when the U.S. celebrates Black History Month, whether or not whites hilariously complain about the lack of “White History Month,” there’s a book that keeps me necessarily self-critical, no matter how much I think I’ve progressed in anti-racist knowledge or practice.
That book is one of the best and most disturbing books I’ve ever read: the anthology Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, though published a quarter-century ago, remains one of the most perceptive texts for our era.
Edited by the white historian and abolitionist David R. Roediger, Black on White presents a brilliantly interdisciplinary range of Black writing over the centuries, including essays, poetry, fiction, philosophy, visual art, and other media, that consistently critiques the concept of race and confronts whites with our assumptions and prejudices, as rendered by some of the greatest thinkers in the U.S.
When I first saw this book at a library, the book’s concept seemed strange: what would Blacks know about what it means to be white? The more I read, however, the more my assumptions were gratefully debunked. I say “gratefully” because even though there were many difficult readings in Black on White, I grew from reading it with a greater understanding of race, racism, and my place in a troubling history.
To be clear, reading this book was not an exercise in guilt, which is unproductive. Rather, Black on White reminded me of every white person’s responsibility of making this world better to eradicate racism. After finishing the book, I felt terrified, but invigorated.
At least three of the most important readings for my understanding of race are in this book: James Baldwin’s “On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies” (1984), a key excerpt of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and bell hooks’s “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination” (1992).
Baldwin’s essay exposes the concept of whiteness in the starkest terms. He writes near the piece’s end that “there are no white people,” and scientifically, he is absolutely right: whiteness is not about skin color, as the Irish, Germans, Polish, Italians, and (many) Jews were all not considered white at different times. He also argues that white identity exists to oppress Blacks in the U.S., writing, “America became white—the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.”
While this text may shock, history—meaning historical fact, not the mythology that passes for American history in many textbooks—backs up Baldwin. Since the invention of the concept of race with the transatlantic slave trade—as Roediger and others have written, institutionalized racial prejudice, more than simply not liking someone because of their skin color, had not existed previously—whiteness has been constructed as the privileged norm. Today, structures in U.S. society—in language, business, education, housing, health care, the “criminal justice” system, and more—benefit whites and denigrate Blacks and other people of color.
More specifically focused, Morrison’s excerpt names what she calls the Africanist presence in American literature. She argues, with pristine clarity, “Deep within the word ‘American’ is its association with race. [. . .] American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. [. . .] The American nation negotiated both its disdain and its envy [. . .] through a self-reflexive contemplation of fabricated, mythological Africanism.”
Writing about what gets constructed as American identity, Morrison’s point lines up with Baldwin’s: whiteness could not exist without Blackness, with one being perpetually valued over the other in U.S. history. At this point, no one has successfully labeled white people “European-Americans,” as I suspect whiteness is once again expanding to include groups outside of Europe. The ultimate elasticity of whiteness is coupled with its exclusion of those who are not considered white, as other readings in Black on White, such as an excerpt of legal scholar Cheryl Harris’s article, “Whiteness as Property,” help corroborate.
Feminist cultural critic hooks’s essay focuses on the perceived invisibility of whiteness to whites and how that perception is patently false to Blacks. I admit, when I first saw this essay in hooks’s Black Looks: Race and Representation, my own ignorance and racism made me question the title: representations of whiteness in the Black imagination—not the other way around? Is that a typo? What could I gain from reading a Black writer on how whiteness has been perceived by Black communities?
A lot, as it turns out. hooks lays bare the lie that whiteness is invisible to blacks; to the fantasy that whites are not seen racially by Blacks and other people of color; and to the idea that whiteness is, if not invisible, universally perceived as benevolent and good. As hooks describes, there is a deep link in Black thought, transcribed in writing and transmitted through oral traditions, between whiteness and terrorism against Blacks.
When I initially read this essay, I was shocked, but the more I read and the more I thought about this idea, the more it made sense: white terrorism is not an aberration in the history of racism in America. It has existed going back to the horrors of racial slavery, lynching, Jim Crow de jure segregation, and in contemporary mass incarceration and many other forms.
And as historian Edmund S. Morgan writes in his landmark 1972 journal article, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox”, throughout U.S. history, one group’s freedom depended on another’s oppression and vice versa. To me, that idea means that even when committing supposedly similar acts, a white person is seen as an individual “lone wolf” while Blacks and other people of color are seen as terrorists.
Black on White is not an exercise in cataloging anti-white prejudice, which, to be clear, is not the same as racism because of the lack of institutional discrimination against whites as whites. As Roediger makes clear in his brilliant introduction, much of the best writing on race and racism involves critically interrogating race as a category and its inherent fictions—how it is socially constructed and how it benefits those who are constructed as white.
While there are readings that may strike some as “reverse racist,” Roediger calls attention to the complexity of the effects of whiteness even as many white readers will miss that point. Roediger and the black writers in this collection extend compassion to John Brown and others who have given their lives to end the oppression of Blacks and other people of color.
This speaks to the differences that Dr. Bettina Love explains between allyship and co-conspiratorship. Love speaks about the importance of taking risks, more than simply reading and learning about racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of institutionalized privilege and oppression. John Brown, it is fair to say, was a coconspirator.
It is true that reading is not enough to challenge oppression, but as I heard Peggy Macintosh speak in 2008, one of the aspects of white privilege is to be believed when you speak about it. It is an unfortunate reality that many whites are unwilling to listen to people of color talking about their experiences and often deflect and project their own racism onto people of color.
This has been amply demonstrated many times over, and when Black philosopher George Yancy wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2015 asking white Americans to confront our racism, the resulting controversy, documented in the 2018 book Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America, could have cost him his career and much more. I, benefitting from the construction of whiteness, cannot experience consequences on the same level when I speak out about racism.
If more whites, including myself, can read and speak out on social media and take real risks against white supremacy, this country and this world will be much better off. Love gives the example of James Tyson, a white man who put his hand on a flagpole to stop the police from tasing that pole after Bree Newsome Bass, a Black woman, climbed it to take down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State Capitol.
To Love, Tyson was not simply an ally who had read a lot of books; he was a coconspirator because he took a real risk to save the life of a person of color, specifically a Black woman. It’s not as much that this world needs more people like James Tyson as it is that the world needs more actions like those that James Tyson performed.
I admit, when reading part of scholar Jane Davis’s book, The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature, that at different times, I could identify with all four types of whites that, Davis argues, show up consistently in African American literature: the overt white supremacist, the hypocrite, the good-hearted weakling, and the liberal. I’m sure that many whites can.
I strongly encourage every white person of every ethnicity, class, gender, religion, age, ability, and sexuality to acknowledge and challenge our racism and our immense responsibility to challenge institutional discrimination that, racially, we do not face.
Linking to the association of whiteness with terror and terrorism, on January 6, 2021, terrorists—and no, I do not mean “protesters”—attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to keep Donald Trump in office. Trump incited this attack in an attempt to overturn the presidential election, in which Joe Biden won both the popular and the electoral vote against Trump.
Eleven days later, I was watching a Martin Luther King Day Zoom concert of the legendary Black women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock when member Nitanju Bolade Casel spoke spontaneously about watching television in shock when a video surfaced of one of the terrorists in an airport exclaiming, “You’re treating me like a Black person!” while being arrested.
What does our historical moment reveal about the state of race and racism in the U.S.? What does the term “American” even mean? Is whiteness often associated with terrorism?
These are just some of the questions with which I wrestle this month, two years later, while I review a rich literature of Black writing on whiteness. While it is necessary for all to take sides—a concept that I didn’t always understand—it is absolutely essential during this time for whites to listen to and learn from voices and perspectives of people of color, including Blacks.
Many whites may post statements like “I denounce white supremacy” on social media when they don’t realize that white supremacy is more than overt expressions of hate like the Proud Boys and the Ku Klux Klan. We need to stand up to forces that oppress others and benefit us. Any of the institutions I mentioned earlier can benefit not only from white people speaking out against injustice, but also, white people learning from people of color to listen.
That, to me, is what my experience with Black on White is about: whites and other groups who have power—including men, heterosexuals, cisgender people, able-bodied people, and so on—learning to listen to marginalized groups about their experiences without being defensive or dismissive—and not giving up when we fail.
If we want to move forward as a country, we must reckon with race and racism. Black writing and thought on whiteness are among the key gateways to greater awareness and action.
That said, Black writing on whiteness is nowhere near a monolith. Roediger distinguishes between “the more reflexively anti-white tradition” of Black writing on whiteness as less impressive than the tradition that critiques the idea of race itself, rather than simply flipping Black-white binaries without challenging such binaries.
Today I wonder how many white readers have embraced the work of writers like Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates precisely because they don’t read many Black authors and/or those that they read do not challenge their fundamental identity as “white.”
That’s why Black on White is so important for me this month. I need that reminder every day.