Jail Break - Part 2

Some years ago I chanced to attend a Pentecostal church whose membership was about evenly divided between whites and Blacks, with numerous interracial families. After the service I stood chatting in the parking lot with a number of men, all of whom happened to be white, married to African-American women, and thus the fathers of children of mixed heritage. We all knew that in our society these children would all be seen as African-American and treated as such—which would of course inevitably make them subject to racial discrimination. Thus these white men had a problem that most white men do not: the anxieties that go with raising non-white children in a society still suffused with white racism.

They knew that, although themselves recipients of “white privilege,” they could not impart this privilege to their own flesh and blood. Thus they urgently wanted a society in which the privilege was dissolved. They had no idea of how to accomplish this—not because they were unintelligent but because they knew the grip that white racism still holds upon our society. They understood its power—so powerful that even as individuals, they could not cease to receive its benefits. There was, as I suggested in my previous post, no place to leave their whiteness upon the altar.

What does it mean to be white? It means to be the member of a race, so what does race mean? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars were confident that they knew. They went about classifying humanity into races and assigning characteristics to each. By the twentieth century, however, the problems with this “scientific racism” became apparent. Writing in 1942, a white Southerner noted that scholars of race could not even agree upon the number and composition of the races. “Thus one scholar makes an elaborate classification of twenty-nine races; another tells us there are six; Huxley gives us four; Kroebner, three; Goldweiser, five; and Boas inclines to two, while his colleague, Linton, says there are twelve or fifteen. Even my dullest students sometimes note this apparent contradiction.”

The races have no objective existence. They are invented, inhabited, modified, and destroyed. In the antebellum United States it was common to hear scientists speak of Slavs, Teutons, Celts, Hebrews, Alpines, and Mediterraneans as separate races, though nowadays all such individuals would be considered Caucasian or white. The historical melding of these groups gives the game away, for the success of “whiteness” resides in its political and social utility, and each of these groups was able to place itself on the same political and social footing as the Anglo Saxons who long dominated the United States. Whiteness is ultimately about power, pure and simple.

I own a white skin, and I have no idea how to divest myself of the privilege that whiteness confers. But I *do* have it within my ability to recognize that this privilege is unfair. I may be stuck with it, but I can choose not to make it part of who I am. I don’t have to think of myself as white—or I can at least try not to think of myself as white. By this reasoning whiteness is no longer about privilege. It is about inhabiting a kind of prison.

When I think of this, I think of a passage from “John Brown’s Body,” Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem about the American Civil War. It is in a context far removed from the prison of white identity but it conveys a sense of what is involved with any form of psychological imprisonment.

The passage occurs in a soliloquy in which Lincoln’s thoughts range across the course of his life and psyche as he awaits the outcome of the battle of Antietam—which, if a victory, he has decided will bring the moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Toward the end of the soliloquy he imagines himself in a psychological prison, and speaks of languishing in “the blind darkness, … the lonely cave // That never hears a footstep but my own // Nor ever will, while I’m a man alive // To keep my prison locked from visitors.”

Lincoln then asks:

What if I heard another footstep there,
What if, some day—there is no one but God,
No one but God who could descend that stair
And ring his heavy footfalls on the stone.
And if He came, what would we say to Him?

Here is where the poem, for me, captures the tragedy of making whiteness the core of one’s identity:

That prison is ourselves that we built,
And, being so, its loneliness is just.
And, being so, its loneliness endures.

Still, there may be hope of a way out, a jailbreak:

But, if another came,
What would we say?
What can the blind say, given back their eyes?

No, it must be as it has always been.
We are all prisoners in that degree
And will remain so, but I think I know
This—God is not a jailor….