Nicole was pissed off. We were standing in the small room that we used as an office, notes for her dissertation spread out on the desk.
“It’s bullshit and it’s sexist and it’s racist,” she said. “Just because I’m a woman they think I can’t go anywhere alone.”
“They” was referring to her family.
Her dissertation dealt with the politics of aesthetics in South Carolina’s tourism industry. In addition to South of the Border, the roadside attraction that used racist tropes on its garish billboards, she was doing a study of Atlantic Beach, a historically Black-owned section of the Myrtle Beach Grand Strand, which was now the location of a controversial motorcycle gathering.
Every year Myrtle Beach had two bike weeks. The first was colloquially called Bike Week and, since it attracted largely white Harley-Davidson riders, it was seen as an economic boon, even if it made traffic a nightmare. The second bike week, dubbed Black Bike Week, attracted Black riders of Japanese speed bikes and sparked the moral panic of white residents, cops, and politicians.
And Nicole wanted to go.
It was Memorial Day weekend, toward the end of my last year at the high school, and there was no way I could go with her, and I sort of sided with her family. Even if for different reasons, I wasn’t sure she should go.
“The world is sexist. Men are awful,” I said. “And it is dangerous to go to a big festival where a lot of people are in from out of town and will be drinking and stuff, and men terrorize women because of patriarchy.”
“And because they’ll be Black?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “My students are Black. I don’t think it’s dangerous because the people are Black. But I saw the white bikers in Sturgis back when I was on the road with Blake, and that was scary. People are dangerous at motorcycle festivals.”
But the idea of her as the only white girl at an almost exclusively Black motorcycle rally did bother me. I would have probably been more worried if she went to the white bike week alone, but it would likely have been a different kind of worry, one I didn’t care to parse because Nicole had already decided not to go, succumbing to the pressure put on her by me and her family. But as the days wore on, I started to think that my fears were racist, and I wanted to correct them.
Atlantic Beach was called the Black Pearl. After school one day, I went to a fancy jewelry store at Gallery Place and found a pair of black pearl earrings that I bought for her.
She liked the earrings when I gave them to her, but they didn’t change the fact that I had played a role in keeping her from her research for what could really only be seen as racist and sexist reasons.
“We are going next year,” she said. “Since you won’t be teaching anymore.”
And we did.
It was the first year of the Obama presidency, and going to Black Bike Week seemed like a particularly poignant sign of the new, possibly postracial times—even if white people in South Carolina were showing us how racial, and racist, they actually were.
Dad hated Obama. Every time he went on some anti-Obama rant, I would recall when he had tried to tell me that Jesse Jackson was the most racist man in America. During the two decades between 1988 and 2008, the propaganda of white grievance had exploded from paper pamphlets and AM radio to a twenty-four-hour news channel and countless websites, and it seemed as if Dad was always parroting some right-wing talking head or radical, ultraconservative politician.
The cast of political characters leading the charge—Joe “You Lie” Wilson, Jim DeMint, and Lindsey Graham—made it hard to miss the deep foundation of racism baked into the white part of our state. They made it obvious that they hated Obama because he was Black and that they would hate him no matter what he said or did. I had started writing a political column for the Columbia City Paper, covering South Carolina’s congressional delegation, in which I attacked these heirs of the Dixiecratic governor and arch-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, who had spoken against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for more than twenty-four hours, breaking the record for the Senate’s longest filibuster.
We had an Obama sticker on our car on our drive to South Carolina for the biker event, and when we got into South Carolina, white people in trucks would zoom past us on the road and then aggressively cut us off, as if they were avenging the defeat of Sarah Palin, the big white mama bear who had somehow failed to chase the Black intruder away, with their massive, gas-guzzling vehicles sporting stickers of the cartoon Calvin pissing on Obama’s logo.
At one gas station near Nicole’s family house, where I was filling up, a white guy in a baseball cap walked by sneering.
“Hopey changey bullshit,” he snarled.
It felt like high school again, with me lost and alienated in my home state due to my opposing politics. I’d done my best to ignore the bad and accept the good about my whiteness. But now, after Obama’s election, the white people in my home state were forcing me to see that I couldn’t just ignore the bad.
“What they do with Obama is the same thing they’re doing with the bike weeks,” Nicole said. “Because this gathering is Black, whatever they do there is going to be seen as criminal. And the other one, because they’re white, they can get away with pretty much whatever they do and it’s seen as just a few bad apples.”
“And if they act like this to us just over a sticker, imagine how they are to actual Black people on motorcycles,” I said.
As we got close to Atlantic Beach, we started to notice the beautiful, tricked-out speed of the Japanese bikes zipping between lanes and cars. The bass on the stereos blared from the bikes along with the roar of their engines. The fashion of the riders was as loud as the bass. Like the bikes, which could go upward of two hundred miles per hour, everything was over the top, and it was beautiful.
When we checked into our hotel room in North Myrtle Beach, just beside Atlantic, we were the only white people in the hotel’s lobby. After the last year, it was a relief not to be around any white southerners. But we didn’t even think about how it might feel for the Black motorcycle enthusiasts to be around us—white southerners, after all.
We saw ourselves as different. I’d been scared for Nicole to come to the bike week by herself the year before, but so much had changed since then. The election of Obama was a stark line for white southerners, who had embraced a full-on culture war. If you supported Obama, you might as well be Black in their eyes. A lot of us white Obama supporters thought that Black people should see us that way as well. Hey, he’s on our team!
I smoked some weed on the balcony of our room overlooking the beach, and we went to walk around the festival. Atlantic Beach was separated from the town of North Myrtle Beach by a barricade blocking it off from traffic. It was like a different world, with small houses instead of Myrtle Beach’s lavish high-rise hotels and dilapidated storefronts in place of garish T-shirt stands. But we both felt more at home here, surrounded by Black bikers with good music blaring and people dancing and neon-green plumes rising from neon helmets, than we did with the dangerously drunken frat boys in baseball caps populating the rest of the beach.
A few people smiled at us as we walked by, and one or two stopped to talk. But for the most part, nobody paid any attention to us at all as Nicole used a DSLR camera we had just bought for the trip to document the festivities.
“A few years ago, we were comfortable at a NASCAR race,” I said as we walked through the streets, motorcycles slowly rolling up and down the avenue and a DMX song blasting out through a speaker near the center of the drag. “Now I definitely couldn’t deal with that.”
“For real,” she said. “With the way white southerners are acting after the election, I feel like if we were walking around at a NASCAR race taking pictures right now, they’d attack us as the lamestream media or communist intellectuals.”
We stepped out of the way of a procession of sparkling bikes easing by, their engines sending up the faint smell of combustion above the smell of all the sizzling meat coming off grills at stands, at stalls, and in yards on either side of the road.
“And even just last year, you were scared of me coming alone,” she said. “And look how cool this is.”
“I wasn’t exactly scared of you coming alone,” I said.
I looked over, and she was wearing her black pearl earrings. On her hand the diamond engagement ring gleamed. I thought with horror now of those seven generations who had owned that ring and how roughly half of them would have thought they owned these people. The thought that the ring had been on the finger of my slaveholding ancestors hit me with a kind of muted horror, casting the relic as a physical inheritance from hell.
As I took Nicole’s hand, both of these pieces of jewelry had become complicated symbols that went well beyond their intended signification, ornamenting our whiteness and its relationship to Blackness.
“We should definitely move to Baltimore,” Nicole said. “This has the same kind of vibe as Lexington Market.”
We had fallen in love with Baltimore one Saturday when we drove up to the market, where we stood at a bar and ate oysters and drank beer, surrounded largely by Black people talking and laughing. We’d begun to notice how white our town, Old Greenbelt, was, and we were no longer happy with that.
We had for years now prided ourselves on living in “historic Greenbelt” and “not the new part.” But the newer part of the city had a largely Black population, like the county it was in, while Old Greenbelt was almost exclusively white. And Nicole’s research—she volunteered as a docent at the local history museum—showed the extent to which that had been by design. As a New Deal government program, Greenbelt was open only to white families in the 1930s, and that demographic decision had gone unchecked, despite the changing makeup of the county, and resulted in what amounted to a segregated city. And though our all-white part of town was staunchly liberal, opposing the Iraq War and voting overwhelmingly for Obama, we felt some deeper undercurrent of white dread when we read the nascent community message boards filled with fearmongering reports of Black youths afoot.
“I’m one hundred percent for moving,” I said. “We need to get out of Greenbelt.”
We’d already been vaguely looking for houses in Baltimore and preparing to put ours on the market—but we kept convincing ourselves to do it, to make all the pain-in-the-ass work worth it.
While working at the school, I had started to think of myself as a white person who is cool with Black people. Not like someone who was artificially down, like the Eminem wannabes, but someone who was at ease and natural around Black people, even though I had very few Black friends and none with whom I was close. Nor was I that white liberal who claims to be equally comfortable with everyone. I felt as if I could recognize and appreciate Blackness and Black people without trying to appropriate or imitate them. But this was still just another way of defining my whiteness in terms of Blackness—it was a way to deflect from actually thinking about whiteness, or a way of grasping to understand a whiteness that remained invisible to me.
When I saw whiteness unveiled, as an organized political force, early the following year, I was struck by how the low-grade horror of the obvious was transforming into the potential for real political terror. Of course this was what whiteness looked like.
It was the first Tea Party rally, on Tax Day 2010. I met my friend Liam at Freedom Plaza early that bright spring afternoon. Liam was a big, tough, blue-collar dude I played country music with. He was a D.C. cop until he got shot. Then he worked on the railroad until two cars coupling crushed half his right hand. Then he became a union organizer, and he was a perfect fit for the job—the loud-talking, confrontational type of organizer who might just slam you up against a wall to make a point. He was the perfect guy to go to the Tea Party with.
When we got there, we found thousands of people wearing tricorne hats and other colonial-era garb along with signs reading “Don’t Tread on Me” or “Obama is a traitor” or “My freedom is a big fucking deal.” Pretty much everyone was white and over forty-five. I thought of Dad. He wasn’t the type to attend rallies—his political actions were largely confined to cursing at the television or the radio—but he shared the sentiments of these Tea Partiers. How much of their anger was the anger he’d expressed when I talked to him about school desegregation? This generation of white men had entered a world where they had to compete with Black people for jobs that had previously been reserved for them. And now, for the first time, there was a postboomer president, and he was Black. And to them that was unbearable.
I started talking with a white guy named John, who had long wavy hair coming out of a white baseball cap. He had on shorts and a loosely buttoned shirt showing off his gold chains.
“I’m ready for the next revolution,” he said. “I firmly believe that the guy in the White House is a Muslim. He hates America, I think he hates whitey. He’s a self-loathing piece of shit.”
“What do you think the postrevolution world would look like?” I asked.
“It would look like me,” he said.
After a while, I needed to escape the constant barrage of aggressive whiteness that was almost bowling me over, so Liam and I went to a bar. Then we went to another one, where we ate oysters for a couple of hours. As it got dark, he left and I went down to the main event, where thousands of people crowded the mall. “Hi, I’m with the Columbia City Paper,” I said to one woman.
“What kind of paper is that?” she asked.
“A newspaper,” I said.
“And what’s your name?”
“My name is Baynard Woods,” I said.
“What?”
I was officially John Baynard Woods Jr., and I had always gone by Bay. But “Bay Woods” was useless in a Google search, which brought up dozens of retirement communities, golf courses, and subdivisions called Bay Woods before anything I’d ever written. So I’d started using Baynard as a byline. But it didn’t matter, verbally, whether I used Bay or Baynard because most people didn’t know what the hell I was saying on the first try and I usually had to spell it. Nicole’s grandmother had thought my name was Gay for a whole year.
“Baynard Woods,” I said. “Of the Columbia City Paper.”
“Your paper isn’t good for anything but wiping your journalist asses,” she said.
She turned away, and I shrugged and wandered off through the apocalyptically Caucasian crowd into the heart of what looked to me like white doom.
I spotted one odd sign. “Defend Obama: Outlaw White Supremacy,” it said. Then I noticed that people were standing around it, holding other signs with arrows and the word “Infiltrator!” written across them.
I decided I needed to go see what was happening and snaked through the crowd until I reached the sign, which was being held aloft by two young people, a white woman and a Black man. Around them, a crowd of angry old white people were yelling and jeering.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked, walking up with my tape recorder out.
The couple with the sign said nothing. They just looked straight ahead and did not react.
“We’re blocking them off,” a Tea Partier told me.
“Is there a reason for that?” I asked.
“Because that’s offensive and no one should see it.”
“What is offensive about it?” I asked.
“‘Outlaw white supremacy’?” the woman sneered. “These Kool-Aid drinkers think all the Tea Partiers are racist.”
“If the Tea Party movement isn’t white supremacist, why block the sign off?” I asked, doing my best to appear as a neutral journalist. “Wouldn’t the Tea Party also want to outlaw white supremacy?”
“They don’t belong here,” the woman said.
She would not give her name.
A blond woman stepped toward me, aggressively.
“I can’t find a white supremacist, can you? Let’s go find one,” she said, and grabbed my arm, digging her fingers in.
“Hold on, hold on. Let go of me, please,” I said, my voice rising to an embarrassingly high pitch.
“Come on, let’s go,” she said, gripping my arm harder and pulling as people jostled around us. I jerked my arm away from her grasp.
“Let’s go find a white supremacist,” she said again, reaching for me once more as the crowd that had been focused on the sign now turned all its attention to me.
“Hold on,” I said.
“Let’s go find one. Do you know one? Do you know one?” she asked, grasping again at my arm.
“Do you have to know a crack smoker to outlaw crack?” I asked.
“Do you smoke it?” she asked.
Then she paused and sniffed, pointing at my face.
“Have you been drinking?”
I stepped back, trying to get away from her grabbing hands.
“You’ve been drinking,” she announced, delighted, her swelling southern accent almost a slur, moving across the word drinking like a truck over an oil slick. “You’ve been drinking. How much did you have before you came down here?”
People chanted, “USA, USA” in the background.
“You been drinking, haven’t you buddy?” she said.
The crowd around us loved that. It confirmed all their stereotypes about the liberal media. More people started yelling at me.
“Did you beat your wife before you came here today?” one guy bellowed.
Others started waving their “Infiltrator!” signs at me like tomahawks. I held up my arm to keep one from hitting me in the head.
I had swiftly lost control of this situation.
“Let me show you a picture of my grandchild,” the blond woman said as she dug into her purse. “Let me show you a picture of my grandchild.”
I knew what was coming. I hated every second of this confrontation.
“Look!” She pulled out a picture.
“He is cute,” I said.
“He’s Black!” she cried. “Isn’t he cute? He’s Black. Isn’t that great? My grandson is Black!”
“And that means what?” I asked.
“That means I’m not a white supremacist,” she said.
“He’s been drinking,” someone else yelled.
“I didn’t say you were one—but if you aren’t, why worry about this sign?” I asked.
“We’re not white supremacists,” the blond woman said. “Obama is a Black supremacist. That’s what we’re against. To be against Black supremacy isn’t white supremacy.”
“He’s been drinking,” a man yelled again.
More white people in tricornes and American flag T-shirts had gathered around. I didn’t even know what the couple’s sign really meant. It was hard to imagine what outlawing white supremacy would look like in a country where, with the exception of the first Black president, the political and law enforcement establishment was overwhelmingly white. But I applauded their sign and the courage it took to hold it.
“Well, thanks a lot for your time,” I said, easing back, hoping no one would push me down from behind. I felt as if I was in danger and I needed to get out.
“Going to smoke some crack?” the blond woman asked.
“He needs another drink,” a man said.
I did need another drink after I managed to extract myself from the rally. But more than that, I needed to get my ass home.
On the Metro ride back to Greenbelt that night, I stared at my reflection in the darkened window, exhausted, my buzz already a hangover. And as I thought about the Tea Party and its white anger, it was as if I saw Dad’s face superimposed over mine. All of this rage came from insecurity. Whiteness is the fear both of being seen and of not being seen. Whiteness demands to dictate its own terms—and everyone else’s terms too. It sees any Black gain as white loss. This anger wasn’t confined to the Tea Party event, it felt intimately familiar. It was the same anger and sense of aggrieved loss that had suffused Columbia when I was growing up and the shared feeling in my community that the Wo-ah and the world had turned out wrong.