The sky glowed electric on a brilliant, bright Friday afternoon in September. I was standing at the park and ride at the train station near the university where Nicole worked.
We’d just moved to Baltimore two weeks earlier, but I was teaching Greek and Latin at a nearby university and commuted by train. Adjunct work was a good way to make sure I had some income while trying to figure out how to survive as a writer.
“Hey, hon,” Nicole said as I got in our silver Corolla.
“How was your day?” I asked.
“OK,” she said as I slammed the door and she pulled out. “But I’m still really stressed about the house. I don’t want to go back to Greenbelt.”
Our house in Greenbelt had sold before we found our new home in Baltimore, so we’d decided to rent an apartment on Cathedral Street in Mount Vernon, a neighborhood in the center of the city that we couldn’t afford to buy in, and we loved it. But then, two days earlier, the buyer had backed out of the Greenbelt deal, leaving us with the prospect of rent and a mortgage.
“We won’t,” I said. “She gave us that five thousand dollars for breaking the deal, and that will cover the mortgage and co-op fee for a while.”
The traffic was all going the other way, streaming southward out of the city as the skyline rose up over the highway in front of us, the BRESCO tower spitting a light cloud of smoke into the sky. Nicole took the exit for 395 into the city.
As we drove up Park Avenue, Lexington Market loomed up at the top of a small hill to our left. The streets were teeming with people standing around and waiting for buses or smoking and talking and drinking from brown paper bags. The street life around the market was one of my favorite things about the city. It was alive with laughter and language. I felt at home in these chaotic streets, and I couldn’t wait for the weekend to start.
Nicole made a sound, but it was not a word—more like something guttural involuntarily escaping from her lips. Then I saw the black SUV floating straight across Saratoga Street, its wide black hood aimed at my side of the car. The next seconds passed frame by frame like a film until the moment of impact. The velocity of our Corolla combined with that of the SUV suddenly and sent us crashing, spinning, weightless, through the intersection.
When the car had stopped, in shock, I immediately climbed out. Looking over the roof, I saw Nicole doing the same, but standing there on either side of our steaming, crumpled wreck of metal, we didn’t know what to do. Faces were all around us, peering in as if through a fishbowl.
“Are y’all OK?” an older Black man asked.
We looked at each other across the silver roof. She nodded and so did I.
“The rich lady hit you,” someone said.
“Aw, my back hurts too,” someone else yelled.
I looked over and noticed that the woman who had been driving the SUV had not gotten out of her car. As I approached, I saw her through the window, talking on her cell phone as she employed a gesture to shoo me away.
“She’s afraid to get out of her car,” I said to Nicole.
A crowd of Black people had surrounded us, still asking if we were OK. I nodded and looked over at the “rich lady” in the car and felt a certain sense of pride that they identified with Nicole and me more than with the “rich lady.” It bolstered the image I had developed of myself since we had moved to the city, the image of myself as a white person who was at home in a Black city, who could move about the world, comfortable in any situation. It was, in the end, another way of erasing my whiteness, seeing myself as not white at all, ignoring my history again, seeing myself as different from other white people.
At this time in my life, I wanted to shed all the imperfect, fucked-up, stupid, and ridiculous things about my past; to lose my history, and my identity, and just become one facet of this crazy diamond of a metropolis. If I could have, I would have liked to dissolve my whiteness, to be truly postracial. But I was smart enough, even looking around at the crowd around me, to realize that was impossible. So I recognized I was white, but I wanted to minimize it in whatever way I could, to put being white behind being a Baltimorean.
We decided not to get another car, and being carless increased this sense of dissolving into the city. Nicole took the 35 bus for an hour each way to her job at the university in the county, about a fifteen-minute drive. And since I already took the train to work, the biggest difference for me was that getting around the city necessarily happened at a human pace, in connection with everyone else, either on the bus or on the street, face-to-face with people.
The buses were mostly full of Black people, while whites regularly told us it was impossible to get by in Baltimore without a car. Cars were, it seemed, a good model for whiteness. Everything in our cities is designed for the benefit of cars, and yet behind the wheel everyone is furious all the time, trying to get to the next light just a little faster, feeling slighted by the least progress made by someone else.
However much I wished, in my peregrinations around the city, to erase my whiteness, I couldn’t escape it. At the same time I was trying to lose myself in the city, my job forced me to see my race in a way I never had before.
“Can I see you in my office a minute?” my department chair asked when I got to work early one morning, his voice soft but uneasy.
“Sure,” I said, and followed him into a dim, book-lined room.
I had an idea what this was about. A student had come to complain to him about me and had not been happy with the response.
“That student filed a formal, federal civil rights complaint against you,” he said when we walked into his office with soft lighting coming from a desk lamp and the book-lined walls. “She’s claiming you discriminated against her.”
I felt my stomach lurch up not only because of the fact of the complaint but also because I knew I would be judged, right now and through the entire process, by how I responded to this allegation. The ways we respond to being called a racist seem to say as much as anything else about whether we really are racist. Previously I’d believed that racism was an active stance one took to be bigoted. Now it seemed a whole set of subconscious assumptions could be imbibed from the culture so that we could be racist without intending to be, without considering ourselves bigots. I was starting to recognize that racism could be structural.
I tried to steady myself and look into the chair’s eyes.
There was only one Black student in my Latin 102 class. She was supposed to graduate from another local university that semester and needed a Latin credit to complete her language requirement. Since her school didn’t offer it, she was taking the course with me. But she had taken Latin 101 many years earlier, and on the first day, as we started working through sentences, I worried she didn’t have the prerequisite knowledge to be in the class. I asked her to stay after, and we stood there talking about her previous Latin class.
“I just don’t know if you have the background knowledge to succeed in the second-semester class,” I said. “You should think about taking my 120 class over the summer, where you get a whole year of Latin in six weeks.”
She said she needed the class to graduate and that she would review.
I offered to help however I could, but mentioned the 120 course in the summer one more time. That was when she first went to the chair, who was a person of color but not Black, to complain about me. She told him that she had been recording my class and wanted to play snippets of me acting unfavorably toward her.
The knowledge that I was being surreptitiously recorded so that my words could be used to prove I was a racist made my teaching feel artificial and stilted, every word analyzed carefully before I uttered it.
Shortly after that, I got a call from her father in my office.
“I know you are from the Carolinas and how racist people are down there, and if you weren’t racist she would pass,” he said.
“I know how racist it is there too. But you don’t know anything about me, and assuming you know what I am like because of where I’m from is the only prejudiced thing I’ve heard today,” I said.
I was angry. Pissed off about the whole thing. I had used my PhD to teach underserved kids of color in the inner city. I had even written an article about using Latin to teach literacy to the students who struggled with reading the most. I had written the introduction to a book about literacy as a civil right, and now I was being accused of violating a Black student’s civil right to an equal education? I wrote articles attacking South Carolina’s racist politicians, and now I was being judged as a racist because I came from the same place as they? I couldn’t believe it.
As long as it was just the tape recorders and the phone calls, I could blow it off. But this was a formal complaint to the Department of Education—whether or not I was racist would be examined by the United States government.
“I know this is difficult,” the chair said.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I taught at a mostly Black school and understand how bad discrimination in education can be and the seriousness of this. I’ve thought a lot about it and even written about it. I’ve never discriminated against anyone based on race, but I applaud the process of reviewing alleged civil rights violations.”
“OK,” he said. “That’s a good attitude. We’ll have to respond. Can you work up a statement with some supporting materials that we can send to the lawyers?”
Because we’d talked about it before, I got the sense that the chair was on my side, and his use of the plural pronoun reassured me here. But I was only an adjunct, and I knew that the department would throw me over if it had to—or if it turned out I actually had discriminated against the student.
“Sure,” I said.
I could tell that the whole thing made him as deeply uncomfortable as I was, and I just wanted to get out of his office, as much for his sake as for mine, as quickly as possible. I was a source of embarrassment.
I would write up my version of what had happened and supply any supporting documents, which he would then send to the university’s lawyers, who would review them and then be in touch with me, he explained.
I staggered from the colonial brick building out onto the lawn of the leafy campus. I pulled my cell phone from my bag and noticed the pack of cigarettes. I spied a student smoking over by the steps and asked for a light and then walked behind the building, hiding behind a dumpster to call Nicole.
“It’s impossible not to look like an asshole when you defend yourself against racism,” I said into the phone after I explained what was going on. “Every racist says they’re not racist. So how do I say I’m really not racist and not just some racist saying that I’m not racist?”
Writing up a defense, I knew that I’d sound like the Tea Partier who’d shown me the picture of her grandson to prove that she wasn’t a white supremacist. I was not racist, or so I believed—but so did that woman who had harassed the kids at the rally with an “outlaw white supremacy” sign. How were we different? I wondered.
Late that night, I could not sleep. I walked into our local bar. My friend Rocky, a short, round Black guy with big baby cheeks and a bigger laugh, sat with a few other friends at one end of the bar in a peach-colored polo shirt. I approached them and did the ritual handclasp, chest-bump greeting and sat down beside them.
“A beer and a shot,” I said to John, standing behind the bar.
“What’s up?” Rocky asked.
“Our damn house in Greenbelt still hasn’t sold,” I said. “Thought there was going to be an offer today, but it fell through.”
I felt wrong about hiding what had really happened today to get me down, but I couldn’t tell these Black men that the United States government was investigating me as a racist.
“Shit,” Rocky said.
“Another round,” I said.
A little while later, I was taking a piss at the stained urinal in the bathroom when Rocky walked in. He took a bump of coke off of a key with a snort loud enough that I heard it clearly over my piss stream. He shook his head and smiled.
“Want one?” he asked, extending the key to me after I’d zipped up.
I took the bump. He took another. So did I.
We ended up later back at a friend’s apartment, snorting blow till 5:00 a.m. Every time I put my face down to the mirror, I thought of the charge hanging over me, the charge that I was racist. What would Rocky and my other friends say if I told them about the complaint?
With a coke-fueled tongue, I almost mentioned it a couple of times, then chickened out and said something else instead.
Over the coming weeks, as I compiled the documents for my defense, the shame kept returning. I worried that any defense I might make would just prove that I was guilty.
The complaint that the student had made—that I’d told her she did not have the background for the class—alleged that I thought whiteness was a prerequisite for Latin. And though I did not think that, centuries of Latin teachers had.
The discipline of classics—based primarily on the study of Greek and Roman languages and cultures—was essential in the creation and propagation of the idea of whiteness. “The glory that was Greece, / and the grandeur that was Rome” served as the foundation of the concept of “Western civilization,” which ultimately justified colonization, genocide, and slavery.
In the South of my ancestors, the slavers had studied ancient Greek while the people they tortured built colonial-style plantation houses with Greek columns. These white slavers often gave the names of famous Romans like Cato or Cicero to the Africans they prohibited from learning to read—on pain of death.
In the Ivy League schools up North, Greek and Latin were used as an elitist barrier. W. E. B. DuBois was the first Black person to get a PhD at Harvard in 1895, which was only possible because he had studied and taught classics, which forced white people to take him seriously as an intellectual.
Reading about this history as I prepared my defense, I understood the wider context of the student’s complaint. I had not meant that Blackness was not an appropriate background for the study of classics—but that assumption had been an essential part of the discipline since its inception. Teaching classics, I felt, was kind of like hanging out with a skinhead—when a Black person assumed you were racist because of it, it was not without cause, even if it was, I hoped, without merit.
I was conflicted and confused. It was the first time that an outside force had made me think seriously about my whiteness. Before that, this awareness had been like a seed growing within me as I hung out in Baltimore, where I was now the minority as a white man and could actually see my whiteness, when I hadn’t really needed to notice it before.
When my parents were kids, race had been inscribed in every public space, above every door or facility, “White” and “Colored” starkly stating the centrality of the category. I’d known this but hadn’t lived it. By the time I was born, only eight years after the Civil Rights Act, white people mostly acted as if they didn’t see race, and they taught me not to see it either. The Civil Rights Movement was ancient history overcome—even as the Civil War was remembered as an ever present tragedy.
Now I understood that whites like me hadn’t forgotten race, we had repressed it, repressed the shame. The monstrous looks on the faces of the white southern racists screaming at Black children integrating schools must have embarrassed my parents, made them bury the experience of growing up in Jim Crow. Sacrificing that reality had been the only way to retain positive memories of their childhoods.
So every time we are reminded that we are white, we feel that shame afresh. It makes us angry, and we want to blame whatever and whoever reminds us of who we are and makes us suffer this shame. When white people get upset about Black History Month, it’s not because white history is excluded from the picture. They are upset because it reminds us of the reality of our history.
But maybe, I thought, the repression was a conscious decision, a strategy for oppression. Whiteness had been a source of power for white people for hundreds of years before the Civil Rights Act made discrimination illegal. In order to undo those centuries of privilege, we would have to discuss race and the imbalances it created. So we white people quit “seeing race” and refused to talk about whiteness—and kept the spoils of our plunder.
If you spend four hundred years creating a world that favors a particular concept—whiteness—pretending that concept no longer exists is a good way to keep from examining its residual benefits.
In the end, I did not argue that I was not racist. I documented what had happened as accurately as I could and compiled a number of documents to show that I had thought about the role of race in education in the hopes that it would show I do not believe that a Black person is less qualified than a white one to study Latin or any other subject.
But I still had to grapple with the difference between what I’d intended my words to mean and what they may have actually meant. The reality lay somewhere between the student and me, my experiences causing me to think of the words one way and hers causing her to hear them in another.
After I submitted the materials for my defense, I just had to wait. Meanwhile the student remained in the class. I was aware of my whiteness at every moment, aware that, with the complaint filed, anything I said or did subsequently could be used against me in that case or even seem like retaliation.
I couldn’t tell how much the white students knew about this whole business. I didn’t know if the Black student had told anyone about it. If they did know, I didn’t want to know what they thought, and so I tried to just focus on the work and keep an even head, making sure my sense of shame didn’t manifest in any negative way against any of the students.
The student started coming to office hours more often to retake quizzes and ask clarifying questions. She said she was using YouTube videos to catch up. I told her I was happy to help as much as I could. But though she asked a question when she had to, she had no desire to work intensively with me.
Still, by the end of the semester, she had gotten her grade up to passing. Because of her university’s graduation date, I agreed to grade her final exam first. When she passed the exam and the class, I was flooded with relief because I had told myself I wasn’t going to pass her if her grade was not legitimately passing, because I thought that would be racist. Such a belief had been the basis of my entire identity as a teacher at the high school, and I still held on to that as an adjunct at the university. But for me to make such a decision would have put us both in a terrible position and escalated the whole problem.
Shortly after graduation, I received an official letter noting that the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights was closing the complaint. Reading the letter, I felt as if a flu had lifted, as if for the last several months my limbs had been suffused by a dull awful ache that was suddenly gone. That weight was a consciousness of whiteness. When the letter allowed me to feel vindicated, I didn’t have to feel my whiteness anymore. I could be unconscious again.
I would learn that I couldn’t ever be entirely unconscious again. I had seen enough of my whiteness, detected the ways it intersected with a larger history and distorted my own actions, casting them into a context I didn’t understand, that I knew enough now to at least be wary of it.
“Let’s go out and celebrate,” I said to Nicole. We would tell no one what we were celebrating.
* * *
Later we were walking up Chase Street and we noticed a bar called Singers and decided to stop in for a drink.
“That’s Lafayette Gilchrist,” Nicole said after we sat down, pointing to a spiffy-looking Black man about my age with a porkpie hat at the next table, watching the drummer on the stage. Gilchrist was one of the best-known jazz musicians in town, and after a few minutes, we introduced ourselves to him.
By the end of the night, we made plans for him to come over to our place the following Sunday so I could start interviewing him for a profile I was going to pitch to a magazine.
We put a pot of red beans and rice on the stove that Sunday as we got ready for Lafayette to come over. I stirred the pot and turned to grab a beer. I noticed the magnets on our refrigerator for the first time since we’d moved from Greenbelt. Someone had given us a set that depicted Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton dressed as pimps. I’d never really thought much about the magnets. Now I was wondering if they were racist. I decided to take them off the fridge and figured I should scan the house for anything else that a Black man might deem racist.
Immediately I noticed the photograph of me and Ben “Cooter” Jones standing in front of the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard in a red frame on the wire bookshelf in the kitchen. I walked up and looked at it closely. The Confederate flag was clear.
I dug through a drawer with some photos and found one of me and Nicole and slid it into the frame covering the photo of me, Cooter, and the General Lee. It seemed obvious that an image of two white men and a rebel flag on a muscle car would appear racist to a Black man. And I’d never even considered that before.
I had been defending myself against charges of racism and had grown so angry at the student’s father for assuming things about me because of my home state, and I hadn’t even recognized that there was really no way to interpret the rebel flag that was not racist.
Because of my upbringing, because of where I was from, I not only had the image on the shelf, I had kept it there because a part of me had loved it. It represented my childhood in a way that actually hit me, emotionally. In order to deflect the reality of that emotion, I, and many others of my generation, had developed an ironic read of the “colorful” parts of white culture. I had never thought of racialized irony, but that’s what the whole hipster thing felt like at that moment. Only a white person could look at a picture of the Confederate flag with this specific kind of irony.
But it was the emotion under the irony that was the dangerous thing. Irony fades like fashion. But a visceral feeling born in childhood is hard to shake. It can inform our choices in ways we aren’t aware of, in the same way that the history of classics shaped the way my words to the Black student were received. Whiteness is the intersection of the hapless individual honky with the power relations embedded in our country’s racist institutions.
Whiteness is institutionalized skulduggery performed by actors largely unaware of our roles. We don’t even know we’re wearing masks. But we are, I realized then for the first time, still responsible for the crimes committed beneath their cover.