My slow journey toward understanding how my whiteness worked underwent a radical change in pace and focus on June 17, 2015, as Nicole and I were packing our bags for a flight to South Carolina the following morning.
We’d been going to stay with her family at a house near Myrtle Beach for the past decade, and my parents, who were close with her family now, had started coming to spend a few days as well. But over the last several years, when I was busy at the paper, I’d come late, left early, or worked while we were there. This would be my first real vacation in years. And I needed it.
It was only a month after the Baltimore Uprising had tamped itself down into the long wait for the trials of the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, and I was exhausted from the intensity of the coverage.
We wore little but bathing suits at the beach, so the bulk of our thoughts about packing revolved around which books to bring. My mind was locked in a debate between Don Quixote and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when I heard a report on the NPR station playing in the background that there had been a mass shooting at Charleston’s most historic Black church, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
I forgot about my books and logged on to Twitter. Details were scarce. When police released an image of the shooter entering the church, I was chilled. The guy in the picture could have been a slightly less well-adapted version of my younger self. It was as if part of the little bowl-cut boy I’d been, the boy who was raised on stories of the Civil War and rebel pride, had broken off from me and grown up raging about our repressed history. Dylann Roof, as police identified the shooter, seemed to me to be a monster made up of everything that I had repressed about what it means to be white.
This initial impression was heightened as more information dripped out. Roof had grown up in Lexington, South Carolina, only ten miles from the house we’d left when Dad lost his job. When reporters discovered Roof’s website, the Last Rhodesian, there were pictures of him at historic sites connected with slavery in South Carolina, waving the same kind of souvenir rebel flags I’d carried as a kid. All of the history that had been whitewashed—the country’s hundreds of years of enslavement, a terrorist campaign to overthrow Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow apartheid regime that had followed—was not only acknowledged but celebrated by Roof. To him, the plantation concentration camps we had dehistoricized and turned into tourist sites and wedding venues were sacred representations of the racist vision South Carolina was founded on. Roof had harvested the history we’d discarded and made its inherent horror apparent.
In that first flush of information, I felt personally responsible for Roof’s actions in a way I had never felt responsible for the actions of a stranger before. A little later, I read his manifesto with horror.
“I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country,” he wrote. “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
I thought of Grandmother Woods telling me about the large Black majority in the Lowcountry and the fear it had engendered in the white minority. I thought of my slaveholding ancestors in Charleston and my skinhead friend in high school.
How had this kid who’d grown up ten miles from me arrived at this place? I wondered, even as the outlines of his trajectory became clear. In the manifesto, he wrote that he had not been raised in a racist home environment, but that the internet had radicalized him, that the Trayvon Martin case “prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”
One wrong Google search is all it takes, when the soil for hate has been fertilized by a lifetime of propaganda for a bowdlerized whiteness. When I was young, I’d had the impression that it wasn’t easy for my friend Glenn to get his racist literature from David Duke. But in 2012, when Roof typed in “black on White crime,” he’d come to the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that attempted to legitimize racism in a way very similar to Duke’s NAAWP. It was part of a self-validating circle of hateful sites. Discovering it, by Roof’s own account, was the defining event in his trajectory toward mass murder.
Roof was the return of everything we “good” white people had repressed, everything we felt we could just wish away. By pretending to be color blind, by hoping to be postracial, we had ceded the floor to the white supremacists anytime a troubled kid did a Google search about whiteness.
I stayed up all night that first night writing an essay in which I addressed my whiteness and its history for the first time in any real way. I acknowledged, for the first time, that my ancestors were the kinds of people who’d put heads on pikes. And I knew that my failure to previously acknowledge the hundreds of years of these atrocities had helped produce people like Dylann Roof.
The Washington Post was interested in my essay. The editor, who was also white, asked me to be specific about a time when I’d allowed a racist remark to slide, when I had not stepped up, when I had been racist. A lifetime’s worth of whiteness flooded my mind, but I fumbled around for something and settled on a weak admission of professional obligation, admitting to ignoring subtly racist remarks made by people I wanted to get information out of as a reporter.
I finished the edits in the morning, and we went to the airport and caught our flight to Myrtle Beach, where Nicole’s family would pick us up.
The story was out when we landed.
I read it rapidly, anxiously, standing there in the airport with tourists in Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps streaming past me as if in a dream. When I opened my email, I saw dozens of new messages, most of them attacking my story. The first one I clicked on even questioned my whiteness, noting that I looked Jewish in my photo on the website.
The comments section was even worse. Women I worked with got vile comments all the time, but this was the first time that I, a white man, had been told to go kill myself—because I was questioning whiteness.
Nicole’s mom picked us up. We would go to the beach house the next morning, and Mom and Dad would join us in a few days. Dad sent an email to family members linking to my story and telling them to “judge for yourselves.” It was obvious he hated my conclusions but couldn’t help but feel pride at my accomplishment.
I wanted to go to Charleston. I felt a need to go, partly for professional reasons—I wanted to compare the way Charleston responded to the murder of Clementa C. Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson—all Black people—with the way Baltimore had responded to the murder of Freddie Gray. But there was something a lot deeper and more basic than that. I hurt and needed to be there to grieve.
Nicole’s mom let me borrow her car, and I drove two hours to Charleston for the mayor’s vigil for the slain churchgoers. As the tires spun over the Ashley River on the new sparkling white suspension bridge, the sweeping cords rising to white points in the sky, they looked to me like the outline of an invisible Klan hood, and I wondered if that is what my whiteness is: a Klan hood that the wearer can’t see.
I knew that Roof had also driven this same route into town with weapons in his car, whiteness in his mind, and murder in his heart. I wasn’t sure why I needed to retrace this course, to track the steps of this killer, to go to Charleston tonight, but I knew I needed to be there.
The North American slave regime was centered in Charleston. Edisto, where my grandmother’s family lived, was one of the richest plantation areas supporting the nearby city’s economy of crops and human bondage, and as I tooled through the traffic clogging the sorrowful streets downtown, near the church, I realized that this was where my ancestors would have come to buy and sell the humans they enslaved. Every street name, every statue represented a slaver.
Passing through this now-gruesome landscape, I contemplated the logic of the massacre. Roof had said he had gone to Charleston because it had once had the largest Black majority in the country. But it had had the largest Black majority because people like my family imported and then “bred,” often through rape, a vast Black population over whom they felt entitled to exert absolute control in order to extract absolute wealth.
Roof also chose to massacre members of Emanuel AME church, known as Mother Emanuel in Charleston’s Black community, because it was founded by Denmark Vesey, who had led a revolt against the slavocracy in 1822. Someone snitched and the revolt was crushed, Vesey was executed, the church burned, all much to the relief, I am sure, of my slaveholding ancestors who profited off Black pain. They rightly assumed that Vesey had wanted to overthrow their totalitarian system. And though Vesey’s revolt was brought down by a snitch, the totalitarian system was ultimately overthrown around forty years later—and white people like Roof, like my ancestors, have been clawing and fighting and scheming and lying and killing to bring it back ever since.
I parked in a downtown parking garage and walked out of its neon lights onto the crowded street. I was struck by the way the city’s mood seemed split. There was a sorrowful air to individual people and groups passing by on their way to the arena at College of Charleston, where the memorial would be held, and yet the crowd as a whole had a collective carnivalesque feel due to the influx of news crews and television cameras, everything bubbling with energy.
In front of the gleaming white facade of Mother Emanuel, where the news crews all had their trucks set up, I saw DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist who had become famous for his tweets from Ferguson, Missouri, during the uprising there. We’d met in Baltimore, out in front of the barricade at the Western District police station, and recognized each other on the street here in Charleston.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” he asked, surprised to see me.
“My family is from here,” I said. “I feel an obligation.”
I asked him some questions for a story I planned to write, but as he talked, I noticed a white guy behind me butting into the conversation. The more I ignored him, the louder the white guy got.
“There are things like the Confederate flag that serve as symbols of hate that are deeply embedded into the fabric of this place,” DeRay said.
“You’re a liar,” the white guy yelled. He had white hair covered in part by the American flag bandanna wrapped around his head. He had a sign that read “MSLSD” and “Communist News Network.”
“The flag wasn’t a problem until people made a big deal out of it,” he said. “Just because other groups misuse it doesn’t mean it’s hateful at all.”
The white man seemed desperate to engage DeRay, but just as he finished this spiel, he noticed Chris Hayes beginning to broadcast for MSNBC behind us and turned to wave his flags and heckle, hoping to get on camera.
As I drove back up the coast that night, the white guy’s words stuck with me. I realized that for every white person like me who felt that Roof’s massacre indicted their whiteness, there were dozens who believed it justified theirs. I could imagine all the casually racist white people now saying, “See, I’m not racist. I don’t go shooting up Black churches or anything.”
As the headlights cut through the dark night on Highway 17, I started to think about what Dad had told me about how his grandfather Dr. I. M. Woods had murdered a Black man because he couldn’t accept that the Wo-ah was over and was trying to “redeem” the state. Rather than seeing the story as some picaresque adventure, as I had twenty years earlier, I now saw it as a precursor to Roof’s attack. In Roof, I could see my great-grandfather’s face for the first time.
When Dad got to the beach three days later, I asked him about it as we sat on the screened porch.
“You told me about your grandfather killing a Black man,” I said. “Do you remember anything else about it?”
The leaves of a palm tree scraped against the screen in the wind. The chains holding up the hammock that Nicole lay in, reading, creaked. The surf crashed against the sand below us as a cloud passed over the sun.
“Daddy didn’t tell me much,” Dad said, his beard a stark white in the bright light, his cheeks flushed a rosy pink. “He just told me that granddaddy had killed a Black man after the Wo-ah and had to escape the state and cool down for a couple years in Texas and that’s why he named Daddy Hernando.”
“I thought about that when I was driving back from Charleston,” I said.
Dad looked off at the horizon.
“That what he did was not that much different than what Dylann Roof did,” I said.
“What about all of the white people who are killed by Blacks every year?”
“What?”
“It doesn’t mean that every Black person in the country is responsible when a Black man kills white people,” he said. “So why should we be responsible for what Roof did? It was terrible, horrible, reprehensible—just like a crime if a Black person kills a white family or something.”
I was flooded with frustration and anger. I took a gulp from my beer.
“Because he said he did it in our name. Because my great-grandfather did something similar and then became a hero for doing it and ended up in the legislature, and the fact that whatever it was that he actually did was erased and covered over might have something to do with what Roof did,” I said. “Because I was taught, like him probably, that the South was noble, and the Yankees were evil and they were the ones that turned the enslaved people against their kindly masters—those are the kinds of stories that y’all passed on to me.”
“What about someone like Al Sharpton?” he said. “You were on his show and he openly hates white people. How is that different?”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “We’re talking about a massacre that happened a couple hours from here, in the place where your family comes from, the place you taught me to be proud to be from, and the kid who did it grew up in basically the same place I did, and he went in and killed nine people, and you’re asking me about Al Sharpton and how that is different.”
“Well, isn’t hate hate?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s not. White supremacy is hate with an army and a navy. The police who killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore were part of the same system as Dylann Roof here. They are all coming out of the slave system that we’ve never recognized or acknowledged.”
“That’s crazy,” he said with a theatrical laugh that infuriated me.
“He went to slave sites and took pictures of himself there,” I said. “Literally.”
“And he is terrible,” Dad said.
Nicole got up and walked away, leaving the hammock swinging in her wake. I could tell she was annoyed. She wasn’t afraid to argue, but she didn’t want to waste her vacation with this.
“But he was connecting it to the larger culture,” I said. “I mean, you went to segregated schools and—”
“But we were the minority on our street. The only white family, and we were about as poor as anyone else,” he said.
“But legally, there was a great chasm between you and your Black neighbors. Every door said ‘White’ or ‘Colored’ above it, and the Brown case, which started in your town, ruled that separate was not equal because of the Black schools’ deplorable conditions. It’s still called the freakin’ corridor of shame,” I said, my voice rising far above the surf, like a big wave ready to crash.
“But white kids also go to those schools now,” he said.
“The few who don’t go to segregation academies,” I said.
“The Obama girls go to private schools,” he said. “Is that a segregation academy? Or what about Chelsea Clinton?”
“Goddamn it, Dad,” I said, shaking. “Why do you always do this? We can’t talk about anything without you just saying what about something else.”
“Well, how is it different?” he asked.
“I’m trying to talk about Dylann Roof,” I said.
“Well, he went to the same public school as the Blacks in Lexington, didn’t he?” he asked.
“Oh my God.”
“And you did too.”
“That’s my point,” I said. “Everything I was taught in South Carolina is on a continuum with Roof.”
“That is crazy,” he said. “Most white people aren’t going into places and shooting them up. A lot more Black people—”
“Just stop,” I said, getting up from the rocking chair so that it tilted back, almost tipping, and then rocked forward with an aggressive lurch on its curved timber legs.
“I need another beer,” I said.
Even in the face of death, it was the same thing he always did, a constant dance of deflection that pushed meaning away for the sake of argument itself. As I walked from the humid porch into the air-conditioned kitchen where the beer cooler was, I realized this was the logic of whiteness. Always deflect and defer and change the subject when your innocence is questioned, your power noted. Whiteness is like a chameleon, camouflaging its own power in order to maintain its simultaneous sense of innocence.
“Good God,” Nicole said, walking out of the bathroom. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I know,” I said.
“Want to go to the beach?” she asked.
When we walked outside, my chair, empty now beside Dad, was still rocking.
“We’re going to the beach,” I said.
“I think I’ll make a sandwich,” he said. “And then maybe take a nap.”
I scooped up my copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, whose cover had been wilted soft by the salt air.
I felt a little better as we walked down the hot, weathered gray boards extending out over the dunes, speckled with the green and gold of sea oats shimmering in the wind.
The tide was coming in, and the waves demolished the day’s sandcastles spread out across the strand.
I settled down into my canvas chair in the umbrella’s shade a few yards from the waterline and just sat watching the white foam lap a little closer to my feet each time. The other white people splayed out on towels or splashing in the surf now all seemed suspect. There were no Black people on this section of the beach, and I thought of Atlantic Beach only a few miles north, and I figured it must be by design.
“You’ve already worked a lot,” Nicole said. “You really need to try to relax. You don’t have to argue with your dad while you’re on vacation.”
“If he’s saying racist shit, I do,” I said.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that,” she said. “But you were the one that brought it up in the first place.”
“I know,” I said. “It is obsessing me. I feel like this entire state is haunted with the totalitarian hatred that has defined it for so long, and it almost physically hurts to be here right now.”
“I know,” she said, and took my hand across the small chasm of sand between our chairs. After a minute she bent over and reached into the cooler at the base of the umbrella and handed me a beer.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m going to read a minute and then I’m going to go try to catch some waves.”
I had been wanting to reread Electric Kool-Aid, Tom Wolfe’s book about the Merry Pranksters that I had loved in high school, in order to study the literary technique, but I had decided on it, over the Quixote, after news of the shooting broke, partly because I recalled thinking of it as an antidote to Glenn’s white supremacism back in high school. When he told me about David Duke, I’d thought, since he also liked acid, I could turn him on to the Pranksters and he might see a different light.
I opened it up to the page I had folded to mark my place, a good ways into the book already, where the Merry Pranksters are holding the Acid Tests—the multimedia acid-fueled happenings where the Grateful Dead had first played. I read on as Wolfe detailed a conversation between Jerry Garcia, singer and guitar player for the Dead, and the Black guy who let them use the hall where the Acid Tests occurred, and I stopped cold when I saw that Wolfe called the landlord “Big Nig.”
What the fuck? How had I missed that?
“Big Nig stares at Garcia with the deepest look of hip soul authority you can imagine,” Wolfe writes with acid disdain for the Black man, going on to explain how the landlord tells the stoned Garcia that he hadn’t charged them to use the venue but that people needed to kick in so he can pay the rent.
“A freaking odd thought, that one. A big funky spade looking pathetic and square. For twenty years in hip life, Negroes never even looked square. They were the archetypical soul figures. But what is Soul, or Funky, or Cool, or Baby—on the new world of ecstasy, the All-one,” Wolfe wrote.
“What’s wrong?” Nicole asked from her low-slung beach chair beside me, my face reflected in the lenses of her sunglasses. “You are scowling.”
“I can’t believe I never even noticed how racist this is,” I said. “It’s like the whole hippie movement was an attempt to create a specifically white counterculture.”
I’d been noticing hints of this throughout my rereading of the book, but with this passage it became glaringly obvious. During the previous generations, the way a white person became “hip” was to mimic Black dress and behavior; from the Beats to Elvis, hipness was a matter of appropriating Black culture as what Norman Mailer called “the White Negro.”
But here the Merry Pranksters, as protohippies, rejected that appropriation and attempted to create a new form of hipness with a broader appropriation of American Indian and Asian spiritual traditions and fashion. And because they felt they no longer needed the approval of “cool” Black people, they blithely dismissed the Civil Rights struggle as somehow square.
“The thing that gets me is how I just didn’t even see it,” I said. “I loved this book, and I thought all of these people in it were supercool. And I didn’t even notice the blatant racism. And no one else seems to have noticed it either. When people talk about Wolfe, they don’t mention it. It makes me wonder what I am missing now.”
“My dad and I used to talk about that,” she said. “He used to say, ‘Most white people who lived in the slave system didn’t realize it was wrong. What is that issue that the future will see as so obviously bad but that we are missing?’”
I looked at her beside me in her red one-piece bathing suit, gray tortoiseshell sunglasses, and floppy straw hat, and I thought how grateful I was to be with her, to have someone to try to work out all of these complexities with. Our awarenesses were growing together as we each worked in our own fields toward greater understanding of the world, even when it meant we indicted ourselves. Our younger selves seemed almost silly now in our search for authenticity and roots in our southern whiteness, but that only meant that we had grown, and that made me love her more.
“But I think they did know it was monstrous,” I said. “I think they had to know. But they distorted their view of the world so badly in order to justify it that we still haven’t recovered from their contortions. Once you see it, white supremacy is obviously everywhere.”
We sat there a minute in silence, sipping on our drinks.
“Put on some more sunscreen,” Nicole said, handing me the plastic tube.
Everyone over forty in our families had had some kind of cancerous growth cut or burned or frozen from their skin, many of them with great regularity, and she had some precancerous growths already and was careful in the sun.
“Our white skin will even kill us,” she added as a joke.
“Skin cancer is like a cost of very pale people coming to colonize these very hot climates,” I said.
I stared at the swelling waves. They were choppy, and I needed to feel as if I were beating something or being beaten by it. I remembered when I was little, playing in the surf with Dad and punching the waves.
“I’m going to go fight the waves,” I said, getting up from my chair. The lowering sun stretched my shadow across the sand as I stood.
“I’ll be here,” Nicole said, and picked up the book she was reading about the soul singer Tammy Tyrell.
I jogged off toward the rumbling ocean, looking at its shores for the first time as those to which my ancestors had shipped thousands of Africans. I stepped in the cold water as the foam remnants of a wave rushed over my feet. As I walked farther out, the surf rushed around me and then started breaking, swells coming at me with their white crests. I’ve loved the ocean my entire life, especially in Edisto where my grandmother lived and which I saw as a foundation for who I am, but this time I saw the reality of that foundation and I swung at it. I punched it with all my might, fully aware that I really wanted to punch myself, my dad, my grandfather, and that which is tied and buried within the roots of who I am.
When we returned to the house an hour later, Dad had gone to the store, and I was relieved not to feel the responsibility to fight with him as I cracked open another cold drink.
I learned that week that sometimes whiteness is murder. The rest of the time, it is a cover-up, which is much quieter but still violent in its silencing of everything but bluster, its silencing of all the moral self that makes the murder possible and even inevitable.