4
It is important to remind you, white reader, that Dear White America was originally penned as a gift and an act of gift-giving, one informed by a profound act of vulnerability on my part. It was a gift for you that was filled with danger, though not physical violence or brutality;1 it was/is the kind of danger that implies possibility, of being otherwise/different and not-quite-yet; it was/is a form of danger that signifies vulnerability—that is, an openness on your part to be wounded. And it is that wounding, that impairing of the structure of whiteness, that disorientation, that sense of loss of identity, and that sense of loss of pretense, that was both paradoxically the condition for hearing my voice in Dear White America and the desired harvest to be reaped after reading Dear White America.
This book, which still functions as a letter to you, is an expanded version of that gift and that act of giving. As in the original letter, I still seek to talk honestly about race. This book remains a gift that exceeds any pure self-interest on my part and any obligation on your part, as a white person, to accept it. And like the original version, this version continues to ask for love in return for a gift, the kind of love that derides Hollywood sentimentalism, market-driven desires that wax and wane and that keep “people in a constant state of lack,”2 and forms of party-line loyalty that we are witnessing within our contemporary moment under Trump, that are based on cowardly sycophancy or brown-nosing. I have no use for any of that. As one reader noted in the comments section at The Stone, the New York Times, “The irony of the hostility in some of the comments denies the only request the author asked of the [white] reader: to read with love.”
The letter is written as an entreaty with absolutely no guarantee of reciprocity. It is a solicitation that presupposes the reality of your freedom, your decision, if you so choose, to refuse the gift. I wanted, and continue to want, more than an obligation, something more than that which “binds you by oath.” I was initially careful, and continue to be, because I didn’t want you to act from a place of white noblesse oblige. I have no need of Rudyard Kipling’s white imperialist rhetoric. I am not the white man’s burden. If you are white, Black people didn’t need you; we never asked to be treated as a burden, your burden “to save” us and “to civilize” us. I desired, and continue to desire, something greater from you; I desired to see the real you, the one for whom it is possible to demonstrate greater humanity and humility, a greater sense of integrity, a greater sense of genuine relationality. And despite the fact that the backlash that I received after the publication of the letter involved being called a “nigger” by white readers more times than I can recall, my gift, with no obligatory strings attached, asked more from you—a daring you, one courageous enough to risk tarrying with a disagreeable mirror that refused to walk quietly around the issue of whiteness: white supremacy and power, white privilege, and white normativity.
Yet many of you smashed the mirror of which I’ve previously spoken, refusing to hear me, or, as I would say, refusing to see important aspects of your whiteness. And while I realize that many mirrors do lie, some mirrors are designed to trouble you, to show you what you would rather not see. What if the real you, white reader, had nothing more to give than the speed with which you spewed out a name that I most certainly detest—“nigger”? Well, in that case, and in agreement with James Baldwin, “I Give You Your Problem Back. You’re the ‘Nigger,’ Baby; It Isn’t Me.”3 Don’t run. Stay in the space of this transposition, this reversal. Tarry with it. As Robert Jensen writes, and I assure you that he is as white as you are, “I am a nigger, and so is every white person in the United States. . . . I am not a nigger, but as a white person am the nigger. As long as the United States remains a white-supremacist society, we can’t escape this.”4 Indeed, as long as the United States remains a white governing space within which white privilege, white power, and hegemony continue to exist, and where you, as white, continue to reap the rewards, then you must ask yourself: Who and what are you and to which community do you belong? You must interrogate the ways in which you continue to contribute to my treatment as a nigger, and begin to question whether you are prepared to live a life where I am not that upon which you feed, knowingly or not. To be “eaten” by you, to be consumed by your need to be white, speaks to my real pain and suffering, and the suffering of my Black children, and Black people and people of color. It is important that you open yourself to what your whiteness extracts (that you extract) and to tarry with my pain and suffering and the pain and suffering of Black people and people of color such that it makes you sick, forcing a different form of relationality, one that overflows with giving.
The real question is: Are you prepared to be fully human? You should know that Jensen isn’t attempting to draw attention to himself, and he certainly isn’t trying to reveal his white antiracist bona fides. And he is certainly no white “hero.” Jensen knows where to look and how to look, even as he knows that he can’t, through a sheer act of will, stand outside the system of white supremacy. He writes, “For people with unearned privilege in an unjust system,” and that means you, white reader, “this is the worst, to look in the mirror honestly, both to acknowledge the damage we have done to others and to see what we have done to ourselves.”5
Just as my letter presupposed the reality of your freedom, I, too, wanted to be free to give, which is why I refused to withhold my voice, and why I openly engaged the reality of whiteness. Dear White America was never simply about me; it couldn’t be. White people, you must bear in mind that an irresponsible and narcissistic expression of love belies the necessary care and concern requisite for the beloved. In such a case, there is no genuine act of gift-giving; in fact, your alterity, your otherness as the condition of being the recipient, is held prisoner. As Toni Morrison would say, within the context of such a reckless and vain expression of love, “There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”6 If writing Dear White America, as a letter for and to white people, can be described as an act of love, then it was never meant to be withheld, but given away—given to you, white reader.
The letter was never meant to cut you off from its invitational gesture. In the letter, I warned that some gifts can be heavy to bear. In my case, unlike Odysseus, the heroic figure in Greek mythology, who refused to risk himself, to open himself to the call of the Sirens, I, figuratively, untied the ropes that would keep me attached to the mast of the proverbial ship. So, I took a step in the water. I risked. And I certainly refused to plug my ears with wax. In fact, I refused to do so even as many of you gave me every reason to do so. Think about it from my perspective—how many times should I be expected to listen to white people call me a nigger, to take that abuse from those who look like you? To be honest, once is more than enough. As a Black person, I am no superhuman moral agent, and I’m certainly not anyone’s doormat. Like you, I am broken, all too human. There is wholeness, though, that I continue to seek, an ethical and existential project that I will take to the grave.
As the giver, I, too, bore the weight of giving the gift. Think about it. I am not proud to publicly announce my sexism, though there is the seduction of taking pride in the “confession”: “Yeah, I’m one of the ‘good males,’ one of the ‘feminist conscious’ ones.” That, however, is a trap and I didn’t fall for it. Keep in mind, as stated earlier, that I’m a male antisexist sexist (as you are a white antiracist racist). Even as I fight against sexism, patriarchal structural arrangements in our society privilege me, and patriarchal assumptions continue to impact how I see women, imagine women, arrive at certain problematic gender expectations, and conceptualize and manifest my own male bravado, my sense of male machismo. These are not inconsequential practices, but expressions of male power and violence toward women. Robert Jensen writes, “The way men talk about women and sex in all-male spaces is often brutal and cruel.”7 He continues, “The pornography produced in the United States often reflects that brutality and cruelty. Men have to come to terms with how our sexual imaginations are formed, how we are socialized to accept such inhumanity and find pleasure in it.”8
Recall how Donald Trump clearly bragged about his treatment of women. He was recorded as saying, “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”9 There we have it. There is no need to wait. This gives Nike’s slogan, “Just Do It,” an entirely different meaning from the one that it intends. Also recall that there were surrogates who said that Trump only entertained doing such things and so didn’t commit sexual assault. “I don’t even wait” is not something imaginatively entertained. Recall that Trump had the audacity to refer to such denigrating speech as “locker-room banter.”10 Not only is it the case that Trump admits that he did such things, but he attempts to diminish his misogyny by relegating what he said to the private sphere and dismisses it in a cavalier way as a noncontroversial practice among men. He also allowed Howard Stern to refer to Ivanka Trump, his own daughter, as “a piece of ass.”11 Imagine being caught using the term “nigger” to degrade Black people and then obfuscating the harm done by arguing that it was said in the privacy of his own home and dismissing it as a noncontroversial practice among white people.
Sexism and racism are no less problematic because they are performed in private. Imagine a Black male presidential hopeful having been caught talking about how he just kisses women or grabs their genitalia whenever he feels like it. And imagine if Obama had said disparaging things about white people and then tried to excuse it as said in private and therefore dismissing it as noncontroversial. He would have a snowball’s chance in hell of continuing his campaign. Also, having been caught, especially as this would have implied that he was also referring to white women, imagine the blowback from white men and white women. Also, notice how Trump is the only one to blame for his comments, not all white men. That is white privilege. Had it been discovered that Obama said such egregious things, all Black men would have been demonized as bestial and hypersexual brutes. And I’m pretty sure that Obama would not have received 53 percent of the votes of all white women.12
Let’s face it: The male pornographic imaginary pervades how I, and other men, have been inculcated to distort the erotic lives of women. We “know” how women want to be treated, what they desire, and how they ought to perform, which is not exclusive to the bedroom. This “knowing,” of course, is just another way to neutralize women, to erase what the erotic means for them. For men (across “racial categories”) who are reading this letter, just because I am critical of the ways in which women are objectified and dehumanized sexually does not mean that I am encouraging sexual prudery, which itself belies the embodied beauty, richness, and intensity of the erotic that I embrace. Rather, I’m arguing that it is about facing and contesting our individual and collective violence against women. It is also, as I made clear in the initial letter, about us being especially attentive to the ways in which male violence plays itself out within the context of intersectional dynamics; that is, the ways in which women, differentially located socially in terms of race, class, disability, sexuality, and gender expression, experience male violence. In the context of male hegemony, our “knowing” how women “want to be treated” is deeply problematic and narcissistic. This form of “knowing” both informs and is informed by a male pornographic imaginary. As Audre Lorde writes, “Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”13 And contrary to the ways in which we as men have constructed women in one-dimensional ways, Drucilla Cornell speaks of women seeking a “new idiom in which we [women] can speak of feminine desire.”14 She suggests that women “not make the masculine our world by insisting that we ‘are’ only what men have made us to be.”15
The disclosure in the letter regarding my sexism was a risk, an unmasking, as is my continued disclosure here. The powerful and instructive words of James Baldwin deserve repeating: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”16 I refuse to remain silent about my complicity in the oppression of women. So, part of the objective in disclosing my sexism is to model unmasking for you, white reader; it is to demonstrate what it means to be vulnerable, which is linked to the concept of being wounded. I made myself vulnerable to you with a desire that you would reciprocate. To model in this way, though, compounds the weight to be borne, especially given the assumption that Black men and “hypersexuality” are deemed synonymous. Historically, lynching was the price paid as a result of that assumption, especially as it was believed that white women were the “preferred targets” of Black male alleged hypersexuality. Disclosing my sexism can easily be read through the lens of the myth of Black male sexual potency and the tragic consequences thereof, which can open up historical forms of painful memory associated with specific instances of Black male wounding.
Truth be told, Dear White America was always about wounding, a kind of wounding that is necessary for growth. Coming to understand the extent of my complexity with sexism is a kind of injury to the self, a wounding that I must endure; it is a type of fissure that is painful, especially as it troubles the “innocent self” that my mask portrays. There is no innocence here, whether for me as sexist or for you as racist. Well, that was at least my aim; to have us both tarry with our complicity and to admit and embrace our accountability. Of course, as the gift-giver, the Black embodied gift-giver, there was, and continues to be, a different kind of wounding, the undesirable and despicable sort that is designed to violate, to harm. I wrote the letter. It is what I had to do, but I neither expected the sheer volume of white responses nor the depravity of so many of them. In fact, I was shocked and appalled. I knew that there would be some backlash, but not white folk saying that I needed my “fucking head knocked off my shoulders,” that I should be “beheaded ISIS style,” that I am “100 percent pure nigger,” that I am “a piece of shit,” or that I would be told to “fuck off boy,” or threatened with a “meat hook.” Imagine what it’s like to have fellow human beings say those things to you. Imagine the pain. Imagine the realization that there are actual human beings out there who believe this and who may actually be prepared to act on what they believe.
Of course, some might regard my shock as evidence of my “naiveté” regarding the wicked and inhuman treatment of Black people by white people under America’s structure of white supremacy. I assure the reader that I am not naïve, but I continue to be hopeful, even as my hope feels as if it is at times complicit with white supremacy. It feels that way because as long as I remain hopeful, focusing on the future, white people can feel safe in the “knowledge” that my rage, the intensity of my affect, can be appeased by piecemeal gestures of political reform in the present. That is, I can be unmoored from the gravity of the present reality of my lived experience under white oppression, power, and privilege. Hope, after all, looks toward the future.
Like James Baldwin, I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. Yet being alive feels like borrowed time. Recall the white police officer who almost blew me away. However, I am not an optimist either, because white America is far too bleak in its ethical treatment of Black people and people of color. As such, as I continue to hope, I don’t want hope to become a crutch. Perhaps what we need is a kind of post-hope, a painful recognition that as Black people we are, as you recall that Theo Shaw once said to me,17 on death row. To be Black, in this view, is to have always already been sentenced to death in virtue of being Black within a white supremacist world, where I am just waiting to die. Post-hope is not being a pessimist or giving up in despair, rather it is a stance that we take that is more realistic. Post-hope allows one to face reality without being conned by unrealistic hope of a future that may forever be foreclosed. By the way, this doesn’t speak to a metaphysical fatalism, but to the powerful recalcitrance of whiteness; its historical maintenance.
Given that this form of realism becomes ever more obvious to me, and shapes how I understand my existence and the existence of Black people within the context of white America, I ask you, white reader, to tarry within the space where I think daily about my existence and the existence of Black people within a world that privileges you. Being systemically racially marked for death is not a real possibility for you. Sure, it is an abstract possibility, but I’m talking about real-world possibilities with real-world consequences. Let’s face it, in white America, you are not systemically racially marked for death. There are no historically grounded systemic practices that have marked your whiteness as a target for death. The history of Black people under white supremacist America is very different. As a white person, I want you to lose sleep over that! Become outraged! We are approaching the third decade of the twenty-first century and all that I see, all that I feel, and all that I remember tells me that so many of you don’t give a damn about Black lives mattering. For now, paradoxically, I welcome the shock that I still feel when your white countrymen and women cast dispersions of racist hatred my way. In my shock, I am appalled by these racist white ways of being, but I also know that I am still open to being staggered, despite my realism, by the capacity for your demonstration of white vulnerability.
I learned an important lesson after publishing Dear White America. After I experienced so much unmitigated white hatred, I was in conversation with a prominent white public intellectual who shared with me that he had also been threatened after writing controversial articles that spoke to injustice. Through his act of sharing, I was able to appreciate our similar predicament. I felt less alienated, less alone. What became clear to me, though, is that my white colleague had not experienced racialized trauma. My colleague was threatened because of his exercise of courageous speech, but his whiteness remained unmarked. The objective here is not to judge who suffered more, me or my white colleague. Rather, it is important to recognize the specifically white racist hatred that I encountered; how my Black body was assaulted. My white colleague was threatened, but his whiteness was not under attack. But after the publication of Dear White America, my Blackness was assaulted. My Black body was negatively truncated and reduced to the level of the epidermis. These attacks were not only based upon what I said, but my body was the object of a white narrative that included white stereotypical assumptions, white perverse desires, white desired violence, and white hatred.
There were also other unanticipated lessons and forms of wounding. A trusted white colleague of mine said to me, after I began to receive such extreme white racist responses, that I was being disingenuous. She implied that I must have known before I wrote Dear White America that I would receive such responses. Surely, my white colleague heard me say that I had not expected that degree of white racist vitriol. To say that I underestimated the response is different from saying that I was being disingenuous. The latter accuses me of being deceitful. This added insult to injury. As if being bombarded with such extreme white hatred wasn’t enough, I had to hear my white colleague implying that I lied. It was as if she was saying that I somehow asked for what happened. This kind of denigrating reasoning is akin to situations in which women who have been raped have been treated as having brought this on themselves: that they should have known that this would happen given what they were wearing, how they were dressed. It is perhaps easy for some white people to interpret this incident with my white colleague as one of those “less racist” incidents. However, I don’t need you or my colleague to speak for me. I can speak for myself. I was the target of her white authoritarian denial of my epistemic integrity. As such, it is imperative that I get to define my reality, my frustration, my sense of injustice.
Dear White America challenged “white innocence.” In fact, in the letter, I acknowledged that it is painful to let go of your “white innocence,” to look in that disagreeable mirror that I held up to you. I know that it is difficult for you to see the ways in which you are, as discussed in chapter 3, embedded systemically within white supremacy and the ways in which your white racism is a site of opacity. As was also discussed in chapter 3, many of you said that I am the racist for making the claim that being white within a white supremacist society implicates you in the perpetuation of racist oppression against Black people and people of color. Given this, I discussed how this implicates you in terms of being racist, especially how you not only benefit from white racism, but that your ways of being are complicit in the continuation of white supremacy.
It may be that many of the white readers completely missed my reference to the white brothers and sisters who have made the leap, who have come to understand the relational oppressive dynamics of their white identities and what whiteness problematically means for white people in terms of their racism. If you missed it, I would recommend reading through the letter again. In the meantime, I will share the following examples from white scholars who have come to understand the meaning and dynamics of their white racism. John Warren writes, “I argue that I cannot escape whiteness, nor can I discount the ways I am reproducing whiteness.”18 He continues, “I agree that I cannot claim to be nonracist, to rest in the ideal of a positive racial identity.”19 Ruth Frankenberg writes, “As a white feminist, I knew that I had never set out to ‘be racist.’ I also knew that these desires and intentions had had little effect on outcomes.”20 That is, her white racism, whether intentional or not, still wounded women of color. Robert Jensen writes, “In a society in which white supremacy has structured every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to [white] neutrality.”21 He also argues, “It’s not to pretend we all have the same political or economic power or all are equally responsible for the racialized inequality in the United States. All I am saying is no white person gets to opt out.”22 In stream with Jensen regarding the ways in which white people are positioned within the structure of whiteness, Joel Olson writes that whiteness “does not make all whites absolute equals, but that was never the intent of white citizenship.”23 Rather, the structure of whiteness, as he continues, “just ensures that no white [person] ever needs find himself or herself at the absolute bottom of the social and political barrel, because that position is already taken.”24 Within the context of white racist America, I continue to inhabit that position, and there doesn’t appear to be any change of position anytime soon. Sure. I’ve got a PhD, but we know what that means. It means, from the perspective of whiteness, that I’m a nigger with a PhD.
I wonder what the white readers who claimed that I am the racist for what I wrote would say to their white brothers and sisters who understand and embrace their identities as racist and who are willing to take responsibility for their racism? Are they also “racist” (as I was labeled) because they understand how their whiteness, and yours, is integral to the maintenance of white hegemony—that is, how your whiteness functions as a site of racism? This would lead to a peculiar situation, one where white people who know that they are racists (antiracist racists), and who understand the larger institutional and historical implications of whiteness as a site of racism, are “doubly racist” because they point out the systemic and opaque dimensions of whiteness that impact and define you as racist. Then again, I imagine that there are some of you who might want to diminish what these white scholars are saying by claiming that they are “brainwashed white liberals,” “white leftists,” “social justice warriors,” or perhaps even “nigger lovers.” However, I ask that you resist that urge. I ask again that you act with love, remove the mask, don’t run to seek shelter, take that leap. Drucilla Cornell writes, “The very image of the subject who strives for closure and control, rather than accept the invitation of otherness, is Odysseus as he ties himself to the mast before daring to listen to the sirens.”25
Whiteness can be seen as a site of closure and control. When I shared the gift of seeing whiteness for what it is, I was met with denials and accusations. James Baldwin, writing to his nephew about the terrors of American white racism and how Black bodies are deemed “worthless” and are imprisoned within white institutionally condoned slums, says, “I know your [white] countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, ‘You exaggerate’ ”26 or they scream, “No! This is not true! How bitter you are!”27 Such accusations of exaggeration, of bitterness, of obfuscation (like when white people called me a racist) function as ways of seeking shelter, claiming “innocence,” and achieving closure.
I refer to these processes as ones of suturing.28 I have come to use the concept of suturing within the context of understanding the structure and being of whiteness. As I see it, suturing (from Latin sutura, meaning a “seam” or a “sewing together”) is the process whereby white people engage in forms of closure, forms of protection from various challenges to the ways in which whiteness is seen as the norm, its unremarkable everydayness, its value assumptions, and the many ways in which it’s guilty about producing distorted knowledge about itself. The process of white suturing involves an effort—though I’m sure that for white people it is not recognized as an effort or as a site of active maintenance—to be “invulnerable,” “untouched,” “patched,” “mended together,” “complete,” “whole,” “sealed,” and “closed off.” To be sutured also implies a state of being free from a certain kind of “infection,” which, as the reader will recall, speaks to whiteness as a site of “purity,” as that which is unsullied by “difference” and “otherness.” Moreover, to be sutured within the context of white identity is indicative of “the narrative authority”29 of the white self that seals itself off from “otherness.”
Dear White America, then, functioned to “contest the singularity of [your white insular] story.”30 Granted, there are many versions of the story. However, the majority of the stories converge to form a singularly agreed upon story about me, a Black man, having a problem, or, more accurately, about me being a problem. But this is a fable created by white people. Truth be told, it is whiteness that is a problem. In saying this, I am not casting nasty aspersions or name calling because I’m Black, but simply making a factual, historical observation. Karen Teel, a white sister, concurs. She writes, “To admit that I am a white problem is simply to state a fact.”31
The process of suturing is also reflective of another fable: the white self as a site of self-possession and in absolute control of its own meaning. This meaning is grounded within a larger white narrative history underwritten by white power and hegemony. The sutured white self is not undone32 by simply delineating how it has been historically constituted through relations of power. Another way of saying this is that the sutured, white imperial self’s narration of its own identity tells a fantasy of “absolute” autonomy. Critically engaging and exposing the forces of heteronomy (that is, forces outside of oneself) is threatening to whiteness as the process renders visible the historically contingent struts of white normative and institutional power, which would call into question the grand gesture of white “self-creation.” What I’m getting at here in terms of the day-to-day level of lived white experience is the sense in which white people take for granted the normative status of their whiteness, their white embodiment, and the ways in which in white America, for example, the white social world brings with it a whole host of moral, aesthetic, economic, and psychological advantages.
Sutured, white readers of my letter were unable and unwilling to understand any of this. They therefore reduced my voice to meaningless chatter apparently lacking epistemological, political, or moral authority. They deemed me no more than “a nigger professor.” I was deemed the “racist”; I was deemed the “liar.” They accused me of writing Dear White America with the ulterior motive of “hooking up with” white women. This suturing process is also conceptually linked to what Peggy McIntosh refers to as a “single-system seeing,” one which “is blind to its own cultural specificity. It cannot see itself. It mistakes its ‘givens’ for neutral, pre-conceptual ground rather than for distinctive cultural grounding.”33 As sutured, your whiteness constitutes the fact that you have been oriented in a certain way.34 The majority of responses that I received from white readers were founded on a certain kind of orientation, a white place from which “the world unfolds.”35 As such, then, for the majority of white readers, Dear White America was a familiar discursive territory; it was “a new way for me to pimp,” a way for me to engage in “race baiting,” a way for me to manipulate “white idiots” or a way for me to “guilt” white readers.
Yet, for me, Dear White America asked you to step out on unfamiliar discursive white ground, as it were. The letter asked that you risk your own self-understanding, to seriously trouble that white space from which the world unfolds. That is a lot to ask, but not too much when juxtaposed with the history of white terroristic threats and actual torture that Black people have experienced when they have resisted your white definition of them. I know how terrifying it must be to commit to the idea that you thought that you knew yourself only to discover that much of that was a lie, that whiteness itself is a lie. But it is really important that you know that there are some “white lies” that are not harmless, but they breed existential devastation and twisted logics of white “superiority” along with its correlative attempt to reduce the Black body to “inferior brutes.” Whiteness is a profound lie that blames all social ills on Blackness. Those white lies are forms of soul sickness. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that racism is “a cancer of the soul”36 and that it eats away at white people, and it metastasizes, eating away at the larger body politic and the humanity of others. Heschel writes, “The Holocaust did not take place suddenly. It was in the making for several generations. It had its origin in a lie: that the Jew was responsible for all social ills, for all personal frustrations.”37 As social ethicist Father Bryan Massingale notes:
Racism is a soul-sickness. Racism has become a spiritual cataract; it affects what we see and what we don’t see, whom we notice and whom we don’t notice, and it’s distorted our vision so that we don’t see what’s there in front of us. And body cameras and police accountability review boards, all of those are good and are necessary, but I think they’re going to be limited and even ineffective if we don’t realize that racism is a soul-sickness.38
Within the context of the white American empire, I understand what is at stake. After all, we’re talking about the possible collapse of an entire white supremacist enterprise, a well-oiled machine, predicated upon acts of white world-making, where the Black body has functioned as your fixed star.39 If not for the alacrity and desperation with which whiteness sutures itself when challenged, Dear White America would have created a powerful sense of white disorientation, perhaps even panic. You might have even lost your way, which can be a frightening experience. My letter to you, Dear White America, was written from a crucially and critically different place, a different site of unfolding. I tried to expose whiteness to you as something “fabulous”—that is, a fable designed to make you believe that you are special because you are white. Lillian Smith reports that of the many lessons that she learned about being white; she was taught that her “skin color [whiteness] is a Badge of Innocence which [she] can wear as vaingloriously as [she pleases] because God gave it to [her] and hence it is good and right.”40 She writes that she “clung to the belief [regarding her whiteness], as an unhappy child treasures a beloved toy, that [her] white skin made [all white people] ‘better’ than all other people.”41 Lastly, regarding the dos and don’ts of whiteness, Smith observes, “And we learned far more from acts than words, more from a raised eyebrow, a joke, a shocked voice, a withdrawing movement of the body, a long silence, than from long sentences.”42
It is within the context of subtle embodied gestures that whiteness is performed, and it is through such gestures, not simply ideological falsehoods, that whiteness is perpetuated. The insidious nature of whiteness along with its “ordinariness” is a variation of what I stated in chapter 3 regarding the idea that white racism is learned at the proverbial knee. White people come to understand the meaning of those white gestures that Smith delineates as they inhabit a performative white symbolic world, a world that helps them to move about, to find their way, to orient themselves. Such a world helps to underwrite their whiteness, your whiteness. This is something that many of my white students have so much trouble understanding. They externalize racism as that which is flagrant, overt, and deliberate. For them, racism is something which other white people are guilty of—that is, those who openly use racist stereotypes or God forbid use the N-word. Yet a raised eyebrow from your white parents or white friends in the presence of my Black body can communicate both an entire mutually agreed upon set of white racist assumptions and an entire agreed upon repertoire of white embodied performances, even if only implicitly. That raised eyebrow, that shocked voice, that long silence, and that withdrawing movement of the body are part of a world, a site of white nation building.
The movement of white bodies within spaces at predominantly white institutions involves a dynamic set of institutional and normative forces that allow you to feel at home, for your body to move with ease. In fact, such forces extend and expand your body43 within that space, welcoming you, and buttressing your aspirations to reach and obtain what is “rightfully” yours. There are no calculations; your white body knows how to get around. Smith asks, “What white southerner of my generation ever stops to think consciously where to go or asks himself [herself] if it is right for him [her] to go there!”44 Smith continues, “His [her] muscles know where he [she] can go and take him [her] to the front of the streetcar, to the front of the bus, to the big school, to the hospital, to the library, to the hotel and restaurant and picture show, into the best that his [her] town has to offer its [white] citizens.”45 Similarly, Sara Ahmed writes, “White bodies are habitual insofar as they ‘trail beyond’ actions: they do not get ‘stressed’ in their encounter with objects or others, as their whiteness ‘goes unnoticed.’ ”46 White students are often shocked when I attempt to get them to think about white racism as a kind of habitation, which suggests a kind of structural dwelling. As Black, when I walk through that space, it begins to feel like a chair that has taken on the shape of someone else’s body (in this case, your white body), a shape that is unwelcoming to my body.47 I struggle, I squirm, while the chair resists. The chair often wins out in the end as it has been sat on for far too long by you, white reader. It has taken another’s shape; indeed, your shape. That is how white spaces at predominantly white institutions feel to Black bodies and bodies of color. Within those spaces, Black bodies and bodies of color struggle, they squirm, they feel unwelcomed—they come to realize that those spaces were never meant for them.
Just walking while white across campus is not a racially neutral process, but a process that speaks to a racially saturated white space, historically embedded white racial power relationships, sedimentations of white normative assumptions, and a process where white bodies reap privilege and immunity for being white. I tell my white students that the simple walk between their dorm and their next class has problematic implications for my Black body and the bodies of other Black students; the bodies of Black students are impacted, touched, by white bodies whose edges don’t peter out, are not discrete, but continuous. In fact, it is the cannot48 of Black bodies (that is, not walking lithely across campus without that sense of being the raced “other”) that partly involves their distress as white bodies, unstressed, move productively and smoothly across campus; it is the can49 of white bodies. Like the handle on a cup, which functions as an affordance to drink from the cup, whiteness and the white normative, material, and institutional space within which white people move and have their being function as affordances that enable white students to feel at home, to be at home, as they move from room to room, building to building, to the library and back. In fact, white reader, your spaces, your campuses, are adorned with names, pictures, and statues of white people that “confirm” your membership, your racial ties, your sense of “superiority,” and “specialness.” White students are so braided to that white semiotic space that one of the few things that stand out for them, assuming that there is one, is the Black Student Union (BSU). In contrast, most of your unions are de facto white. Some of you have complained about BSUs. Yet the BSUs are not the problem. The problem is the white normative framework that makes so many white unions inconspicuous—at least to you.
The activity of walking across campus constitutes a site of ontological relationality that is continuous; hence, whether “passive” or “active” with respect to the perpetuation of racialized injustice, your white embodiment problematically impacts my embodiment. Vasko writes, “[White] privilege distorts privileged persons’ view of reality. It tricks us [white people] into believing that we are innocent and that the suffering that befalls those on the underside of history is the result of their own inadequacies.”50 The weight and urgency of insistent interrogation and vigilance is necessary. Again, this is not about guilt, which is far too easy. “Daily [white people] should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation,”51 to fight against white oppression, white arrogance, white color-evasion, white privilege, white hypocrisy, white denial, and everyday white normative ways of being?
While I briefly discussed this in chapter 3, I want to say a bit more about how I think about bodies, mine and yours, not petering out—that is, having no edges. Elizabeth Vasko challenges a deeply problematic conceptualization of human beings as neoliberal, atomic subjects. She writes, “To be human is to be a person in relation.”52 And Mary Elizabeth Hobgood writes, “Discerning our social location within a web of economic, political, and cultural systems is essential to evaluating our responsibility to others.”53 And Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”54 Along these lines, in terms of this concept of having no edges, there is something radical that I have in mind with respect to how your white embodiment fundamentally and problematically touches Black bodies and bodies of color, something that has deep ethical implications for how your being as white has deep implications for my being as Black. This also takes us back to the notion of what it means to be yoked or “joined to.” Your whiteness is always already haptic—a term that is related to touching. To say that white embodiment has no edges introduces what I’m calling an ontology (or being) and an ethics of no edges. In other words, an ethics of no edges and a radical rethinking of a relational ontology, where the white body does not terminate at some fictive corporeal edge, ought to encourage a different response from white people. The connection, the touching, after all, is already there. We are now touching each other.
An ethics of no edges that I have in mind rethinks or, better, lays bare a dynamic ontology of connectedness, a dynamic racialized somatic network (or web) that problematizes a clear-cut outside limit, and thereby calls for a robust sense of ethical responsibility, indeed, white responsibility. King writes, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”55 One way of thinking about this is that injustice is not an isolated phenomenon, but bleeds into the body politic. Heschel writes, “Whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt.”56 My point here is to encourage you, white reader, to engage critically how you are always already constituted relationally and socially and that you are politically preconfigured in the lives of Black people and people of color, especially in ways that perpetuate white racist oppression. Consistent with the idea that the structure of whiteness is one of suturing, whiteness functions as an edge. Think here in terms of white segregation, white redlining, white neighborhood covenants, and white gated communities. Such processes not only function as acts of nation building, but also the building of edges, limits, boundaries, borders, perimeters.
With this in mind, then, what are the deeper and larger implications for my act of gift-giving? Or what are the deeper and larger implications for my entreaty for an act of love from you? Within the context of whiteness, where whiteness is a site of closure, love has to be an act that troubles that “edge,” that rethinks how bodies might be thought to peter out or come to an end. Perhaps a eulogy is in order. This eulogy is for the death of white forms of embodiment, conceived and lived as self-enclosed or monadic, where there is a presumed outside limit. The embodied white self, then, if it is to adopt an ethically relational ontology that troubles a white monadic identity with presumptive discrete edges, must undergo a species of death. Butler writes, “But this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of a fantasy of impossible mastery [and separateness], and so a loss of what one never had.”57
In the letter, I asked that you try to un-suture. The term, as I suggest, brings to mind a state of pain, “open flesh,” exposure. Un-suturing suggests processes of troubling a problematic ontology or mode of being. Unsuturing can function, within this case, as a way of undergoing a radical rethinking of the body as a site of profound vulnerability, and a radical way of being-in-the-world. White reader, I understand that there is “safety” in suturing; there is “safety” in closure. This becomes all the more understandable as your whiteness is buttressed by a conception of “purity” and a set of practices that historically have been designed to maintain your “purity,” to keep you sutured from “otherness,” from that which might “sully” your whiteness. Yet it is a form of “safety” that sacrifices the potential promises of difference and thereby closes off the possibility for knowing otherwise through the force of alterity. Being un-sutured, or more accurately, coming to understand how you are always already exposed, vulnerable, and open to be wounded, creates space for the ecstatic to be experienced and engaged—where your white body trembles in its contingency, openness and responsibility; where it stands in awe, where the perceptual and sensorial are shaken, unhinged.
Suturing was at work in the profiling of Trayvon Martin’s body by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, whom I shall now refer to simply as the killer,58 as Martin’s parents refer to him, decided to get out of his car and track down Martin. Doing discursive violence to Martin’s body before the actual confrontation with him, the killer said that Martin looked “suspicious,” was “up to no good,” and looked like he was “on drugs,” which functioned as white racist tropes that mark the Black body, that hail the Black body as a “problem body.” The killer had internalized the white gaze, even though he was mixed race—his mother apparently having some Afro-Peruvian ancestry and his father of German descent. In this situation, the white gaze of the killer had already functioned as an embodied social process or vector that “touched” Martin’s body. In short, this is an example of the gaze itself impacting the Black body. It actively truncates, doing violence through the ways in which it possesses the power to constitute the Black body as “deadly.” The killer did not un-suture in the presence of Martin; he did not understand how he was always already intimately entangled with Martin’s Black embodiment in terms of a racially shared social skin where Martin’s Black body is obstructed, stopped, distorted, touched by his white gaze and its violent history. The killer chased Martin, pursued him (note that “pursue” is linked to the term “prosecute,” to hold a trial). It was the killer’s bodily style and comportment, being on the hunt, that positioned Martin as the one who must be hunted, who is about to “commit a crime,” who is to be “feared,” and who is to be “tried.” For the killer, Martin was disposable. The killer was on the prowl, his physical gait uninviting, his body in the mode of taking a stand. As a result, Martin’s young Black body was met with a bullet, fired from a gun by a sutured self that failed to lose itself in that moment, that remained closed.
The killer sacrificed the potential promises of alterity, “otherness.” For the killer, there was no place for Martin to be alive in that gated community in Sanford, Florida. After all, its edges were well defined. The racialized social space, which was predominantly white, was already touching Martin’s body, structuring and configuring potential and actual racialized and racist dynamics in relationship to his Black body. In this case, the killer’s white gaze had already slain the innocence and integrity of Martin’s Black embodiment; the killer’s white gaze had already blocked Martin’s ability to move through that space with effortless grace. The killer was well sutured. There was no wonder; Martin’s Black embodiment was always already known. There was no show of concern: “Perhaps I can help you?” There was no openness for the killer. There was no space for the killer to be surprised, for Martin “to appear to [the killer] as new, very different from what [the killer] knew or what [the killer] thought [Martin] should be.”59 The killer failed, refused, or just didn’t give a damn to ask, “Who art thou?”60 And then to say, “I am and I become thanks to this question.”61 Being and becoming presuppose a thick form of sociality that resists suturing. Within this context, “Who art thou?” is a question whose weight presupposes an openness, where the addressee overwhelms what we have taken for granted.
The process of un-suturing disrupts; it troubles and unsettles; it risks forms of openness or embodied gestures—un-sutured gestures that are linked to the ways in which the world reveals itself differently. Un-suturing is a form of exposure, an opening, a corporeal style and a dispositional sensibility that troubles the insularity, in this case, of the white gaze. Unsuturing troubles and overwhelms the senses, revealing how porous our bodies are and instigating instability, that sense of being thrown off balance, off center, disoriented. The killer’s white gaze was not an inaugural event, but a historical formation underwritten by social hegemonic practices and white institutional forces that impact/touch Black bodies—in this case, Martin’s Black body. To have become unhinged in the face of alterity/ otherness/“difference,” in the way that a gate designed to keep people out becomes unhinged, would have provided an opening, a fissure, and the potential for loss of orientation. Perhaps in that unhinged moment, that un-sutured moment, the killer would have lost his way, and the white hegemonic and stereotypical frame of reference operating within that space would have broken down; he would have broken down, collapsed, “fallen apart.”62 Think here of collapsing as the inability to stand, to stand one’s ground. In that moment, it would have been the killer’s white gaze that was shattered and not the life of Martin.
It is the gift of being unhinged in this way that I desired of white America when I wrote the letter. In terms of the examples of shopping while white or walking across campus as white, the very idea that your whiteness is touching me, oppressing me, truncating my humanity can result, hopefully, for you, white reader, in a fundamental process of being in deep crisis. It is such a crisis that Dear White America attempted to prompt. White reader, I wanted you to come to understand how your whiteness impacts me, touches me so that you might literally stop in your tracks as you shop or walk across campus. I desired that you might lose your way, and in so doing that you might scream aloud that you have failed to see, failed to see the damage, failed to see me. Imagine screaming that out for the world to hear.
When I say that I attempted to prompt crisis, I mean not only the sense of losing your footing, of losing your way, or a process of disorientation, but also the etymological sense of the word crisis (from Greek Krisis, meaning decision). Crisis, as I am using the term here, is a species of metanoia or conversion. This is a kind of perceptual breakdown, that is linked to the idea of that scream, that terrifying realization that your “innocence” was not real at all. Such an experience involves tarrying within that space of breakdown. It is within that space that there is a powerful sense of loss, which is actually not a loss at all, but a gain. The concept of deciding denotes a life of commitment to engage, perhaps every day of your life, to challenge the complex ways in which you are embedded within white supremacy and white normative structures. It is a process that will be painful and chaotic. Indeed, it must be, because it involves facing an unfamiliar terrain; like facing the disagreeable mirror.
Perhaps you are still unconvinced. Let’s try another way into this. Dear White America’s message was written precisely to encourage you to risk yourself, to undergo a process of moral and existential perplexity, to rethink how your white body has come to move lithely or with effortless grace in the world. The message in Dear White America is a dangerous one, especially as it invites a dangerous undertaking. Why dangerous? As suggested previously, it involves a powerful risk. As I wrote earlier, bell hooks writes that love is about telling the truth to ourselves and telling it to others. However, for the most part, white readers of Dear White America sutured themselves, withdrew their bodies in a movement indicative of what it means to recoil. For so many white readers of the letter, there was no resulting disorientation that involved a process of truth-telling to yourself or to me or to others. You dug your heels in, sutured, and refused to accept the gift. White “common sense,” as it has been constituted, spoke to you about how you’re suffering in a zero-sum situation in which Black people and people of color are taking everything from you, where an inner voice whispered, “You’re the victim here.” My guess is that it was that inner voice that encouraged some of you to vote for Trump. Many might ask, “Do you really think that a Trump supporter is reading these lines?” Probably not. But isn’t all of this about risk and the possibilities integral to that risk? Yet what if the ways in which that inner voice speaks to you about your white self is a function of a white protective discourse whose “legitimacy” is underwritten by systemic processes of white power and privilege? In this way, white power and privilege are inherent within the “self-knowledge” that you as a white person construct about yourself “and the ‘wording’ of [your] world.”63 And let us not forget, the structure of whiteness is predicated upon a lie. Remember, whiteness is an embodied phenomenon, a flinch, a cringe, in the presence of Black bodies and acts of Black gift-giving, especially ones that are weighty, that demand something from you.
White reader, I want you to understand how racism is not a miscalculation, or simply a cognitive distortion, but whiteness is a way of being embodied, a white way of being. It is a lie that is so intimate that it is you, the normative you, the you that walks into stores, attends college, and falls in love without ever asking how whiteness constitutes itself as the ground of your individual and collective white intelligibility. This is why being sutured, sewn up, is so integral to who you are as white. Being embodied as white, as a white reader of Dear White America, you refused to cut away at the institutional ties, the normative assumptions, and everyday white performances that seamlessly empower and privilege your white body, the ones that reassure you that as an individual your moral state depends exclusively upon your individual moral will, and that you are “innocent” of any racist wrongdoing. And it is important to keep in mind that that refusal to cut away at the processes of whiteness doesn’t reveal itself as a refusal to see differently, to become otherwise, to be in danger. As so many of you read Dear White America, you clung to your whiteness as to the mast of that proverbial ship. It is that clinging, that suturing, that supports the pretense that belies bell hooks’s conception of love. Suturing helps to create a false self that “has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to be honest and clear.”64
If whiteness is a lie, a deeply rooted historical lie, then surely who you potentially can be and how you might come to affectively engage the world differently is deferred by white norms and white embodied practices. Another way of putting this is that as partly “a constituted effect of [white] power relations and [white] intersecting discourses,”65 you are shaped by the existence of a form of regulation of a certain “truth” about yourself not being a white person who is racist, a person whom Dear White America addressed. That brings us back to danger. Love is a kind of danger in that it requires risk, truth-telling, and honesty. James Baldwin writes, “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”66
Baldwin also writes, in words that I wish I had written, “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.”67 I risked and I gave. From all of you, I asked for you to also risk and to give—that is, to love in return. I didn’t write to harm, hurt, degrade, or humiliate you, but instead to issue an alarm about your failure to confront the problem of whiteness; to cultivate a critical awareness of the specter of whiteness and white privilege that each one of you inherits. For me, knowing the history of white supremacy, its terror and hatred, my act of gift-giving was one of profound vulnerability. I took a risk to trust you, white reader. Trust is a hell of a thing. It leaves one vulnerable to attack. To know the truth of this, I ask that you revisit chapter 2. There was no risking of your white self. You didn’t give of your white self. Perhaps many of you “wear so much mental make-up”68 that you have forfeited your face. Heschel writes, “But faith [trust] only comes when we stand face to face . . . suffer ourselves to be seen.”69 Dear White America was not greeted with a flood of white people risking or suffering themselves (yourselves) to be seen. And relying upon Baldwin’s assessment, it appears that you had absolutely nothing to give. To call me nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, and then some, is to take as much as you can. There was no giving. Your response seized my humanity by the throat. And you heard my response: “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” You heard it eleven times no less.
A gift is that which is given. To give is to entrust, which means that I gave white America over to you, white reader, as something for which you were asked to take responsibility. In the end, you were rash, many of you defensive, and even more of you unconscionably vindictive and cruel, the stuff of white madness and bloodlust. Some white responses were so distorted that you might have thought that I was in a parallel universe where I was the “Black grand dragon” of the “Black Ku Klux Klan”: “We can see what kind of hate is inside you. I will pray for you. You need it. All you are is a mouth piece for racism.” And, “You are one of the most racist people on earth . . . your existence is kind of pathetic.” And, “People pay money to get an education, instead they are subjected to assholes like you. Maybe in a few decades you will come to the realization that you are the racist.” Finally, “You Vile Anti-White Motherfuckers think you’ve won???” There is certainly no internal battle here, no internal war against their sutured white selves. Baldwin writes, “In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is and formed one’s point of view. In great pain and terror because, therefore, one enters into battle with that historical creation. Oneself.”70
In response to my point about the necessity for an internal battle or war with one’s white self, one white reader responded, “I answer that I am prepared to be at war with you, and people like you.” When I speak of being at war with one’s white self, it is not about engaging in acts of violence, though it will involve, by necessity, a violation, an intrusion into the safe space of whiteness, a disruption of white business as usual. It requires that you see your own nakedness, that you, white reader, un-suture, and suffer your white self to be seen. I think that a haunting is necessary for white America, one that produces ethical insomnia. That haunting is to tell the truth about whiteness to yourselves and to others so that you might know love. I’m not asking for a confession, though. Don’t get distracted by the desire for absolution. Absolution runs the risk of being all about you. Even forgiveness can recenter whiteness, and thus obfuscate the need to explore and to interrogate your whiteness in greater depth. Confession and the desire for absolution can function as new forms of masking. I’m suggesting a haunting that Baldwin’s words summon—one can give nothing whatever without giving oneself.
It is important to bear in mind that the act of giving oneself is neither asking me how you, white reader, can help me nor is it asking me to tell you how I want to be treated by you. The former situation reeks of white paternalism. That’s a distraction, more suturing. The latter situation places the burden on me. Furthermore, who says that you are ready to hear how I want to be treated or that after hearing me you are even prepared to carry out the expressed desire? In both situations, you, white reader, emerge as the white hero, the hero who is infinitely capable of making my dreams come true, where whiteness is the answer, the solution. Yet whiteness is the problem, how you live your whiteness and its impact upon me is the problem, which means you are the problem. Begin there, begin with you, begin with telling the truth to yourself and telling it to others. Be in that place of risk, that place of danger. Tarry in that space. Don’t flee. Don’t wallow in guilt. And whatever you do, please don’t seek recognition for just how sorry you feel. Weep if you must, but don’t weep for me alone. Lament if you must, but not for me alone. Let your mourning move you to action, to fight for a world in which whiteness, your whiteness, ceases to violate me, Black people, and people of color.
Some white readers of the letter said that I had failed to offer any solutions. In fact, there were a few who seemed to say, “You say that I’m a racist, but you’ve provided no advice regarding what I should do.” To me, this felt like another form of avoidance. I wanted, and still want, white readers to tarry within that space of profound discomfort for which the letter asks. As Ahmed would say, I didn’t want to reposition you, white reader, “as somewhere other than implicated in the critique.”71 Part of the doing is in the tarrying, which doesn’t mean navel-gazing or going off into some corner and crying in despair. I wanted you to realize that, as Heschel writes, “the history of interracial relations [in America] is a nightmare,”72 and I wanted you to tarry with the ways in which you are complicit in supporting and benefiting from that nightmare. White reader, I wanted that letter to induce a scream from you, a refusal to live a lie, a refusal to live another day within a white supremacist system where Black people and people of color continue to be oppressed. I wanted you to suffer yourself to be seen; to really do that. I wanted you to tell the truth to yourselves and tell it to others, and to counter white regimes of “knowledge” production that are counter to that telling. All of this is a necessary doing, one that in fact outstrips the question of a specified set of tasks.
This process of necessary doing was undertaken by a few of your white brothers and sisters who read Dear White America. Here are some examples of what tarrying looks like, lingering with the problem and complexity of whiteness.
“I accept the gift of your letter freely and with the same spirit I believe it was intended. Thank you for your gift. I would like to offer you a gift in return: A commitment to fully accept the racism (and sexism) that is embedded in me, acknowledge the privilege that comes with having been born a white American, try my best to be educated about the suffering my racism and privilege causes others, and educate others to the extent I am able. I sincerely regret that you received hate-filled responses to your letter. I felt compelled to let you know that I, for one, don’t hate you. I want to show you, and others, the unmasked, risk-taking love of which you spoke. Please accept my gift, albeit flawed, with the spirit with which it is intended. Thank you again for your work and voice on these very important matters.”
“Professor Yancy’s essay was breathtaking in its honesty and provocative in its pain. I am a racist, a sexist, and combat many other ills within myself that perpetuate a system that was made for me.”
“Thank you. I am a white liberal/ardent backer of civil rights, but as you say, also a racist. Godspeed, and thank you for helping to keep me honest.”
“Beautiful words, thoughtful words, and words that needed to be said. Thank you for holding up a mirror to my inner hate.”
“Thanks Professor Yancy for your thoughts. The system is racist. As a white woman, I am responsible to dismantle that system as well as the attitudes in me that growing up in the system created. I am responsible for speaking out when I hear racist comments.”
“Thank you George Yancy. You speak for me, through me, though we are different; I am a woman and white.”
“Thank you, Mr. Yancy, for this gift. I will use it every day. Maybe some days I will be using it more adroitly, more successfully, than others, but I promise I will use it every day for the rest of my life.”
“Beautiful piece in today’s Times, Professor. I accept the difficult gift, gratefully and I hope, over time, with grace.”
“Thank you for words of truth and the gift that they are.”
“Dear Professor Yancy. Thank you for the letter. I am white, female, liberal and I do not consider myself a racist. What a lie! I don’t use the ‘N’ word, I have black friends and I do the other things white liberals do so they can pat themselves on the back. Nonetheless, I recently saw a black woman walking close to my home. I wondered if she was lost and questioned in my mind what she was doing in my largely white neighborhood. The fact that this was my first thought just confirms what Professor Yancy is saying. We may think we are not racist, but many, many of us still are.”
“I for one am incredibly grateful for [Yancy’s] letter. In the same way that he owns his sexism, we are being invited to look inside and name and own any elements of racism that exist inside us. If you have not done this and you truly believe that there is no racism inside of you, then I gently suggest that you have not done the work that we are all here to do. I say that as a white woman. It’s painful as a progressive and spiritual person to admit that there might be racism in us, but it’s an integral step. I own it. And until we own and take responsibility for the racism in our own hearts, however minor, we are ignoring a hugely important part of the conversation. . . . We are being asked to see through a lens of love, and love means owning and taking responsibility. . . . That is the basis of a truly healthy relationship, and that will be the act that will heal. So grateful for this beautiful and love-filled invitation.”
“I just read your opinion piece in the New York Times. I can honestly say it touched me, and I felt this overwhelming need to at least reach out to thank you for this gift. Speaking for myself, it made me realize the walls that I (and most likely everyone) put up every day; to cope with this confusing world, to minimize my involvement and responsibility as a human being. I hope I have the strength to be aware of my privilege and ultimate responsibility towards others on a daily basis, going forward in the New Year and beyond. Much love and respect to you and yours.”
“I just read your article in NYT. As a white woman, I have the mirror sentiment about racism in me (the same way you have admitted sexism in you). I think we all have to start looking inwards before accusing others of ‘isms.’ Yes, there’s racism in me, I acknowledged it and now I’m in a position to do something about it. Whether or not I succeed, I don’t know, but it’s a good way to start. Thank you and kudos for honesty.”
“I feel that I should be on a first name basis with you because of your loving gift to me. I have been living this past year with the growing understanding that my white privilege is toxic and that I have been floating in my barge in a sea of black blood. I have sent copies of your gift to some of the people I feel closest to.”
“It is a brilliant, wondrous (and sadly necessary) letter in today’s Times. I hope that other whites will be as moved as I was reading it and truly, truly thinking about all of the implications of what you wrote.”
“I just wanted to tell you that I was deeply moved by your piece in the New York Times. It was such an honest, accurate analysis of the problem we face in America. I found myself, almost involuntarily, reaching for the reasons I am not racist—I am married to a person of color, my child is biracial, I believe I treat all people the same regardless of their skin color. And yet, of course I know all of that is beside the point. Your piece will stick with me.”
“The title of your New York Times article caught my eye. I read it and am trying to understand what you are hoping to accomplish. I am white, 52 years old, female and—after reading your article—willing to admit to being racist. Not KKK racist, not Trump racist, not ignorant and uneducated and insulated racist, but after listening with love I can admit to being racist. I am certainly the product of White Advantage: college educated father, middle class upbringing, no fear of police, etc.”
“Thank you so much for your article in the New York Times. I’ve been fighting my own internal battle against racism for a little while but I still fail so miserably sometimes. I am too ashamed to describe my most recent failure. Your article and the timing of your article are truly uncanny. Your admission of your own struggles and failures are very comforting. Your language is so kind and encouraging. Your words are exactly what I needed.”
“First of all, I would like to thank you for your article in the December 24th edition of the NY Times. I am a 53-year-old white male who has benefited from both the institutional racism and sexism you described. These thoughts have always been in the back of my mind, but were brought forth eloquently in your essay. Secondly, thank you for offering this gift during a period of time in our history in which we need this as much as ever. I will personally utilize this renewed self-awareness to be cognizant of it in my own life and in how I may positively impact it throughout the rest of my life.”
“I am writing regarding your very enlightening article, ‘Dear White America’. I think I get it. I am a 63-year-old, white male liberal. I suppose I have been laboring under the illusion that ‘voting for Obama’ and ‘having a lot of black friends’ lets me off the hook. Now, I see that by virtue of who and what I am, I am the problem. The racism is within me and every day of my life I am benefitting from white privilege.”
“I am a 34-year-old white professional. I work and live in NYC. I have a 3-year-old daughter. I didn’t really understand your article until your last paragraph: ‘If you have young children, before you fall off to sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch your child’s face. Smell your child’s hair. Count the fingers on your child’s hand. See the miracle that is your child. And then, with as much vision as you can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is black.’ ”
“First, I am sorry this is not a handwritten letter. Snail mail may be more meaningful, but email is an easy and environmentally friendly way to express gratitude. Thank you so much for your ‘Dear White America’ piece. I found it both poignant and timely. I am additionally amazed at how much it spoke to my own experience in realizing that my own feminism was distinctly white. This was an ugly moment, but realizing and embracing the constraints on my own thinking has allowed the world to proliferate with the most amazing possibilities.”
“I’m sure you are getting a ton of hate mail today. I read some of the Facebook comments and they were just what you warned of. Anyway, I wanted to tell you directly what a great piece I thought it was. Just a little Christmas Eve email from this Irish girl to give you a little love back! Best wishes to you in the New Year!”
“I read your letter to White America today and wanted to thank you for your words. In the past year my eyes have been opened to real (and horrifying) racism happening all around me, but worst of all I’ve found it within. During the Baltimore protests in April I came across a few blogs that challenged my world view about race and every day since then I’ve seen America with different eyes. . . . I’ve seen how systemic racism is and I’ve seen how I benefit from that system and how I’m complicit in the oppression of people of color. As I read your letter I found myself skipping ahead, looking for the how-to section. I admit it with eyes and heart wide open that yes, your words are true, I’m racist. But, I hate it. I hate that I am an oppressor, and that I have a 2-year-old white son who could be raised to be a double oppressor.”
“I wanted to thank you for your Dear White [America] piece in the NYT. Pretty thankless job talking to white people, trying to help us ‘get’ it. That ‘bridge called your back.’ I read some of the comments in the Times, but not too many. Too frustrating. I experience similar frustration trying to talk about sexism to most men—and many women. Most white people—as you know—don’t see or understand the white power structures that protect and blind us. That’s why they can call you racist and talk about ‘reverse racism.’ Anyway, thank you for making the effort. For the gift of your effort. And for using your struggle regarding sexism/patriarchy as you did. Thank you very much.”
“Astounding, I was highly skeptical about this article as I read through it. I wasn’t convinced that we should accept the language of white privilege and those who passively benefit from it as being an equivalent to racism. However, the last line punched me in the chest, ‘I want you to imagine that your child is black.’ That sold me on this argument completely, until this point I’ve always considered myself as extremely progressive. I’ve never tolerated racism, sexism, homophobia or any other form of discrimination and I always try to speak out when I see it, yet I’d never thought to consider it in that way. I felt a moment of pure shock at the sort of assumptions people would make about my child just because they were black. I can’t pretend, or hide anymore. Thank you for your wonderful insight Professor Yancy.”
“Thank you for this wonderful gift! I plan to pass it onto many of my friends and relatives.”
“Thank you for writing this. I will hold this piece near and dear for the rest of my life. A gift indeed. Much love.”
“I accept your gift and thank you.”
“I wish I could memorize this!!! I want to read this every day; so encouraging! Thank you!”
“As I explore the streets and underbelly of New Orleans, the white privilege of my friends and myself is palpable. I try to live in as diverse a world as I can but here it’s so evident the difference in perspective and class I have. Being a white privileged man makes me completely blind to so many realities, insulating me far beyond what I even realize. I took a long walk today overwhelmed by the differences I observed in class and color and I realized how racist I am and my belief that I’m not is pure illusion and my good intention simply isn’t enough.”
Perhaps for the first time, these white readers took off their masks, even if only for a moment, to hear me. Then again, perhaps they had already known about the difficulties involved in removing their masks, knowing how hard it is not to be seduced to hide, to fall back on white “innocence.” They seem to have tarried in the space of danger where they dared to tell the truth to themselves and to me and to others about their whiteness. Yet as we now know, that sense of daring can easily be mistaken as white heroism. There is no place for white heroes within this book. White humility, though, is welcomed. It is such humility that “provides [white people] with an avenue to remain present to the violence done in the name of whiteness and to take up a meaningful critical stance toward that violence.”73 White heroes typically soar high above the earth. To be humble, which literally means “on the ground,” speaks to the importance of engaging the muck and mire of whiteness, its everydayness, and its intractability in relationship to its social, institutional, and embodied rootedness.
These entries appear to have involved humility and risk. Your white brothers and sisters suspended pretense, perhaps only momentarily, and exposed the lie of whiteness. They un-sutured and seemed to understand that we are indeed touching. Furthermore, there was no sense of the fantasy of arrival. In other words, there was the recognition that white antiracism is a continuous and complex process, not a one-off gesture of white voluntarism. They seem to understand the concept of the nonmutually exclusive reality of the white antiracist racist. My letter did not, or so it seems, function for them as an opportunity simply to clear their conscience, to impress me with gestures of white liberal “enlightenment,” or to play the role of “good whites.” They appear to have looked into that disagreeable mirror and tarried within that space of white double consciousness, to have seen themselves through a consciousness not originally of their own. As stated by one white reader, “You speak for me, through me.”
In the letter I revealed that I know something crucial about their opaque racist thoughts and their systemic racist embeddedness, and these readers appear to know that I know. Embarrassed? No doubt. Furious? Not obvious. However, their fury, if present, was neither directed at me nor did “they deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth.”74 There was no surreptitious effort to dance around the problem of their whiteness such as when people say: “I have so many Black friends whom I love. It makes my blood boil that Black lives don’t matter.” This kind of response suggests a sense of white self-righteousness. In contrast, for the readers I quoted, there seems to be a genuine longing to be honest and clear—even as they will falter and fail. There seems to be an act of trust. I would argue that trust presupposes fallibility, the fact that we are broken and can be broken, that we are not perfect. Yet despite this, for me, for Black people, trust, within the context of anti-Black white racism, has often been and can be far too costly. For me, white reader, especially given the historical record of white supremacy in America and around the world, trusting you is not easy. That uneasiness or downright fact of not trusting you at all is a problem that you have inherited and helped to perpetuate. Nevertheless, it is your responsibility to persist. Recall that this is about your demonstration of love, your vulnerability; it is about your freedom, your un-suturing, the possibility that you might become more human.
Some of your white brothers and sisters, as witnessed here, seem to have forgone that false comfort and returned the gift with love, though “not in that infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”75 As one white reader writes, “I want to show you, and others, the unmasked, risk-taking love of which you spoke. Please accept my gift, albeit flawed, with the spirit with which it is intended.” Or another, “I am a racist, a sexist.” Or “Thank you for holding up a mirror to my inner hate.” Or “I am white, female, liberal and I do not consider myself a racist. What a lie!” Or “my white privilege is toxic and . . . I have been floating in my barge in a sea of black blood.” Or “After listening with love I can admit to being racist.” Or “I am a 53-year-old white male who has benefited from both the institutional racism and sexism you described.” Or “I am . . . amazed at how much [your letter] spoke to my own experience in realizing that my own feminism was distinctly white.” Or “I’ve seen how systemic racism is and I’ve seen how I benefit from that system and how I’m complicit in the oppression of people of color.” Or “I can’t pretend, or hide anymore.” Or “I realized how racist I am and my belief that I’m not is pure illusion and my good intention simply isn’t enough.” Or “Now, I see that by virtue of who and what I am, I am the problem.”
This courage, this willingness to see yourself as the problem, the white problem, to see beneath the pretense, to suffer yourself to be seen, the desire to know love through the act of telling the truth to your white self and to others, of removing masks: all of that and so much more is what the gift was all about.