It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child . . .
• • •
The beginning of Steve Martin’s The Jerk still makes me laugh with its twist on Once Upon a Time. The dissonance between what we know of the white comedian Martin, his relative success, and his obviously false declaration sends up not only the tragic showbiz biography but the corny black one: in both, the worser, the better. It also suggests his character’s transformation, his overcoming—after all, he’s clearly white now!—not to mention his current lot in which he’s as smudged, bummy, apparently destitute. His isn’t blackface, but his face half-greased is certainly part of the effect—it’s a familiar one, in other words, to black people used to watching white people only claim blackness as a “poor me” stance.
Now, why does this jerk remind me of Rachel Dolezal?
• • •
There’s a long-standing American tradition of whites donning blackface, or redface, or any other colored mask they pretend is a face. Those who wear blackface reduce blackness to skin in order not to be white. The implication of course is that black people are just miscolored or extra-dark white people. Many a joke told for my benefit in my Kansas grade school reinforced the same. Know why black people’s palms are white?
But if you are white but truly “feel black” then why do you have to look like it?
• • •
My next nonfiction book, Unoriginal Sin, is about hoaxers and impostors, plagiarists and phonies. I finished it last week and sent it in to my publisher, elated and relieved. Now I have to take time to write about Rachel Dolezal too?
I can’t decide if Dolezal, the woman revealed to have been merely pretending to be black, lecturing as such and even leading her local Oregon NAACP, is the natural extension of what I’ve been saying in my next book, or a distraction from this larger point: that quite regularly, faced with the paradox of race, the hoax rears its head. It turns out, I now know, it rears its rear too.
• • •
When Rachel Dolezal first broke, and was simply a joke on Black Twitter, I identified some of my favorite Twitter titles for the inevitable, anticipated memoir: “Their Eyes Were Watching Oprah” (that one’s mine); “Imitation of Imitation of Life” (from Victor LaValle); “Blackish Like Me” (mine too). Now things done got serious.
• • •
When you are black, you don’t have to look like it, but you do have to look at it. Or look around. Blackness is the face in the mirror, a not-bad-looking one, that for no reason at all some people uglify or hate on or wish ill for, to, about. Sometimes any lusting after it gets to be a drag too.
• • •
Every black person has something “not black” about them. I don’t mean something white, because despite our easy dichotomies, the opposite of black is not white. This one likes European classical music; that one likes a little bit of country (hopefully the old stuff); this one is the first African American principal ballerina; this one can’t dance. Black people know this—any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable. This doesn’t mean there aren’t similarities across black people or communities or better yet memory—just that these aren’t exactly about bodies and not really about skin at all, but culture.
• • •
There is a long tradition of passing—of racial crossing the line, usually going from black to white. You could say it was started, like this country, by Thomas Jefferson.
One of the best things about being black is that, barring some key exceptions, it’s not a volunteer position. You can’t just wish on a dark star and become black. It’s not paid either. It’s more like a long internship with a chance of advancement.
• • •
I’ve never seen the TV show Blackish all the way through. (I hear it’s quite good now.) From what I’ve seen, Fresh Off the Boat, another of ABC’s offerings, seems to me a more accurate portrayal of the complexity of racial identity, even black identity. (This is despite the worries of its creator, chef and author Eddie Huang.) The young Asian immigrant who’s the main character identifies with hip-hop in order to be both American and remain and help explain being nonwhite. It’s funny, and frequently brilliant: How do you become American?
Is this the same as becoming black?
• • •
Traditionally, pretend blackness was the fastest route to becoming white. This is true for Irish and Jewish immigrants, who adopted blackface in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, and soon assimilated; and for Northerners, for whom blackface helped them imagine themselves a nation since blackface’s advent in the 1830s.
Cue that f’in caricature of Jim Crow dancing.
Like Rachel Dolezal, I too became black around the age of five. I first became a nigger at nine, so I had me a good run.
• • •
The problem isn’t just that Rachel Dolezal can wash off whatever she’s sprayed on herself (it just don’t look right), or that blackness is a choice, but that what she’s wearing isn’t just bronzer, but blacker: a notion that blackness is itself hyperbolic, excessive, skin tone only. Well, and wigs.
This last, some black observers have praised.
• • •
Did Dolezal really fool those black folks around her? I have a strange feeling she didn’t, that many simply humored her. You have to do this with white people, from time to time.
• • •
Black people are constantly identifying and recognizing those who look like secret black folks—many light-skinned people I know get identified as white by white people, but we know they’re black. (This isn’t passing, btw.) Most look like one of my aunties. Knowing they are black, it is hard to see them another way.
It’s one of the advantages of my folks being from Louisiana—there’s lots of folks who don’t “look black” but are (which of course should make us stop and reevaluate what “looking black” is). Because of the one-drop rule, though begun as a controlling race law, black people themselves adapted and even invented and accepted a broader blackness. In general this has made black people—I am speaking for every single black person without exception here, of course—wary yet accepting.
• • •
Those surprised by a white lady darkening her skin and curling her hair haven’t been out of the house or online in a while.
• • •
There was the rather white-looking bank manager in Athens, Georgia, who chatted me up one day and mentioned a couple key black striver things—a black sorority here, the Links there—that let me know she was black too. It was brilliant, and in no way calculated; hers was smart survival.
It was also a test to see if I was woke, or a striver, too.
• • •
Teaching a class about blackness doesn’t mean you are black. Blackness isn’t a bunch of facts to memorize, or a set of stock behaviors; nor darker skin color neither. It’s like the jazz heads I’ve seen, often white, who can tell you every sideman on every session, but seem in the daylight unable to find the beat. The beat is there always; doesn’t mean you can always hear it.
While black folks often hear the beat, and set it, doesn’t mean when anyone else hears it, that she gets to be black.
• • •
Every church I know of had a white lady who arrived one day. Ours in Topeka did. After she hung around awhile, and proved herself she wasn’t a tourist, “Mrs. Pete” was accepted and seen as part of the AME congregation, even singing in the choir (which was a high bar, as it were). But we never thought she was, or somehow became, black. She’s good people, folks would say.
She did get herself a perm: I mean a white, curly one, instead of a straightened, black one; a clarification that’s one more sign we’re awfully mixed up. There’s the joke: You didn’t get yourself a perm, but a temporary.
• • •
There is the other, far rarer passing, which we may call reverse-passing, of whites living as black. The most prominent I know of may be Johnny Otis—who was successful enough that many race women and men I know aren’t aware he was actually born white. Or the Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, owner of a Negro League team who likely wasn’t black herself. What’s interesting is to wonder what the black people around them thought, usually accepting them—not necessarily as what they said they were, but how they acted. It isn’t that they weren’t judged, just that when they were, they weren’t found wanting.
So when the killer [name withheld] walked into Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston one week after the Dolezal story broke, I am not surprised that the black worshippers there welcomed him. Welcome is an integral part of the African American Christian tradition; it is especially so in the African Methodist Episcopal one, begun over two hundred years ago when the Methodist church prevented blacks, mostly freedmen and women, to pray beside its whites, even pulling them off their knees.
How long did [name redacted] sit there waiting, deciding to deny the evidence of humanity before him? Nothing, it appears, could have convinced him not to kill blacks, whom he believed—and spewed hate about—preyed on white people, especially women. One suspects he may not’ve known any women besides his family.
• • •
Thomas Jefferson hated black people but slept with one who bore his children, six of them. (Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry, he wrote in Notes on Virginia.) That Sally Hemings was also his wife’s half-sister neither stopped him nor did it make him reevaluate his stance toward black thought, which he saw as an impossible paradox.
Jefferson had black heirs who he, and for centuries his (sorta) white heirs and white defenders, denied. In our time, Strom Thurmond had him a black daughter out of wedlock; the only people surprised by this were the white voters he courted by vehement racist rhetoric. Of course, this behavior, demeaning blacks while desiring at least one, descends from slavery and is how we got most light-skinned folks who “look white” in the first place.
Why doesn’t Rachel Dolezal seem to know that a white person can have a black child (see one-drop rule above)? (See Obama.) (See Hemings.) (See Jefferson.) See . . .
• • •
Being black is not a feeling. I don’t always feel colored. Nor is it simply a state of mind.
Blackness: a way of being.
• • •
It would be one thing, I think, if in her house, to her pillow or family, Dolezal said she felt black. I imagine many white households across the country don blackface and grab banjos and have themselves a good ol’ time when no one else is around. It’s when that somehow translates to what she does, when she teaches black studies as if she’s a black person—not a teacher, but a mind reader—that it becomes a problem. She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims to want to be. How very white of her!
• • •
After Rachel Dolezal had mumbled her way through various news shows looking like Gilly from Saturday Night Live and answered the question of whether she was black or not with I don’t understand the question, came the murders in cold blood at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Both cases didn’t seem just coincidental, but near-simultaneous misapprehensions not just of blackness but of whiteness too.
• • •
After the killings in Charleston, several things happened: Dolezal’s story went back to merely being ridiculous. Talk shows moved on to something else and those who somehow willed Dolezal sublime retreated. Flags flew at half staff—except the Confederate flag on South Carolina statehouse grounds. It took a black woman to climb up and take that down.
They gave the assignment to a black man to raise the “rebel flag,” the stars and bars, back up. Like Sally Hemings, he might not have minded, but he certainly couldn’t have refused.
• • •
Soon the Confederate battle flag would be voted down by the state assembly, but flag sales would soar. Customers began to hoard them like guns once most major outlets suspended sales. Yet given the killer’s postings of himself with Confederate flags and separatist slogans, easy slogans like “heritage not hate” stood naked. The proof here only increased as a pro-flag rally brought out the American Nazi flag, side by side and even mashed up with the Confederate one.
In a place like the South that loves its tall tales, why do people take their Confederate stories hyperseriously? As gospel? Everyone’s a colonel, someone joked with me about the South when I was at the University of Georgia, where I taught for five years.
• • •
It was my first job, and I was regularly thought by strangers at the university to be passing for a student (and not a grad student). You look too young to be a professor, surprised interrogators would say, usually after asking what year in school I was. (It’s true I was only twenty-five, but had a book already and a degree or two.) After a while, I began to translate the comment about looking young to be a more polite way of saying what they couldn’t: You look too black to be a professor.
• • •
Maybe blackness is only a look, one we’re told cannot ever look back?
• • •
Far more interesting and provocative than a white mother in blackface would be a white mother with black children. Wouldn’t that provide a much more complex identity than any blackface? You get the feeling that, for Dolezal, blackness equals hiding.
For the deaconess at the church who had to make her way by cleaning white people’s houses during the week, blackness don’t mean hiding. Sunday meant rest, and a respite, wearing a different kind of white, black hair crowned by lace.
• • •
Blackness too often veers between two poles in the public eye: opaqueness and invisibility. For [racist killer], blackness wasn’t just opaque but conspicuous. It named an enemy and provided a uniform that allowed mass judgment—and murder.
Rachel Dolezal could be conspicuously outraged all the time, filing lawsuits, marching, because she didn’t have to save any energy for just being herself.
• • •
Dolezal’s drama didn’t just start recently. The persecution complex, the past lawsuits (when she was white) against a historically black institution like Howard University no less, seem like the whitest thing ever. It’s like when you are with a white friend and they experience racism, likely for the first time, alongside you: they usually go wild, protesting no one and everyone; you shrug as much as shout. Some things are just part of the daily dose of being black. The cab will drive away with a white friend in it rather than drive you too. It’s dealing with blackness that black people have perfected—or at least gotten practiced at.
Racism’s daily injustices are almost an inoculation against it. Almost.
Whenever I tell a white person about the injustices at the airport, or on the street, the daily snubs, or that my white neighbor’s farewell to me as I was moving out of my apartment last year was Goodbye, nigger and that no one in the condos or its board, both painted white, did a thing about it, they too grow silent.
Part of grief, I’ve found, is silence. Protest too, at times. What the no-longer-neighbor wanted from me most, I knew instantly, was a reaction. Bye, I said. Good riddance, I meant.
• • •
I’ve heard even Dolezal’s paintings of black faces while in school as a white graduate student at Howard were actually plagiarized. Our Dolezal didn’t just want to disappear into blackness, but disappear. For her, blackness was not a private thing, which ultimately may be where blackness best tells us what it knows. It is this private, shifting, personal blackness that cannot be borrowed. What can be: wigs, tanning booth, rhetoric.
• • •
Dolezal’s righteous rage looks more like self-righteousness—or is it other-righteousness?
• • •
What no one seems to say is just how Dolezal’s actions, over many years, conform to the typical hoaxer’s: a constant shifting set of stories to explain her identity (it’s complicated), an array of attempts to be not just someone else as anyone might, but to be exotic, even in her birth (which she said was in a teepee or tipi). When asked directly on the teevee if she was born in a teepee, she answered, “I wasn’t born in a teepee,” emphasis allowing that maybe, just maybe, she could later say she was born near or under one. The hoaxer is always leaving the pretend teepee door ajar.
• • •
Dolezal also says she was abused, and claimed to have lived in South Africa. It is true that her actual parents did live there, but not with her, only her siblings—many of whom were actually adopted and black. She apparently earlier equated their alleged beatings (that several of them have denied) with slavery. Given her disproven lies, abuse does not so much provide an explanation for her behavior as much as a distraction: true or not, like her making slavery a mere metaphor it would seem part of a scenario of victimhood, which to her is also, inherently, black.
Borrowed blackness and nativeness provide her the ultimate virtual victimhood.
• • •
Finally the chief problem with racial impostors or blackface: it can be only, as James Weldon Johnson said of stereotypical black dialect, comic or tragic. Ultimately, it conforms to white views of “the blacks” themselves, offstage: as either a joke or a set of jailed youths and stooped old people.
Even the president, who started up a Twitter feed weeks before the Dolezal incident, was inundated by racists posting pictures of nooses and equating him to a monkey or worse. It is only when one feels such stereotypes as real that one might find being in blackface freeing—not because you believe the stereotypes, but because you want to establish other, corny ones.
• • •
Sinking feeling: blackfaced person always occupies a bigger public stage than a black one.
• • •
Standing back, maybe it’s true: not that being black is only comic or tragic, but that too often white thinking or acting out about it, as demonstrated in Dolezal’s hoax and the Charleston murders, remains only polarized: comic or tragic. Both are nullifying.
Amid the bewilderment and grief, for just a moment I wondered how onetime NAACP chapter leader Dolezal would’ve responded, as surely she would have sought to, had she not been unmasked. Where’s our fearless leader now? I thought. Then I didn’t think of her again.
• • •
I came out as black as a teenager. Before then, I was simply a boy. After, I was sometimes, still.
When President Obama broke into “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for those killed at Mother Emanuel, it was mere hours after the Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal, and barring it as unconstitutional. There it was strange yet strangely fitting to hear him sing that song written by the reformed slaver while at sea. I like to think the slaves who took the song over and made it a Negro spiritual were not the same kinds of wretch as its author.
• • •
Of course you can see why anyone would want to be black: being black is fun. Don’t tell nobody.
• • •
This morning I woke from a “deep Negro sleep,” as Senghor put it. I then took a black shower and shaved a black shave; I walked a black walk and sat a black sit; I wrote some black lines; I coughed black and sneezed black and ate black too. This last at least is literal: grapes, blackberries, the ripest plums.
Summer 2015