By Touré
The Atlantic
Sep 14 2011, 2:38 PM ET
Prominent African Americans recall painful and life-altering brushes
with discrimination
There's a Chris Rock joke that is emblematic of modern racism. It's
from his 2008 standup routine "Kill the Messenger," and it's about
Alpine, New Jersey, the posh town where he lives in a multi-million
dollar home. His neighbors include Mary J. Blige, Patrick Ewing, and
Eddie Murphy. Rock says Blige, Ewing, Murphy, and he are (or were)
among the best in the world at their professions, legends in their
line of work. They're also the only four Black homeowners in town.
Then he says his next-door neighbor is a white dentist. "He ain't the
best dentist in the world," Rock says. "He ain't going to the dental
hall of fame. He's just a yank-your-tooth-out dentist." Rock spells
out the point with a devastating punchline: "The Black man gotta fly
to get to somethin' the white man can walk to."
He's saying that in modern America Blacks can ascend to the upper
class, it's possible, but they have to fight so much more to get there
because white supremacy remains a tall barrier to entry. The fact that
a few slip through the infinitesimal cracks is a way of advancing the
idea that white supremacy does not exist, an attempt to mask its
awesome power, because the Matrix doesn't want you to know it's there.
How can someone argue that Alpine, New Jersey, is racist when four
Black families live there, welcomed by the community and unharassed by
police?
Of course this is a fake argument--these extraordinary Blacks would be
welcome anywhere and Alpine itself is not racist because it doesn't
need to be. There are institutional systems in place that keep the
number of Blacks in Alpine and Beverly Hills and other exclusive
communities very low, but not so low that Jesse Jackson can come and
raise a ruckus. It's like releasing a tiny bit of air so the bottle
doesn't explode.
Modern racism is a much more subtle, nuanced, slippery beast than its
father or grandfather were. It has ways of making itself seem to not
exist, which can drive you crazy trying to prove its existence
sometimes. You're in Target. Is the security guard following you?
You're not sure. You think he is but you can't be certain. Maybe the
guard is Black, so if you tried to explain it to a white friend they
might not understand it as racist, but the guard's boss isn't Black.
Or maybe he is. Maybe what you're feeling are his ashamed vibes as if
he's sending you a silent signal of apology for following you. Or
maybe . . . now you're looking for the Tylenol for migraines when you
all you needed was toothpaste.
And that's one of the basest examples of racism. That says nothing of
the constellation of anxieties that could flash through you when the
stakes are high--when you're applying for a job or competing for a
promotion, or applying to a school, buying a house, or asking for a
loan. When you're wondering if the white person who appears less
qualified got the promotion because they were actually better than you
or because they were better at networking upper management, or someone
wrongly assumed you're not as good because you're Black or . . .
I asked my 105 interviewees, What is the most racist thing that has
ever happened to you? The response I received most often was
indicative of modern racism: The answer is unknowable. "I imagine it'd
be a thing I don't even know ever happened," Aaron McGruder said. "It
would be that opportunity that never manifested and I'll never know
that it was even possible." A decision is made in a back room or a
high-level office, perhaps by someone you'll never see, about whether
or not you get a job or a home loan or admission to a school. Or
perhaps you'll never be allowed to know that a home in a certain area
or a job is available. This is how modern institutional racism
functions and it can weigh on and shape a Black person differently
than the more overt, simplistic racism of the past did.
The poet and Yale professor Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, who read an
original poem at Obama's inauguration, said, "The most racist thing
that ever happened to me would likely be a continual underestimation
of my intellectual ability and capacity, and the real insidious aspect
of that kind of racism is that we don't know half the time when people
are underestimating us. We don't know half the time when we're being
cut out of something because someone is unable to see us at full
capacity. And so I presume that that happens, and has happened, a
lot." She presumes this racist miscalculation of her brilliance
happens quite often even though it never makes itself plain. How
tragic.
"What's scary about prejudice is that it's not a measurable force,"
Malcolm Gladwell said. "We just know that it's all around and it
matters sometimes a lot and sometimes it doesn't matter as much but we
don't really know how much."
Many people said they could definitely put a finger on the most racist
moment of their lives. Some of these stories were classic examples of
blatant old-school racism: whites saying or doing things meant to keep
Blacks in a lesser place. Reverend Al Sharpton told me, "I remember
once in the sixties we went down South. We were driving in a Cadillac.
I was maybe seven or eight years old. And my father had been an
amateur boxer so I felt nobody could beat my father. We stopped in
North Carolina and they told him he couldn't eat in that restaurant.
And that was the first time I saw my father emasculated. And I never
forgot. He got back in the car and pulled off and didn't stand up to
them and I didn't understand why. And that bothered me. And he
explained to me what racism was. He said in parts of the country
Blacks are barred from basic things like hotels. And I'm seven, eight
years old. I didn't understand. But I remembered and I think that's
what sparked my activism."
As inspiration, racism can spiral in many different ways. The artist
Fred Wilson said his family was ostracized when, in the 1960s, they
moved to Westchester, a suburb north of New York City. As their home
was being built someone put up a sign that said niggers go back to
Africa. Wilson ended up making no friends in town or at school and
spent a lot of his childhood by himself. "We had a big backyard so my
fantasy life flourished because I was alone all the time, which is why
I am the artist that I am today."
"The most racist experience you have," said Ben Jealous, president of
the NAACP, "is the one that's worst, and the one that's worst is
usually the one that transforms the way you look at the world." These
moments of suddenly discovering the pain and lack of status and power
that attends being Black is what comedian Paul Mooney refers to as "a
nigger wake-up call." Skip Gates calls them "the scene of instruction"
and he says they exist in classic Black autobiographies from slavery
to recent days. "For W.E.B. Dubois it was a little girl who wouldn't
take his Valentine card," Gates said. "For James Weldon Johnson in
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man it was when the teacher said,
'Would all the white scholars stand up,' and he stands up and she goes
'No, you can sit down.' It's always a moment of trauma. There's always
something lacking, a deprivation that makes you realize what being
Black means."
New York Governor David Paterson had a classic scene of instruction
when he helped integrate a segregated school as a nine-year-old
entering the fourth grade. "I don't think I knew what race was," he
said. "And then all of a sudden I found out in a couple of weeks what
race was and I think it was a little disturbing because for the first
time I felt that there were limits on me. And it was clear that some
of the teachers kind of looked down on us." This sense of being taught
the absence of importance, of relevance, of status, of power, of
humanity runs throughout the Black experience. The painter Barkley
Hendricks said: "There's that area of thinking that you're really not
painting people until you're painting white people."
In 1964, in West Virginia a fourteen-year-old Henry Louis Gates Jr.
broke his hip and went to a doctor who x-rayed his knee, which was
also in pain. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his knee and deemed
his pain psychosomatic. "He said that I had a nervous breakdown
because I was an overachiever," Gates said. "He said colored people
weren't supposed to do as well as I had done. I had been stressed out
and there was nothing wrong with my knee. White guy thought I was
imagining things. And that's why I walk with a cane and I've had a
dozen operations since I was fourteen." Gates remains bitter about the
whole thing. "I hope that motherfucker's burning in hell."
Duke Professor Wahneema Lubiano, who was introduced to me by a
brilliant college professor as "one of the smartest people in
America," internalized a racist comment and it shifted the course of
her life. In the early seventies, in Pennsylvania, in high school, she
took the National Merit Scholar's test and placed as a semifinalist.
But when she went to the guidance counselor, he suggested she go to
secretarial school. "And I believed it," she said. "I went home crying
but I believed it." Lubiano ended up going to the University of
Pittsburgh but she left after freshman year. "I dropped out, thinking,
'You're too stupid to do this,'" she said. "The damage had been done."
She didn't return to college for ten years.
When she went back she went to Howard University and it changed her
life. "I was surrounded by really smart Black people who were pretty
casual about it," she said. "It's not like you walked into a class and
sat down and said, 'This is a miracle there are so many smart Black
people here.' No, you normalized it, it was routine. And in that way
it was really nurturing because being smart was routine." For someone
with tremendous mental capability and a self-esteem so fragile that it
could be broken by a slight comment from a white man she respected,
Howard was a life-saver. "By the time I finished with Howard I could
go to grad school at Stanford because I was ready."
In the fall of 1960, in Greenville, South Carolina, an eighteen-year-
old Jesse Jackson tried to use the public library. He was home from
college and needed a certain book for a speech he had to give. "I went
to the colored library," he told me. "Librarian said, 'I don't have
that book but my friend at the Central Library does. I'll write you a
note and I'll call her. She's my friend.' I ran about two and a half
miles. I was so anxious to go because I had to read the book, write
the speech, and memorize it. When I got there I went in the back of
the library and two policemen were standing there talking with her. No
doubt she told 'em I was coming.
"So I give her the note. Said, 'May I get the books?' She said, 'I'll
have 'em in about six days.' I said, 'I need 'em so bad.' I knew not
to ask to sit down. I said, 'Can I go down in the stacks to get them?'
She said, 'Six days.' Policeman said, 'You heard what she said.' I
went out the back of the library and I saw the sign said public
library. I cried."
Jackson said what made him cry was thinking of the man he called his
father--his stepfather, Charles Henry Jackson. He'd fought in World
War II but was barred from certain places on the military base that
even Nazi POWs could enter. That sort of bizarre restriction could
make your head explode--these evil, captured, enemy soldiers had
rights that valiant American soldiers who'd risked their lives did
not? How could one understand or accept that? "Couldn't get it out of
my mind."
The following summer when Jackson returned home he and several college
classmates went to jail for trying to integrate the public library.
"It was kinda my baptism in officially fighting back. I'd grown up to
resent the limitations, resent the walls; that was the first time I'd
taken definitive action." It was the beginning of the activist the
world would come to know and revere.
Deep in the Jim Crow South, amidst backdoor entrances and policemen
always ready to maintain Negro second-class citizenship and white men
who pulled men out of prison in the thick of the night to lynch and
decapitate them, Jackson saw his father debased and physically
endangered and refusing to accept it. And when Jackson encountered
racism that broke his heart and saw a life ahead of him that would
insist he have fewer rights than a Nazi prisoner of war he said no, at
the risk of death, I refuse, and in the name of justice, I refuse.
Because my father taught me better, even if he didn't realize it. At
his scene of instruction, Jackson began to blossom into greatness.
Adapted from Touré's Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? (Free Press/Simon
& Schuster, 2011).
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