“Did you see that?” Robert asked.
The speaker was a light-skinned black
man with close-cropped hair, a sense of fashion, and a fine tenor voice. Like me,
he was a member of the Columbia Basin Junior College jazz choir—a twelve-voice ensemble
called the Desert Tones. It was the spring of 1965. Having just finished a
concert in Yakima, we all went to a local restaurant for dinner.
“Did I see what?” I asked.
“Did you see the way the people in
the diner glared at me when I walked in?”
I admitted that I had not. But how
could I? I was white and impervious to the thousand cuts felt by a black man.
Was Robert to blame for the white
people’s resentment? Many would say, “Yes.”
The American psychologist William Ryan
explained it well in his 1971 landmark book, Blaming the Victim. According to Ryan, blaming black people for
their struggles is a strategy for justifying racial injustice.
Ryan offered education as an example.
The nearly illiterate black ghetto child is described as “culturally deprived,”
which is a euphemism for low intelligence, non-standard English, hyperactivity,
and a dearth of reading materials at home.
His poor performance at school is his problem. Nothing is mentioned of the
crumbling school building; the ragged, outdated books; the overcrowded
classrooms; and the frightened or insensitive administrators and teachers.
For a black boy or girl to advance in
society, it requires twice the effort applied by a privileged white child.
The life of a 1964 Pasco High School
classmate of mine, Lynda, is an example of the magnitude of that effort. Her
grandfather, Joseph, was lynched in Mississippi circa 1932. Lynda’s mother,
Naomi, was determined to shelter and feed her children. So, she decided to
become a registered nurse. It was no easy task. In the middle of her final
exam, she asked the instructor if she could go to the bathroom. The teacher
refused. Naomi was disparate. She was caught between two conflicting needs:
first, to relieve herself and, second, to graduate. So she reluctantly seized
the only alternative available. She told the other nursing candidates to turn
their heads while she discharged into the classroom waste-paper basket. Naomi
was the only black student to graduate, although her name was accidentally excluded
from the list of graduates.
Lynda described her mother—a single
parent—as “intelligent, courageous, and determined.” They were the same
qualities Naomi instilled in her children. If their homework did not meet
Naomi’s standards, she would tear up the work and say, “Begin again, and this
time do it right.”
At sixteen, Lynda was the first black
person to work at the Pasco J.C. Penny’s department store. At seventeen, she
worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. Then, her burgeoning interest in civil
rights landed her a position with the Seattle Human Rights Commission. Thanks to
President Kennedy’s affirmative action program, she was able to attend and graduate
with a BA in psychology from the University of Washington.
Lynda’s life was not without turmoil.
In high school, other students occasional identified her by the N-word. Her
first marriage ended in divorce. Her seventeen-year-old son was shot in the
heart by a Seattle gang member for out-rhyming the thug in a spontaneous rap competition.
Her daughter died at that age of twenty-seven after a fourteen-year battle with
lupus. A security guard killed her brother in a department store because “he
looked suspicious.” (Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey have also felt the sting of
suspicion.) The guard was acquitted.
Today, Lynda says that she has little
time to waste on life’s tragedies. Instead, she is thankful for spiritual
grounding, a loving husband, a fine home, and—not surprisingly—independence.
Cynics might say that Lynda is the
exception. I say that she is certainly exceptional—and inspirational. It is not
easy being black in America—even for college-educated blacks. A 2016 survey by
the Economic Policy Institute found that black college graduates are twice as
likely to be unemployed than white graduates. In 2011, during the height of the
recession, 20.7% of black college graduates were unemployed, as compared to 9%
of their white counterparts.
Why is that? Is it because the black graduates
are less educated? Obviously not. It is because of historical prejudices and
institutionalized racism. Do not blame the victim; blame a complex and often
contradictory social amalgam of ignorance, biases, injustices, and fears.
How often have we heard this
colloquial version of the American Dream? “Hey, anybody can succeed if they
work hard enough. And if they don’t, they’re just lazy or like collecting food
stamps.”
The American Dream may be true for
the privileged—especially the wealthy white class. It is not true for the black
boy or girl from the slums. Their mantra has to be something entirely different
to survive in a white world:
“I love the color of my skin. I’m
proud and courageous, but I’m not cocky. I work harder than I ever imagined. I
choose to be so dignified, so qualified, that prospective employers would be
foolish not to hire me. I am not derailed by my people’s history or even my
family’s history. I am brand new. I am the architect of my life. And although I
have one hell of a climb—one that is often marked by injustice—I will keep
asking, keep seeking, keep knocking, until I am finally heard and the door is
opened.”
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying
that this should be the mantra of
every black man or woman; I’m saying it has
to be. And that truth is the proof of white privilege.
