Black white
“I and two Negro acquaintances, all of us well past thirty, and looking it, were in the bar of Chicago's O'Hare Airport several months ago, and the bartender refused to serve us, because, he said, we looked too young. It took a vast amount of patience not to strangle him, and great insistence and some luck to get the manager, who defended his bartender on the ground that he was "new" and had not yet, presumably, learned how to distinguish between a Negro boy of twenty and a Negro "boy" of thirty-seven.
Well, we were served, finally, of course, but by this time no amount of Scotch would have helped us. The bar was very crowded, and our altercation had been extremely noisy; not one customer in the bar had done anything to help us.
When it was over, and the three of us stood at the bar trembling with rage and frustration, and drinking- and trapped, now, in the airport, for we had deliberately come early in order to have a few drinks and to eat—a young white man standing near us asked if we were students. I suppose he thought that this was the only possible explanation for our putting up a fight. I told him that he hadn't wanted to talk to us earlier and we didn't want to talk to him now. The reply visibly hurt his feelings, and this, in turn, caused me to despise him. But when one of us, a Korean War veteran, told this young man that the fight we had been having in the bar had been his fight, too, the young man said, "I lost my conscience a long time ago," and turned and walked out. I know that one would rather not think so, but this young man is typical. So, on the basis of the evidence, had everyone else in the bar lost his conscience.” -- James Baldwin, Down At the Cross
The other day, in a drunken state myself and looking to become moreso, I stumbled down the street of my neighborhood here in Portland to a local spot with food, music, and art from the deep South - specifically, the Mississippi Delta. Given where we live, the entire staff was white skinned, as I presume the ownership to be.
As I sauntered my way to the back patio, I grabbed a menu and waited to be served. And waited. And waited. And waited. Until eventually I decided it was no longer worth waiting to be served anymore and I would take my business elsewhere. On the way out, I asked the bartender why it was so difficult to get service to which she demurred and made an excuse or two, two which I replied, “Is it because I’m Black?” The bartender, a White woman, broke out in laughter, as did a couple others, as I left the bar.
If I sat down and thought about it, I could probably tell 3-4 hours straight of stories just like this one about my experience living in Portland. But I’m less interested in that, and more interested in the woman’s response to my question - to laugh at a Black white.
In America, for all intents and purposes, there is Black and there is White. There are Yellow, Red, and Brown too, but due to our attention being so deeply co-opted and eroded by sensationalist media, we don’t have the capacity to hold multiple cultural conversations simultaneously in this country right now. So let’s focus on Black and White.
Now, most people in America understand Black and White to denominate race, and race in America generally doesn’t actually mean race in any sort of genetic or scientific capacity, it’s simply a code word to describe the color of your skin. And what I’d like to propose to you is that Black and White - these codes - don’t actually have anything to do with the color of your skin, and rather have everything to do with your cultural inheritance in this country.
One important aspect - perhaps the most important? - of being Black in America is to be born into disinheritance. Howard Thurman describes this in depth in his essays Jesus & the Disinherited, and cuts to the heart of the matter when he asks
This is the position of the disinherited in every age. What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political, social, and economic life? This is the question of the Negro in American life.
Of course, here he references the American Negro which is a kind of race, I suppose, but what he describes here is less about them and more about the notion of disinheritance: when born into an unjust world, how should one conduct oneself?
In this aspect, Blackness has nothing to do with the color of your skin, and rather more to do with the hand you were dealt at birth.
Another key aspect of being Black in America is to be treated as subhuman by Whites. I don’t think this one needs much fleshing out since we can see it born out on black flesh nearly every day in this country if we pay attention: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Walter Scott, Solomon Northup, the list goes on and on, seemingly forever throughout American history.
But this physical violence of the flesh is not the most degrading form of treatment by Whites to Blacks. Instead, it is more the violence that Baldwin describes in the opening quote’s anecdote.
This form of violence is violence upon the soul, a violence intended to destroy one’s love of self, and thus completely submit one to the subjugation of White America: “You can only be destroyed by really believing that you are what the white world calls a nigger.” (Emphasis his.)
For the purpose of this discussion, a final key aspect of being Black in America is to be asked to live in a constant state of terror.
What terrorizes you?
Our nation's economy, its media, its police, its courts, its prisons, its government, its schools, even its churches. For a Black person in America, there is no escape from fear, for even were you to temporarily escape or avoid it in one place or institution, it will find you at the next, wherever you go.
Now, of these three key aspects of being Black in America — born into disinheritance, treated as subhuman, and living within a society built to keep you subjugate through fear — which has anything to do with the color of your skin?
It is a uniquely American phenomenon that we have created a race - the American Negro, it was called, although that seems to have fallen out of fashion - the only quality that binds them together being the darkness of their skin, and have forced them to endure these miscarriages of justice all the while self-proclaiming America and American values as the greatest country and greatest government the world has ever seen.
But correlation does not mean causation, and Blackness - at least as I have defined it here, based on the teachings of many of Black America’s greatest teachers - is not reserved for the American Negro alone. And this is why, if you were to look, you have seen Freddy Hampton, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and so many other leading intellectuals and artists constantly discuss the idea that Black does not mean black, just as White does not mean white.
But this idea is extremely hard for White America to understand because it undermines everything about the reality of white meaning White, which again is just childish code for white meaning Power.
As Baldwin wrote:
Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
Because, to be clear, Power is the cultural inheritance that all of this is really about, and white and black skin tones are just idiotic variables used to assign power - to decide who is disinherited and who is not. And as black Americans have fought and won, more pried really, power from white Americans, we have seen the White response: lynchings, race riots, Jim Crow, redlining, gerrymandering, etc. Anything to ensure the universe they created is not disturbed.
And what I would tell you is that, of the three key aspects of being Black in America, I am all three. And I’m sure this will make many people, both black and white skinned alike, laugh or at least smile. But it is not a laughing matter to be born into disinheritance, treated as subhuman, and live in a constant state of terror, even if I have missed some, many, or maybe even most of the most horrific parts of bearing black skin in this country (I doubt I have, even if I failed to mention them here).
So like Baldwin when he was refused service at the O’Hare airport bar, I also raged and fumed and continue to rage and fume, over my treatment at a bar here in Portland whose nearly every aspect has been appropriated from Black culture and yet treats Black Americans like second class citizens.