Sitting to Stand: Protest, Patriotism and the Endurance of White Supremacy
In his recent New York Times op-ed, “The Uses of Patriotism,” David Brooks chides high school football players who would protest racism by not standing for the national anthem. Invoking American Studies pioneer Perry Miller, Brooks argues that patriotic self-criticism and radical hope, not abstention, are the foundation of American values. It is through these partnered ideas that the United States fuses into a nation. Thus, he concludes, it is the duty of all Americans to participate in patriotic rituals because they alone bind us into a nation.
He is not alone. In the months since Colin Kaepernick decided to stay seated during the national anthem, this country has witnessed an extended attempt to diminish the act. Former quarterback Boomer Esiason said that Kaepernick was “about as disrespectful as any athlete has ever been,” while Hall of Fame baseball manager Tony La Russa called Kaepernick’s sincerity into question. Fox News correspondent Bill O’Reilly went even further, arguing that “No nation is perfect,” but the presence of racial injustice described by Kaepernick and others is grossly overstated. Most recently, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg surprised some and confirmed for others that even the most stalwart proponents of justice can be and often are insufficiently critical on matters of race when she told Katie Couric that Kaepernick’s decision not to stand was “dumb and disrespectful.” [Ginsburg has since apologized] Like Brooks, these four understand patriotism to be bigger than any individual or race.
They are right that recent protests transcend any single event or person. They are wrong, however, that patriotic rituals form a binding phenomenon that exceeds questions of racism. To the contrary, the continued presence of racism within the United States severs our national connection and, in doing so, renders acts of uncritical patriotism a mockery of the American polity. What good, we might ask, are rituals when they require one to forego national reckoning for feel-good aqcuiencence. When approached from this vantage, kneeling becomes less a gesture of disrespect than a demand for the kind of critical analysis Brooks and others understand to be the crucial element of American hope. It is, then, an invitation for Americans to interrogate white supremacy in all its shifting and often complicated manifestations.
For many, the invocation of white supremacy conjures violent events and abhorrent laws from the past. However, these historical facts are better thought of as consequences of white supremacy, not the enduring and wily thing itself. At base, white supremacy is nothing more than the institutional privileging of white desire over and above the rights, protections and needs of citizens of color. It is not, then, a specific set of laws or rules that exist historically, but, rather, a network of legal, social and moral responses that privilege white interests. This means that white supremacy exceeds specific laws, which are always historical responses to particular desires.
And much like the radical hope Brooks cites, white supremacy has existed throughout this nation’s history. The Constitution included a clause that postponed all efforts to prohibit the importation of enslaved Africans for twenty years. Largely a compromise meant to appease delegates in Georgia and South Carolina, the clause placed the interests of white slave owners above the protection and interests of enslaved Africans. Nearly 80 years later, state legislatures in the South installed Jim Crow laws, sanctioning white desire for segregation. In the North, practices like redlining had a similar effect. In each case, white desire superseded the rights and protections of black people.
Of course, white supremacy is not limited to oppressive sanctions and events. It also exists within acts we think of as liberating. One of the more famous examples is the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Ed. decision, which desegregated public schools and effectively overturned the Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine. While often presented as a moment of uncomplicated progress, scholars from a variety of fields have argued that the Court’s decision was not motivated by its desire to redress racial suffering; rather, it ended legal segregation in order to improve the country’s international image at the start of the Cold War. To borrow from legal scholar Derrick Bell, Brown v. Board of Ed. was a moment of “interest convergence,” which is to say that it was a moment in which the pursuit of racial justice received a favorable decision because it coincided with the interests of whites.
Today, we no longer live under legal segregation. This is a good thing. It is also a fact that has led many to argue that we have found our way to a post-racial nation. And, yet, racial disparity abounds. This new millennium is one in which people of color are disproportionately imprisoned. It is one in which people of color are less likely than whites to receive needed health services. And it is one in which wealth disparity exceeds the normal markers of success, with a 2016 study by the Corporation for Economic Development and the Institute for Policy Studies finding that the average black family would need 228 years to build the wealth of the average white family.
One of the more popular — but fallacious — explanations for these disparities is the myth of black pathology. Like medical pathology, from which the concept derives, black pathology describes a condition in which a deviation from healthy behavior causes problems. In the case of black pathology, aspects of black culture, which is to say the behaviors and values of black people, are believed to be the cause of racial disparity. For some proponents, oppressive conditions are seen to have shaped black culture, but where time has healed legal and social oppression, black culture is understood to have remained stalled. For others, the recognition of historically oppressive conditions has no bearing on the contemporary moment. Nevertheless, black culture continues to be seen as the source of disparity within African American communities. Both notions, however, share the idea that poor black communities are the source or reason for ill conditions.
Putting aside the ways this myth reduces black people to a monolith, it is worth noting that white participation within black cultural production or the adoption of values and behaviors associated with the black community is seldom enough to precipitate consequence. Whether we look at the phenomenon of Elvis or the contemporary embrace of rap music, white audiences continue to enjoy black culture with few if any of the consequences normally associated with it. More telling, illicit behavior, no matter how vile, has proven to be an insufficient guarantor of long term consequence for white people.
The same cannot be said for people of color. Drug usage, for instance, has been shown to cut across race and class, and, yet, poor communities of color are disproportionately policed and convicted for these offenses. These convictions often lead to imprisonment, which, in turn, lead to social and economic disenfranchisement upon release. What initially is seen to be the consequence of culture — or, to quote Paul Ryan, the “tailspin of culture” — is nothing less than a systemic imbalance in how communities are policed, protected and judged. Put more simply, to be a person of color in the United States increases the chance of a small mistake rising to catastrophe. But worse, this threat does not require black men and women to make a mistake; consequences are suffered even when no crime has been comitted. And despite its inconsistent applications across racial lines, the myth of cultural pathology has become the excuse upon which disparity is explicated and the American project exonerated.
The installation of pathology is not unique to this moment. In fact, the ease with which we accept its truth is predicated upon the frequency of installation across the last two-hundred years. If racist terms like jezebel, buck, zip coon, and sambo have been removed from the American lexicon, the particular grammars or ways both the state and white communities come to know people of color have not. Nor are these installations unique to those who seek to diminish African Americans. To the contrary, pathological assignment can be found within work from historians and social scientists who endeavored to prove stereotypes of African Americans to be both a fallacious and corrosive force throughout this nation’s history.
In his 1959 monograph, Slavery, Stanley Elkins argued that the psychological impact of slavery on black men reduced them to childlike sambos and, in doing so, evacuated a great deal of misinformation spread by slavery apologists and Dunning School historians. Yet, for all its intended good, the argument retains — indeed, maintains — the insidious idea that slavery created the conditions through which black pathology emerged. Enslaved men were not the endlessly resilient survivors of slavery’s violent and vile conditions. They were, instead, a series of conjoined adjectives: “docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing.” Following Elkins’s series, it is not hard to imagine someone arguing that racial disparity both during and after 1865 was the consequence of uneven social development between races.
And, indeed, this was the case. As early as the 1960s, social scientists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Kenneth Clark and reporters like Rowland Evans and Robert Novak published reports on cultural pathologies that were believed to explain poverty across generations. By the 1970s, historians had disproven Elkins’s thesis, but diagnoses of pathology remained in both social science and the popular press. Much like Elkins’ argument, these reports effectively shifted the location of deprivation but failed to excise pathological assignments. More simply, the black community was no longer thought to be biologically inferior; rather, it was believed to be socially and culturally stalled.
By the 1980s and well into the 1990s, concepts of the “underclass” became the primary hinge through which pathology was bolted to the black community. This was true even as many of these studies ostensibly turned to class. As David Theo Goldberg argues, “the idea of project housing has . . . come to stand throughout ‘the West’ as the central mark of racially constituted urban pathology,” out of which emerged a variety of newly invented stereotypes like the “welfare queen” and the “super predator.” By contrast, poor white communities during this period were often framed as the victims of industry and a diminished economy. Whether we look at the rust belt, which describes a geographical area various industries once utilized and have now abandoned, or the xenophobic and unfounded notion that immigrants take jobs from U.S.-born laborers, poor white communities seldom come up against the idea that white culture is to blame for unemployment and poverty.
Whatever the historical or sociological reasoning, a single assertion continued to surface within report after report and across time: African Americans were the makers of their own deprivation — even as study after study proved the continued existence of institutional racism. Today, calls for African Americans to focus on “black on black crime” draw from this tradition, not statistics. Such calls, however, ignore more recent studies and reports like that from the Center for Contemporary Families, which found that a single-parent family structure, the perennial boogeyman of reactionaries, does not lead to an increase in juvenile crime or inequality.
They also ignore the work done by people of color within their respective and particular communities. When the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, argues that Donald Trump’s West Bend, Wisconsin speech “casts [the candidate] alongside some of the worst fascists in history,” she does so as the special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the former executive director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), and a board member for Forward Together. By contrast, when Donald Trump tells Bill O’Reilly that Chicago police could solve the city’s violence “by being very much tougher than they are right now,” he ignores community organizations like CeaseFire and violence interrupters, who work to deescalate situations within Chicago neighborhoods. This comparison is not meant to quantify efforts, which is problematic in and of itself; rather, it is meant to point out Garza and others’ respective commitments to issues that pundits and politicians like Trump claim protestors lack.
This is to say nothing of how these calls conflate separate issues in order to diminish objections to police violence. As my friend Robert Tillman remarked upon reading an early draft of this essay, “it’s not just about black pathology. It’s about diversion. At what point does existence of crime excuse additional crime? Where’s the point on that graph?” His opinion is shared by Black Lives Matter organizers. As they write on their site,
The continued focus on black-on-black crime is a diversionary tactic, whose goal is to suggest that black people don’t have the right to be outraged about police violence in vulnerable black communities, because those communities have a crime problem. The Black Lives Matter movement acknowledges the crime problem, but it refuses to locate that crime problem as a problem of black pathology.
The recent calls for patriotism are equally diversionary, and like those calls that ask protestors to focus on crime, they miss a simple fact of history: the seizure of rights by people of color has never come from quiet acquiescence. Writing in 1845, Frederick Douglass captures the need for seizure when he tells his audience, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Seventy years later, in 1925, Elise Johnson McDougald took up the work begun by formerly enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs in her essay “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation.” In it, she refused the vile stereotypes that had long been thought to be the biological destiny of black women and urged readers to recognize the rich history of black women who had and continued to create lives in the midst of both racial and gender oppression. Today, we call interrogations of this overlap between race and gender intersectionality. This is thanks to legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work from the late 1980s, which further expanded our ability to understand how race and gender form a network of oppression.
These are only three examples of critical life-making across a century, but there are as many examples as there are people of color — both past and present. Indeed, whether we look at slave revolts, the Underground Railroad, the politics of uplift, the Civil Rights and Black nationalist movements, Womanism or quotidian gestures like humor and song in the face of oppression, black citizenship and its liberties have been made by rather than given to African Americans.
Yet, even as individual lives were made, the pursuit of liberty by people of color was not accepted without complaint. To the contrary, communities of color have long been treated as impositions upon white citizenship. This was true in 1867, when white, Louisianan Kate Stone lamented that newly freed black men and women “demanded high wages.” It was true a century later, when FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, called Martin Luther King, Jr. the “most notorious liar in the country.” And it is true today when people of color’s demands for racial justice are dismissed on the basis that equality can only be maintained by a colorblind approach to law and nation.
The nation, however, is not colorblind. It has never been colorblind. To paraphrase Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the absence of racial insult does not evidence the absence of racial discrimination. And to treat these absences as synonymous is to reveal colorblind models as little more than tactics through which the state and its citizens disavow the presence of continued racism. To singularly confront overt acts of racism, as colorblind models suggest, is to dismantle one’s ability to confront covert racism.
It is this focus on overt acts, for instance, that allowed Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy for Ronald Reagan to work. As he describes to Alexander Lamis in 1981,
[this] is how abstract you handle the race thing. In other words, you start out — now y’all aren’t quoting me on this — you start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say nigger — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. . . And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.
For Atwater, abstraction was the means through which white desire could be smuggled into a political climate that no longer accorded overt racism. But it was — and is — the ethos of colorblindism that discouraged citizens from interrogating the bulge under Atwater’s rhetorical robe.
More importantly, colorblind approaches sabotage efforts to identify racialized consequences that have no single culprit but, instead, are the result of historical accrual and structural inequality. It is this approach that enables Ohioan and former Trump chairwoman, Kathy Miller, to say, “I don’t think there was any racism before Obama got elected . . . You’ve had every opportunity. It was given to you . . . You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to.” Barring the absurdity of Miller’s timeline, her assertion illuminates how colorblind approaches obscure the operations of contemporary inequality. To put it bluntly, people of color have not had every opportunity even after Brown. In the fifty-plus years since the Supreme Court desegregated schools, educational inequality persists in numerous ways. Even optimists like sociologist Adam Gamoran, whose 2001 study for the Sociology of Education foresees a continuing decline in black and white educational inequality throughout 21st Century, acknowledges that communities of color remain at a structural disadvantage.
Miller’s claim also fails to acknowledge how proximity and affluence have not been able to inoculate communities of color from both racial limit and animus. A 2013 Columbia Law School study found that girls of color suffer harsher punishment and are six times more likely to be suspended than their white peers, while black boys are three times more likely to be suspended than white boys. That same year, the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce found that while minority students have better access to higher education than ever before, African American and Latin American students are being channeled into open-access two- and four-year colleges at the undergraduate level while white students are encouraged to apply to more selective colleges. And obstacles do not end once a person of color has been accepted by a college. As a 2015 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found, inquiries about research opportunities from women and persons of color were more likely to be ignored by faculty than identical requests from white males.
Equally dire findings can be found within employment. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester K. Spence observes that job opportunities abounded in the pre-Obama nineties, and had he stopped his investigation of job growth at this point, it would appear that assertions like those made by Miller were correct. Thankfully, he complicates his findings, pointing out that while the vast majority of white job seekers were placed in jobs that included job security, stable hours, safe working conditions and benefits, approximately 75% of jobs that African Americans and Latin Americans took during this same period did not. In fact, Spence finds that “3 out of every 5 jobs that were added among black and Latino populations were bad jobs,” which he describes as those that offer “very low wages, unstable hours, little to no job security, little to no dignity, no due process, unsafe working conditions, and little to no benefits.” In the case of the pre-Obama nineties, then, it was not that people of color failed to take advantage of job opportunities; rather, it was that the kinds of jobs available to job seekers were, in part, determined by race. And, worse, such determinations led to jobs that created further disenfranchisement within African American and Latinx communities. Where Miller sees “fifty years” of self-inflicted and, perhaps, pathological failure on the part of African Americans, Spence demonstrates this to be patently false.
Of course, colorblindism is not the exclusive domain of reactionary dismissal; it has also bankrupted goodwill efforts like empathy. This is not to dismiss empathy out of hand. It can be and often is a powerful means through which we come to better see and understand those who live at a distance from us. But when it is used as the means through which difference is erased, empathy is dangerous. As Saidiya Hartman argues, empathy always threatens to become the method through which the powerful hijack the experiences of oppressed communities. By employing a “shared language of pain” the enfranchised link themselves to the kind of violence endured by institutionally marginalized communities. The danger of this is twofold: it not only enables one to speak for the disenfranchised, it also allows the enfranchised to center their experiences, to replace, as it were, marginalized experiences with their own.
When in her DNC Convention speech, Hilary Clinton called for Americans to “put ourselves in the shoes of” both “young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism” and police officers, she offered listeners a shared language of pain through which to equate the violence wrought by racism with the killing of police. And, in doing so, she drew people of color and the police as parallel communities. They’re not. The kind of violence that manifests because of systemic racism and the threat of violence police officers face are two different phenomenons. Both are tragic, but to rhetorically and temporally link them, as she does, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they invoke ideas like systemic racism and white supremacy.
Whether we look at its utility for smuggling in older iterations of racism or the ways it encourages individuals to be uncritical of structural racism, colorblindism is central to the maintenance of white supremacy. At best, it mistakes good intentions for good ends — even as dire consequences disproportionately befall communities of color. At worst, it is the method through which the acknowledgement of racial difference is seen to be antithetical to the American project — even as such acknowledgements are necessary for rooting out today’s most insidious inequalities.
These are just a few of the issues that surround Colin Kaepernick’s decision not to stand. And they are the issues we ignore when we ask high school players not to do the same. To kneel is to move against those tactics that seek to blind us to racial disenfranchisement and violence. They are neither simple abstentions nor acts of disrespect. Rather, they are acts of radical insertion, which seek to halt those narratives that erase black lives politically, socially and physically. And, in doing so, they help many of us to recognize that while the vagueness of this country’s foundational creed opens up an ideological space through which people of color have inserted themselves, our founding documents — which is to say the colonial, state and national laws that both establish and sustain our lives — have been much clearer about whose rights and desires should be protected. Indeed, Kaepernick’s opponents would do well to consult Perry Miller’s student Edmund Morgan, who famously argued that American slavery was the predicate upon which [white] American freedom was won.
Postscript: The Half Life of Racism & Practices of Displacement
Throughout the writing of this essay, one grandmother, numerous calls and hundreds of texts have interrupted me. I have been thankful for all of them, as they have allowed for breaks from this attempt to parse difficult ideas and realities.
Today is different. As I work through the final edits of this essay, reports of Terence Crutcher, the 40-year old African American man murdered by a white Oklahoma police officer, fill my phone. And the only question I can manage to ask is whether we have reached a moment when it is possible to hate racism but not love people of color?
I’m not sure. Frankly, I’m not sure of much right now. This includes whether or not I should send this essay out into the world. I am, after all, a white man whose work on these topics is always undertaken without the risks that threaten writers of color. What this essay and my work more broadly bely is the often unacknowledged problem of who gets the opportunities to work and succeed and who gets to live in relative safety.
This much I know: despite notions to the contrary, these preoccupations are my own. I have never experienced people of color telling me that I should not be working on any of the topics I have undertaken. I have, of course, been taken to task for lacking the training and rigor required to effectively confront them, as I would in any field. But my interests in the literature and music of African American communities has been met with a great deal of support and guidance from both peers and mentors of color. This is not to say that tacit approval or even unvocalized dismissal, of which I am also sure is present, means that I have earned the right to pursue these fields. It is merely to address the idea that people of color who challenge white scholars and allies do so out of separatist inclinations. If my experience and work is any indication, they do not.
It is also an anemic attempt to recognize how the expectation of embrace by people of color is, in and of itself, a function of white supremacy. For me to demand that I be given a role, to think that I’m entitled to the work, is to privilege my desires over and above the very people with whom I claim solidarity. For white men like me, work is easy. We bear none of the bodily and social risk with which people of color contend. What is harder is showing up and maintaining a presence that relinquishes any sense of feeling useful. What is harder is being quietly present even when every impulse lurches toward volume.
Sometimes presence of this sort requires nothing more than listening, and sometimes presence does not even rise to listening. Nevertheless, the decision to remain within an often uncomfortable and awkward quiet is not without its uses; it is a gesture that both acknowledges how history has disallowed automatic trust across race and one that seeks to displace white needs. For the white ally, quiet — not silent — presence and the kind of vulnerability it can generate must be ok.
This was something lost on me when I was younger. I wasted countless opportunities to stand with people of color by demanding a central role in discussions and efforts to push against oppression. And only by the grace and patience of friends have I come to see my demands as a form of racialized dismissal.*
Dismissals of this sort are not unique to me. They are present in discussions about Yale’s Calhoun College and the effect of living and working in a space that includes windows depicting enslaved Africans. They are present in Lionel Shriver’s keynote address at last week’s Brisbane Writers Festival, where Shriver framed cultural appropriation as the proverbial gag placed upon white writers. So, too, are they present in the University of Chicago’s letter to incoming students that safe spaces would no longer be provided. In each case, there exists a logic wherein the dominant group’s inability to fathom structural violence somehow determines that certain experiences are either not true or exaggerated. When this occurs, discussion becomes a means through which the majority community justifies its distrust of certain experiences and arguments. This is precisely the moment in which dorms, classrooms and book events become unsafe or violent. This is precisely the moment when a community is marginalized.
This is not to say that painful, confusing and even unsatisfying discussions are worthless. To the contrary, discussion is always necessary. The centrality of white perspectives, however, is not. So while it is true that discussions are about making sense of what we hope to collectively know, it is also true that the desire to make sense of something according to our individual, normative and white experience has the potential to re-instantiate a structural space in which racism orders our conclusions. And our way out of such re-instantiation must start with efforts to displace ourselves.
My process of displacement starts with learning how to be powerless to privileges I can neither take off nor disable. This sometimes means that I have to be absent or outside of the groups that I most seek to be a part of. It sometimes means that I have to accept the fact that I’ve injured people with whom I most seek connection. And it often means acquiescing to failure because there is no correct practice, no definite path, no sure way to guarantee that my actions match the desire to do well by people and communities. There are only gestures that are learned minute by minute and failed second by second.
To be sure, this failure produces a profound psychic damage. It is also an injury always already entering into its half-life. For white people hurt by racism, decay is not imminent; it has already begun. This is true even when its half-life seems to endure, as it does, and even when the alienation is painfully felt, as it is. What I have come to learn is that psychic injury surges for white folks, but it so immediately enters its half-life that it’s hard not to see this as a function of power itself. It allows us to fool ourselves, to believe that we have an equal share in the violence and pain wrought from racism.
What is harder to grasp is that there is no decay for people of color. There is certainly joy and celebration. And there is love and invention that have nothing to do with racism and which are accountable only to the communities in which these same expressions emerge. And there is grace, too — of course and always. But these moments are enacted in the midst of structural and personal violence. For people of color, there is no decay. There is only continuity. As racism is evaded, racism evades.
This difference means something. And it is always present. It is there when efforts are taken to grapple with these issues, as I am doing now. And it is there when well-meaning white people sink into the ease of similarity. And I suspect that this ease, so clearly born from the desire to fold into communities we admire and respect, is its own form of violence. This is white supremacy’s most insidious manifestation.
There is, of course, no procedure that guarantees success. But what is clear is that discomfort is part of the process, and sometimes the only way for white folks to partner with people of color is to stay quiet and listen — to be, as it were, outside. And so we, too, must sit to stand — though differently and with an intent to help as people of color determine necessary. And that has to be ok, as do the sorts of discomfort borne by a presence that sometimes feels like absence.
*Special acknowledgement to Rodney Osher, Margo Ellis, Daniel del Pielego Ramon Alvarez, Danny Gardner, Patricia Ravenell, Dr. Jason “Haysoos” Nichols, Dr. Herman Beavers, Dr. Julius Flemming, Dr. Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum & Dr. Tanji Gilliam.
