End of Blackness

Several years ago I read The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and was impressed by her facile and intellectual writing style and the force of her message. In her book Dickerson concludes that we’ve gotten all that we are going to get from whites in terms of apology or concession, that through begrudging white acquiescence and black determination, blacks have made tremendous strides in the past 45 years since the Civil Rights Movement, that racism is not dead but has morphed into a new, less virulent strain that while still harmful no longer prevents blacks from achievement, and most importantly, that blacks should stop looking to whites to solve their problems but rather find solutions within themselves as individuals and from within their own community.

I pulled Blackness off the shelf recently and began to read it again, as I do with most books that I really enjoy. I expected to savor again some of the lucid, clear points that Dickerson makes in this very insightful and pragmatic writing. But something is happening this time around. I’m picking up a vibe that I’m not sure whether I missed the first time, or that my views have since shifted – probably to the right but still left of center – since I last read the book and I’m reading it now through a different prism. From this reading of Blackness I’m feeling from her an edge, an anger, even a meanness that I didn’t feel before.

I know that a black person writing meanly about white people should come as no surprise, and is with justification. I’m used to taking a beating, as a white, reading black literature of the fifties, sixties and later, about black oppression and victimization, about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and overt racism, about how a white can take no comfort in racial ignorance, that all whites are guilty, actively or passively, in America’s great Original Sin. I fully understand, though no longer fully accept, that today's white cannot wash his hands of the racism of centuries ago by simply saying I wasn’t there. Such readings for me have always had a purging effect, as if reading the work of an angry black author was a cleansing, washing away at least some of the white guilt, and possibly – though rarely – showing me the way to salvation from the racial swamp that we all have to muck around in.

Writings like Dickerson’s always leave me perplexed. As a white reader you take a real pounding from constant reminders of how your being white ties you permanently to our nation’s treatment of blacks first as as slaves, then victims of the Jim Crow era, followed by being the recipients of the various forms of overt and invidious racism of the 20th century up to today.

The black writers remind a white person how barren is his soul of love, how hopelessly egocentric and Eurocentric he is. What’s perplexing is that nothing concrete is offered as to how whites can help. I believe that the vast majority of whites want to do the right thing when it comes to helping other Americans in need, regardless of race. But whites today don't know what to do when it comes to being part of the race solution, if there even is one, and blacks have nothing substantive to offer them as to how to help. (Dickerson at least offers a strategy for blacks to follow.)

Most of us have come to recognize that blacks historically have been treated egregiously and, we are willing to take part in something to make things right. America has been trying to do that for the past 45 years. First, the black-led Civil Rights Movement blew the doors off old-school racism, prejudice and discrimination. Then President Johnson ushered in the $7 trillion Great Society that harmed more than helped black America, destroying the black family and black manhood with open-ended welfare. Maybe whites have not embraced the change, but we have accepted it as inevitable, and we either stepped aside and let it happen, or jumped in and helped to bring about the change. After all, the vast majority of the social workers and social engineers of the Great Society where white liberals, motivated by a blend of white guilt and a sincere, if naive, desire to do good.

Dickerson thinks that because American culture is out there, highly visible for all to see on television, film, art, and the Internet that blacks know what whites thinking and feeling. Black race writers always see whites as transparent, an easy read. They still rely on the dated model of the old days, when blacks worked in the midst of white folks but were invisible as slaves, domestics, and menial laborers. And whites carried on with their lives in the presence of these blacks as if they were invisible. Or some blacks became close friends or confidantes and were brought in on the nuances of white life. But those days are past. Today, all our shit is hanging out there – black, white, Latino, whoever. And all of us from all cultures and groups in America know, or have access to, what the others are thinking, or how they feel on a certain topic. There are no more racial secrets in America. We’re the Mulatto Nation now.