I would like to speak for a moment, to speak in very loose and non-technical terms, about a clash of races. Less generally, I would like to speak of the black race—of what have been called black identity and the fact of blackness. More specifically, I would like to speak of these things in the contexts of culture, of my self as a member of the white race, and of a confluence of personal histories, identity and blackness. I would like to speak, in truth, of my own arrogance and ignorance.

I WILL call him John: a man who was once a security officer at my place of employment. On occasion he and I would talk about jobs, cars, the weather or whatever else might come to mind. We always smiled and waved at one another and were, for all practical purposes, good-natured acquaintances. All of this changed, though, on a day we were talking about careers, efforts to progress and succeed in one’s own field, and the associated attention to appropriate dress and physical appearance. John mentioned something about being annoyed by having to shave regularly, and (unfortunately) I had recently read a news article concerning discussions in the United States military about requirements for the shaving of facial hair. At issue in the article was that the facial hair of African-American men, when submitted to close and repeated shaving, in a majority of cases leads to a medical condition whose symptoms include painful and sometimes disfiguring inflammation of the skin. My reply to John’s simple statement was, approximately, “Yeah you know I’ve heard that black people have a hard time with shaving because their hair curls under the skin…” Somewhere near the completion of my thought, John’s demeanor changed drastically and the conversation abruptly ended. Our association remained strictly “professional” for the rest of the time we worked together. Undoubtedly and yet with the best of intentions, I had committed an act I abhor: I had deeply insulted a fellow human being.

IN THE shadow—for the word seems much more appropriate than “light”—of this story, I would first like to consider the word Black to be “a historical category, a political category, a cultural category” as presented by Jamaican writer Stuart Hall when he refers to hearing the word “for the first time in the wake of the Civil Rights movement (149).” This recollection of Hall’s is important at several levels, of which I will mention two. It is most importantly seen as what Hall claims it was: a performative use of language wherein Black was taken out of its tragic and horrendous history and rearticulated in a new and positive way (149). But it is also important presently and to me personally, albeit in a very ironic way, because it was this re-articulation in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s which became an articulation that framed and solidified what “Black” meant to me in my history—a history that for some thirty-five years has remained naively unrevised.

As a student in a fully integrated primary school outside of Washington, D.C. in 1970, I was daily exposed to the phrase “Black Power” by my classroom peers. I knew what the colors black, red and green appearing together on a shirt, bumper sticker or notebook represented. I knew that a plastic or steel pick carried about in one’s hair was “bad,” which is to say, “cool.” It was not uncommon for the good-bye gesture between friends at the end of the day to be an outstretched hand clenched—with the thumb held just so—as a symbol of black power. It was a gesture shared even between friends of mixed races, and I used it myself. The overall impression upon my childhood sensibilities, as I recall it today, was that some of us are white, some of us are black, and there is no difference between us.

But time changes things. It fades photographs and it effaces the monuments of children. I am beginning to learn that within myself the remaining, potent remnant of the history I have just recounted is simply and no more than this: Some of us are white, and some of us are black. So what? So I must now painfully consider the present result of my personal history in terms of what Frantz Fanon articulates powerfully in his essay “The Fact of Blackness:”

Nausea… for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slavery, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin.”

On that day, completely dislocated… I took myself far off from my own presence and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men (259).

It was upon a slow reading of this section of Fanon’s that I sat chilled in the warmth of my office, a new dictionary turning in my mind, recalling my conversation with John: Sho’ good eatin. To be a man among other men. Sho’ good eatin. To be a man among other men. Your hair curls under your skin. You can’t even shave clean. Sho’ good eatin, right John?

While to me my comment about shaving one’s beard was prompted by a personally historical and conceptually positive view of blackness, it was to John more likely a commentary regarding black vis-à-vis white; which is to say it was a claim made by me concerning his blackness vis-à-vis my whiteness. Some of us are white, and some of us are black. So what? So I meant nothing other than to manifest an attempt to recognize, to sympathize with and to connect to, a man’s blackness. I was stuck somewhere long ago with little Tony and Jimmy playing 45’s at a Valentine’s party. I was implying awareness and acceptance that was easy and uncomplicated; like the first grade was always supposed to be. But since then I should have learned something else simple and uncomplicated: that implication has precious little to do with inference. I realize now, with newfound dismay, that what I “successfully” connected with in the soul of John was more akin to Fanon’s fact of blackness as it existed in John’s history; not in my own. In my arrogance and ignorance I had attempted to show John a white man’s view of Black Man’s history, but had simply reminded him of his own, black, man’s history. I had said to him that, all in all, he was first and foremost black—before anything else.

IN ACADEMIA, one is guilty of plagiarism even when it is accidental. My confession today is that one is similarly culpable for his own racism. And so the question remains as to how we can extract from this story something good; something applicable positively in the realm of race relations. A brief and clever answer would be nice; perhaps something sublime about the need to responsibly loose, claim, revise and apply histories both universal and personal. In this vein, we may do well to note that while history demonstrates that one group of people tends to define all other groups in terms of itself, we must remember that such an act is just as wrong in the small and current cases as it has always been in the monumental and historical cases—for the latter begins with the former. We might also do well to remember that race is not in skin color, nor in our genes, but only in our social constructions (Haney López, 166-71). And with this in mind we might also try to understand that as culture changes, so does race and our outdated views of it. You and I must continually review our own histories small and large, holding them up to the light of current society and reinterpreting them as necessary for the dignity of one another. This is all well and good. And yet I am still left cold, and frustrated, and ashamed.

All of this seems too sterile, too clean and too safe to me today. It looks all too much like a bar of Ivory soap sitting freshly unwrapped in a powder room of privilege. I cannot escape a feeling within my white self concerning black identity, the fact of blackness, and Sho’ good eatin’. To be sure, the belief that race is constructed in relation to others can bring many positive changes in our thinking. But to end with this belief is to run the grave risk of making an implicit, privileged claim within one’s white self that since I have defined blackness, I therefore and obviously understand what it means. It seems imminently logical, after all, that if I define a concept then I determine its meaning. But again, implication has precious little to do with inference. For me today, and for all my talking, the lesson is brutally simple: It is never the place of the White to speak as if he understands Blackness.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” Theories of Race and Racism. New York: Routledge, 2000. 257-266.

Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Theories of Race and Racism. New York: Routledge, 2000. 144-153.

Haney López, Ian F. “The Social Construction of Race.” Critical Race Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.