In Our Way: Racism in Creative Writing

Claudia Rankine | October/November 2016

Claudia Rankine

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This essay was adapted from the keynote address at the 2016 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Los Angeles, California.

I would like to give shape to the “amorphous uncomfortable.” Along with all our socializing at AWP, along with all the interesting panels, talks, and readings we’ll attend, we understand that everything that happens here should serve the education of our students and ourselves as writers. In short, we are here to help each other as teachers and writers. And in the words of Bryan Stevenson, the head of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of  the memoir Just Mercy, “the way to help is to get proximate”—in our case with the students and their writing. In order to do that, as Sevenson has pointed out, we have to change the narrative in our heads that doesn't acknowledge that “Segregation Forever” was part of the ideology that reared us and put in place the institutions in which we were taught and in which we teach. The theorist Elijah Anderson writes in his essay entitled, “The White Space,” “The wider society is still replete with overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, universities, workplaces, churches, and other associations, courthouses, and cemeteries, a situation that reinforces a normative sensibility in settings in which black people (and I will add many other people of color) are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present…. For whites… the settings are generally regarded as unremarkable, or as normal, taken-for-granted reflections of civil society.” And this contemporary reality is starkly reflected inside many of our academic institutions. Simply, when these spaces were set up they didn’t take into account people they didn't allow to enter. I originally wrote “people they didn't expect to enter” and then I remembered the history of my own marginalized presence in these walls. Yearly, these spaces, our spaces, reinstate themselves in ways that reflect their white supremacist substructure.

I asked Beth Loffreda, my coeditor on the Racial Imaginary, what questions she might bring up to her white collegues. Her response was to forward me the following list of questions and observations: “Do you invite mostly white writers for your visiting writers series, and assign mostly white-authored readings in your workshops, and nominate mostly white students for prizes and awards, all the while thinking you’re engaged in a benevolent form of meritocracy? I was once told by a white colleague who in a discussion about keeping the reading series diverse wondered if ‘we couldn’t take a break from that now.’” Loffreda also pointed out that reading assignments and visiting writer choices, “are public value judgments, are decisions about what writers and kinds of writing you value…. You’ve praised yourself and each other for recruiting students of color, and then your decisions upon their arrival say, ‘we don’t actually value writers who look like you; we value writers who look like us.’’’

These choices within our academic institutions are not accidental formations specific to a single writing department, they are historically determined ones actively maintained in the present, perhaps by some of you—white people surrounded by other white people. Sara Ahmed, in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, notes that “it is important to remember that whiteness is not reducible to white skin or even to something we can have or be, even if we pass through whiteness. When we talk about a ‘sea of whiteness’ or ‘white space,’ we talk about the repetition of passing by some bodies and not others. And yet nonwhite bodies do inhabit white spaces; we know this. Such bodies are made invisible when spaces appear white, at the same time they become hypervisible when they do not pass, which means they ‘stand out’ and ‘stand apart.’ You learn to fade in the background, but sometimes you can’t or you don’t.”

To Ahmed’s description of the dynamic of institutional whiteness, Loffreda adds, “The public visibility of that formation makes it even clearer when you have successfully tokenized a person of color: objectified and exploited and disregarded her all at once. That formation also means that white students aren’t being asked, by you and the readings and visitors you arrange for them to encounter, to think harder about the assumptions they carry into and express in workshop; assumptions that also are tiring for the students of color you so proudly recruited to sit in a room and take. For if they don’t just ‘take’ it, they’re right back in the other unlivable place you’ve made for them, of the angry complainer, the hysteric, the divider.”

I want to argue that in many ways keeping your distance from the brutal reality this country maintains for people of color by unintentionally discriminating is as bad as intentionally discriminating because the result is the same. Are your white students easier to talk to? They probably are because they maintain the supremacist narrative inside a culture of amnesia with you. Are you living a different reality than people of color? You definitely are because the justice system, the media, our language, our institutions, and many of our great canonical texts are also engaged in imprisoning, denigrating, belittling, and erasing those of us who complicate this country’s narrative of white greatness. Or as the author Fran Lebowitz notes, “What it is like to be white is not to say, We have to level the playing field, but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word ‘advantage’ at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.”

What we often forget, to quote Craig Steven Wilder from Ebony & Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, is that our revered academic institutions were where “theories of racial difference and scientific claims about the superiority of white people” first were legitimized. Wilder goes on to argue, “The academy refined these ideas and popularized the language of race, providing intellectual cover for the social and political subjugation of nonwhite people.” Now, even though the “science” behind the primacy of whiteness has been refuted, those beliefs remain unarticulated and just below the surface of white identity.

This investment in whiteness does take work and collusion among faculty and students. The insistence that white supremacy doesn't continue to be our dominant frame takes work. The belief that white lives are not political lives with political privilege and protections takes work. The failure to push back against systems that subjugate others takes work. The constant unwillingness or inability to retain diverse faculty takes work.

The obvious questions then need to be asked. Does our long-standing supremacist narratives mean you are smarter, brighter, more helpful, more beautiful, more benevolent, more burdened, more patient, more caring, more imaginative, more universal, and more transcendent? No. Does it mean you are working from a deficit of understanding inside a world that has thrown all its weight into shielding you from a reality that makes your reality possible? Perhaps. White Americans have come to believe their lack of hyphenation makes them the true Americans because as the novelist Toni Morrison points out in The Guardian (29 January 1992), “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

The narrative of white supremacy in this country, Bryan Stevenson has stated repeatedly in so many words, has been inflated to deflect the shame we should be feeling for our continued racial indifference and racial terrorism. And when students arrive in the classroom, students you claim to be welcoming, and acknowledge this reality, their reality should not be dismissed because it doesn't sit nicely in your understanding of your universal humanness.

One day, out of the blue, I received an email from a graduate student in an MFA program. With permission I will quote from that email. I am mixing up pronouns going forward in an attempt to keep the student’s identity private. Though the student was ambivalent about being quoted anonymously, I felt the recounted experiences were not singular. As a person of color, I myself continue to experience versions of what is described after twenty-five years of being part of our community. Here is an excerpted portion of the email (italics, my emphasis):

Dear Claudia,

Sorry to bother you and I hope you are well... I am currently considering leaving my MFA program in poetry at the end of the year, which is a great and grand program for many but not the right fit for me at this time. I am considering leaving due to ethical/humanity-based, pedagogical, and semi-institutional concerns within my genre: poetry. To be vague, there are struggles related to identity, politics, race, gender, class, poetry, and power here which I have experienced in negative ways and which seems deeply engrained in a few monoliths of power despite efforts towards progress and self-advocacy on my part and the part of a few people in the program and genre. At times, my humanity, pedagogy about poetics, poetry, and capacity-for-equal-intellect/decision-making-as-a-poet feels under attack or in disfavor here in a way I am beginning to doubt is regular across all sub-programs and which might not be personal/unique to me. I simply want to be able to thrive somewhat.

This is just my experience, specifically, and I do not seek to harm or incorrectly portray an otherwise unquestionably excellent program of education in poetry and opportunity. Often, I’ve wanted to not observe what I have observed and not feel what I have felt, simply because I love to love where I am and to be appreciative of this opportunity.

Thus, I am writing to ask you your advice in this situation? Is it foolish to quit an MFA?

I wasn’t able to describe to this person what foolish looks like but I did say it didn’t sit right with me that a student should feel run out of a program because the experiences and imagination expressed in workshop are not “normal” (hear “white”) enough, are not “universal” (hear “white”) enough for workshop leaders and participants who have no relational understanding of difference. (Think here of Edouard Glissant’s definition: “I say that Relation is made up of all the differences in the world and that we shouldn’t forget a single one of them, even the smallest. If you forget the tiniest difference in the world, well, Relation is no longer Relation. Now, what do we do when we believe this? We call into question, in a formal manner, the idea of the universal. The universal is a sublimation, an abstraction that enables us to forget small differences; we drift upon the universal and forget these small differences, and Relation is wonderful because if doesn’t allow you to do that.”) When the student noted that their struggles related to identity, politics, race, gender, class, poetry, and power, what I heard, and what was subsequently confirmed in a phone conversation, was that certain life experiences are said to belong to sociology and not to poetry. To write beyond the white imagination’s notion of normality and normality’s traumas is to write “political poetry,” “sociology,” “identity politics poetry,” “protest poetry”—many labels but none of them Poetry. For in order for poetry to be poetry white readers must find it relatable and only then can it transcend its unrelatable “nonwhite” writer. (Ironically, however, I have heard white students in workshop insisting that the depiction of a nonwhite narrator is not authentic if his/her/their language resembles too much what they imagine white educated speech to be.) All of these terms creating subcategories for work written by nonwhite writers have dogged my own writing my entire career, as in Adam Fitzgerald’s blog “‘That’s not poetry; it’s sociology!’—in defence of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.”

Our programs—programs organized inside our historical legacy—function by default: the majority of white faculty and students invest in structures of living and writing defined by a white patriarchy that also thought it appropriate, in the words of poet and theorist Fred Moten, to put the “category of human …under the severest pressure by the terrors of colonialism and imperialism.” This, as you know, meant white civility, intelligence, and imagination, and beauty included having slaves, building reservations, and internment camps, lynching people, withholding the right to vote and incarcerating large segments of our nonwhite population. Theirs is a world not dirtied up by the experiences of people reared outside the privileges of white dominance.

I recently read an essay by the poet and nonfiction writer Ed Pavli? addressing his fluid notion of racial identity. “People ‘believing themselves white,’” he writes, “must invest in that belief continually. Whether consciously or not, they must rehearse its prohibitions and privileges all their waking days—in their dreams, even. Our world offers them a great assistance with this and, on average, the dividends paid by this pact with whiteness are real.” This investment in whiteness does take work and collusion among faculty and students. The insistence that white supremacy doesn’t continue to be our dominant frame takes work. The belief that white lives are not political lives with political privilege and protections takes work. The failure to push back against systems that subjugate others takes work. The constant unwillingness or inability to retain diverse faculty takes work.

To maintain our many writing departments with their majority white faculty has, we often forget, taken conscious work, choice, and insistence. The perpetuation of white orientation, white narrative, white point of reference, white privilege, white denial, white dominance, and white defensiveness, if any of these things are pointed out or questioned, has taken work and is the originating problem. The unacknowledged aggressor and the overly sensitized person is not a person at all but the monument of white ideology, which found its roots in white supremacy and continues to live on (structurally and unconsciously) in our institutions and in us.

This inability of white faculty and students to know and understand themselves as white Americans and white writers, as white writers conditioned by a racist history with resulting dominance and privilege, diminishes and marginalizes students of color in the workshop. This is whiteness working at privileging the white imagination, keeping their notions of their normality, universality, and transcendence in tact. Thus making participation a struggle for the nonwhite student. When a student takes the time to point out the inequality determining, governing, and policing white spaces by stating simple facts, that student is often read by white writers in positions of authority, as well as the student’s white peers, as problematic, difficult, and ungrateful. The now silenced student of color is overly sensitive, angry, unable to fit in, and, in short, a problem. One head of a writing department faced with what he felt were unruly students of color reportedly said to a white colleague, “I regret letting them in.” (This is hearsay, but who among us truly finds such a statement difficult to believe?) The student, or group of students, is now labeled as divisive, self important, out-of-control, and “uppity” (for weren’t they “let in”), and held responsible for hurting the feelings of the benevolent, pure-minded, and well-intentioned white faculty and white students.

Or when a student points out that the language of critique in the workshop in fact diminishes and marginalizes their work—language that delegates their imagination to protest, politics, or unrelatable stuff that at times is just met by “eloquent silence” to use a phrase offered up by Loffreda—the white workshop leader, I am told, all too often joins the white students in their bewilderment.

The novelist Teju Cole in his essay “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” which is in his collection of essays Known and Strange Things, makes this point, “People of color, women, and gays—who now have greater access to the centers of influence than ever before—are under pressure to be well behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as ‘racially charged’ even in those cases when it would be more honest to say ‘racist’; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.”

In my aforementioned conversation with Beth Loffreda, she pointed out the need to shift our attention from the stated intention of white faculty and administrators in our programs to their actions, and to the impacts experienced by their students. Here I want to say most of us, but what I really mean is most of you, many white writers in positions of authority and power inside our programs disavow your participation in institutional racism by assuming to yourselves, purity of intention, reasonableness, thoughtfulness, care, objectivity, and color-blindness, or alternately, shock, confusion, and helplessness when confronted with questions from peers and/or students of color.

When pedagogical practices regarding syllabi, stated inabilities to critique writings by people of color, or the declaration that what’s written is political and not poetry, etc., are questioned, Loffreda reminded me that “the person of color who questions these actions is immediately ascribed with disqualifying features including anger, mistakenness, inappropriateness, knowledge deficit, hysteria, divisiveness, and unsavory ‘personal’ motivation.”

Many of us are familiar with the dynamics that put in place these structures of alienation but stop short at recognizing how they determine the very enviorments we exist within. Many of us, and here I include myself, understand that “internalized dominance” (a phrase I borrow from Robin DiAngelo) is not something we own. DiAngelo argues, “This dominance is shored up structually and institutionally and its positioning doesn't go both ways.” It doesn’t belong to all of us. For DiAngelo, internalized dominance is defined in this way: “We know that we learn who we are as social beings largely by learning who we are not. For the dominant group, being socialized to see the minoritized group as inferior necessarily conveys that the dominant group is superior. This sense of superiority is often not explicit but internalized deep beneath the surface. Across their life span and in every aspect of life, dominant group members are affirmed, made visible, and represented in diverse and positive ways. This process causes members of the dominant group to see themselves as normal, real, correct, and more valuable than the minoritized group, and thus more entitled to the resources of society.” 

DiAngelo’s term “internalized dominance,” in my opinion, gets to the root of the problem more directly than the more popular phrasology of “white privilege.” Peggy McIntosh, the Wellesley Professor who is credited for beginning the discussion on white privilege, in the 1988 essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” argues that the use of the term white privilege might be the first wrong step in addressing the inequities inherent in our institutions. She writes, “Privilege simply confers dominance, gives permission to control, because of one’s race or sex. The kind of privilege that gives license to some people to be, at best, thoughtless and, at worst, murderous should not continue to be referred to as a desirable attribute. Such ‘privilege’ may be widely desired without being in any way beneficial to the whole society.” This returns me to the student who sent me the email and the question posed: “Is it foolish to quit an MFA?”

The feeling of alienation this student experiences means that he/she/they are invited by white people to doubt the accuracy and scale of their feelings regarding white discriminatory behavior. And like Ingrid Bergman in the film Gaslight, the student begins to believe that they themselves are the source of the conflict or, equally worse, that they should not have equal rights to the spaces they inhabit.

The feeling of alienation this student experiences means that he/she/they are invited by white people to doubt the accuracy and scale of their feelings regarding white discriminatory behavior.

I would like to invite all of us to engage in a form of self-examination, or as Loffreda names it, a form of “diagnostic behavior,” which would include taking resposonsibility for our difficult and uncomfortable shared moments. The hope is recognition will help to reroute the broken and biased structures girding our own academic and personal relationships. Dismantling the claim that the white imagination is capable of transcendence because it is universal and not engaged and invested in its own identity politics will take work.

When the student wrote, “At times, my humanity, pedagogy about poetics, poetry, and capacity-for-equal-intellect/decision-making-as-a-poet feels under attack or in disfavor here in a way I am beginning to doubt is regular,” he/ she/ they feels under attack by you because “segregation forever” has shaped the value system in this country and that has shaped who you value and who the language values. Some people of color, if they are not vigilant, also begin to propagate the same rhetoric to remain in favor as the exception. We really can’t continue pathologizing people of color in order to maintain our benevolent narratives around white supremacy. We in this community can be better than that.

The other section of the email from the MFA student that I can’t stop hearing is this: “Often, I’ve wanted to not observe what I have observed and not feel what I have felt, simply because I love to love where I am and to be appreciative of this opportunity.”

The writer is at such pains, despite all the pain inflicted upon them, to defend the institution doing the inflicting. They want to love and appreciate. The institution, of which we are all a part, has taken that love and weaponized it against the writer; that love is the portal the institution avails itself of in order to do its worst harm. The writer would rather not observe—would rather curtail the very perceptiveness that is the necessary foundation of any creative act—than bear witness to the institution’s pathology, because the writer wishes to love.  That’s what makes these moments so painful for me. We love to love where we are.

*

After Joshua wrote/rewrote his poem I thought about who wasn’t represented in my own work and who I had little contact with in my own life. The answer was poor working class white people...

Those of you who know me well know I am often wondering why race acknowledgement remains absent from the writing of many mainstream white writers. All the people are presumed white in their work because they are simply people. This conscious or unconscious complicity with the idea that white life is a standard for “normal” life and the people in the white peoples’ writings are simply people who are motivated by anything but maintainence of their own whiteness remains a question for me. I often wonder why as a reader I am being made to join in and be complicit with the belief that white people are the people. It is an equation that rules journalistic, nonfiction, and creative writing. We all know the moment in the morning news when the armed men equals white men—not Black, African, Arab, Hispanic, Native, or Asian Americans. And given the armed men status as men, we also know no one will be killed unless they really, really want to provoke the police and these defacto benevolent civilized reasonable “armed men” will be able to hang out for days with their many guns. I am thinking here of Ammon Bundy’s stand-off in Oregon in January because armed and white is not a threat if you are white.

Even if people of color are present in the lives of whites they are wiped and rendered invisible in imagined works that fail to imagine beyond its segregationist orientation. Somewhere in the writing process it’s believed the imagined “universal” work, the imagined “trancendent” work, the work of prizes and mainstream magazines replicates the valued white spaces in our world. To recognize blacks especially, or other people of color in a work is to politicize the work, (thereby calling white out as an aggressor,) and remove it from its status as universal art.

The poet Joshua Weiner, whose work I admire greatly—he’s the author of the collections The World’s Room, From the Book of Giants, and The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish—heard me speaking about this and wondered if and how he had “e-raced” his own work. He went back through his books and came across the poem entitled “Cloak” in From the Book of Giants. Here’s how he describes that process, “I was looking through the three books, and when I saw the title ‘Cloak’ my attention went *boingg* and when I read the first line that ends with ‘riot’ that’s when I realized there was a whole social history behind that word that was personal, and Howie was back there behind it.”

Cloak

Late May, skin tingled true with riot,
the screen door clapping shut behind me
on the final days of school. Beneath
the dogwood’s white explosion, fragrance
of milk floated down and floated up,
each petal a portal, a pure cup
and sweet pill to cure us of winter
and call back the birds. The body dies,
but today I am taller, I can
tell time (but what will I tell him?) I’m
not good at reading… Running then not
to be late, the dogwood casting one
beam like a full daytime moon over
shortcuts, bamboo, bulldog, and quiet
creek water. A waking bulldozer:
who are the sleepless, who do they carry?
Nights I felt plagued by my body’s heat
I’d strip and climb the dogwood branches.
Who wears the final cloak of summer?
The son of an ancient seed caster,
I was searching for a gate. I worked
hard but remained lost among faster
numerals interacting through blizzards
of feeling. I would not pick my scab
to speed the healing. One day, every
year, I’d return to find the dogwood
blossoms fallen like a great snow cape
silencing capacities of green.

(“Cloak” from From the Book of Giants by Joshua Weiner. Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.)

Weiner went back to his originating creative impulse, the scene that brought the poem forward, young boys playing in 1970s New Jersey, and wrote it again without the automatic gesture of cleansing the imaginative space of blackness. His reopening of the door of memory and risking the universality of his whitened space by peopling it with African Americans immediately calls into question his own presumed dominance as a white male. Reading the new version the first line of the original version begins to tremble differently by the time we arrive at the word riot. The two versions begin exactly the same but you will get an immediate sense of their differences.

Cloak

Late May, skin tingled true with riot

I wrote years ago             in some spring reverie

the screen door clapping shut behind me
on the final days of school.

                                             But pull the door back
open                the echo   of dis/ease               enter
again                the sharp report
the general tense              final days                
masking one day in May
my friend Howie’s cousin picked a fight
because I was white?  Because
I was Howie’s friend
                                        and he somehow knew
like he knew what was coming
                                                        the poem I’d write
would leave Howie out…
                                                        Beneath
the dogwood’s white explosion

                                                          before
I saw blackness               his cousin saw me
stealing through friendship
Howie’s attentions           that afternoon
turning the school jungle gym into
a spaceship, a prison, a frontier cabin,
an igloo, a teepee, a cop car, a tank
each petal a portal, a pure cup
and sweet pill to cure us of winter
and call back the birds.

                                          Call back
the words he called me    six years old
he was maybe eight          the tiger of wrath
for real leaping from him calling me out
what could Howie do                       his friend

his older cousin               embraced, embroiled
like a knot        tightening at its heart
as its ends are tugged apart
it was everything I could do
to pull him close enough  to keep him
at bay                               hugging him hard
to crush space between us weaken
the velocity force of those fists.
                                                           The body dies
the length of a breath
in such confusions          there in the dynamo
discovering who you are
but today I am taller, I can
tell time (but what will I tell him?) I’m
not good at reading…

                                          Not good
at fighting, either, not good enough at
friendship, Howie, our skin
tingled with riot in warm air
outside Trenton, 1978 now              kids bussed in
and cops on the high school roof, even in suburbia        
with all those trees           their dogs
their rifles       
                  Running then
not to be late

                        when we were nothing less      nothing other
than the one who’d turn round, wait for you
                                        the dogwood casting one
beam like a full daytime moon

                                                         Not to find you
even as we were               slowly backing away
keeping eye contact          seeing differently
and these elegaic tones from the future
like some Babylonian muttering
like who gives a shit—
                                         I would not pick my scab
to speed the healing.

                                        But press the skin hard
the nerves still remember                
                                           One day, every
year, I’d return to find the dogwood
blossoms fallen like a great snow cape
silencing

           an awareness (a wariness) in the poem, the poem
like grey fog in a dream   where I speak

what sounds like you saying            my cousin was right

capacities of green
                                   hidden by blossoms
were his fists
calling you forward          past
the pattern on the cloak            the period’s sentence.

Lyricism in “Cloak” pushes against the poem’s narrative elements. “The dogwood’s white explosion” is as much about beauty as it is about confrontation. On the remembered day there is a fight (Is scandal the only way the races can exist together in the white imagination?):

masking one day in May
my friend Howie’s cousin picked a fight
because I was white?  Because
I was Howie’s friend
                                        and he somehow knew
like he knew what was coming
                                                          the poem I’d write
would leave Howie out…
                                                        Beneath
the dogwood’s white explosion

                (Reprinted with permission from Joshua Weiner.)

But Weiner’s recalled memory is as much about racial confrontation and jealousy as it is about the unconscious insistence of the structural knowledge of white dominance the media and much canonical writing inculcates in all of us. Weiner acknowledges how his initial “e-race sure” is tied to his white presence which is married to the invisibility of blackness. This form of erasure occurs repeatedly in the work of white writers and as Homi Bhabha points out in “Writing the Void,” “The void that emerges through the act of writing is not an evocative abstraction lost in the mists of metaphor. The void is, quite literally, the empty space of erasure and extermination: of missing persons, destroyed things, hidden histories, lost records, expropriated lands, murdered minorities. The humanist must graphically evoke such emptiness an erasure without sublimating these absences, remaining all the while, ‘wary of every dream and nation.’”

*

I am often wondering why race acknowledgement remains absent from the writing of many mainstream white writers.

After Joshua wrote/rewrote his poem I thought about who wasn’t represented in my own work and who I had little contact with in my own life. The answer was poor working class white people who understand our white supremacist frame is the one location where they have automatic value given their economic disenfranchisement. I thought I’d end by talking about my own discomfort writing about a class of folks who might shoot me if I randomly knocked on their door (as happened to nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride who after a car accident knocked on a door for help and ended up shot to death.) The fact that they would shoot me with impunity and not worry about consequences from our justice system (“The black person made me feel  threatened”) underlines how deeply they believe in and are supported by our white supremacist framework that doesn’t count me as human and understands blackness as a threat to white safety.

Sound & Fury

Dispossessed despair, depression, despondent
dejection, the doom is the off-white of white. But wait,
white can’t know what white feels. Where’s the life in that?
Where’s the right in that? Where’s the white in that?

At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of seeing,
the frustration of being unequal to white. White-male portraits
on white walls were intended to mean ownership of all,
the privilege of all, even as white walls white in.

And this is understandable, yes,
understandable because the culture claims white
owns everything—the wealth
of no one anyone knows. Still the equation holds—
jobs and health and schools and better than
before and different from now and enough
and always and eventually mine.

This is what it means to wear a color and believe
the embrace of its touch. What white long expected
was to work its way into an upwardly mobile fit.
In the old days white included a life, even without luck
or chance of birth. The scaffolding had rungs
and legacy and the myth of meritocracy fixed in white.
Now white can’t hold itself distant from the day’s touch—
even as the touch holds so little white would own—
foreclosure vanished pensions school systems
in disrepair free trade rising unemployment unpaid
medical bills school debt car debt debt debt.

White is living its brick-and-mortar loss,
staving off more loss, exhaustion, aggrieved
exposure, a pale heart even as in daylight
white hardens its features. Eyes, which hold all
the light, harden. Jaws, which close down on nothing,
harden. Hands, which assembled, and packaged,
and built, harden into a fury that cannot call

power to account though it’s not untrue jobs were
outsourced and it’s not untrue an economic base
was cut out from under. It’s not untrue.

If people could just come clean about their pain,
the being at a loss when just being white
is not working. Who said there is no hierarchy
inside white walls? Who implied white owns
everything even as it owns nothing? But white
can’t strike its own structure. White can’t oust
its own system. All the loss is nothing
next to any other who can be thrown out.
In daylight this right to righteous rage doubles
down the supremacy of white in this way.

The poem was published in the New Yorker with the last three words “in this way.” “In daylight this right to righteous rage doubles / down the supremacy of white in this way.” But I kept wondering in what way? Then I thought “in their way.” I liked the implication that white supremacy was something that was preventing them from fully… what? being compassionate, being fully human perhaps? But I didn’t like how “their” created an “us” and “them” dichotomy between the speaker and her subject.

...it occurred to me that white supremacy was “in my way” as much as it was “in their way” because it terrorized me to enter their white spaces even in the writing of the poem.

After further thought it occurred to me that white supremacy was “in my way” as much as it was “in their way” because it terrorized me to enter their white spaces even in the writing of the poem. That’s when I realized the last three words should be “in our way.”

In daylight this right to righteous rage doubles down the supremacy of white in our way.

Bhabha defines writing in this way: “The exercise of writing is a lesson in the art of thinking against the grain of inheritance and illusion, and the discipline of poetry is an experiment in thinking otherwise, in letting the language of alterity unsettle the sententiousness of the sovereignty of selfhood and nationhood.” Writing then is and should be an arena full of discomfort as we try to keep present the differences that keep us in relation.

Like the student who wrote the email that got me thinking, “I too love to love where I am and to be appreciative of this opportunity.” Thank you. May we all “be able to thrive somewhat.”                                                             

 

Claudia Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Citizen.

 

Bibliography

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