The Voices Are Coming from Inside the House

Before this day in 1957, Hazel Massery (white) had never met Elizabeth Eckford (Black). After this day, they did not meet again until a decade later. And yet Ms. Massery became the face of white reaction to the mere presence of Black people in their reserved spaces. Without prompting, she exploded in anger and fury—and yes, hate.

Something in whiteness trains us to be like this. To simply hate not only the “other” but the “inferior.” We’re trained to believe in the innate superiority of white people; in things where we appear to fail we say we have no interest.

What was the actual problem Ms. Eckford caused that would make these white students so vitriolic? She literally had no contact with them before this day.

What had trained Ms. Massery to explode in such hatred to a woman she had never met?

What had these children so worked up that they would lose their own humanity in paroxysms of gibbering hate?

It wasn’t the media. It wasn’t their parents. It wasn’t their schools or churches or 4A clubs.

It was whiteness, which is the ground of all these social structures.

Whiteness breeds contempt and hatred, infecting everything and everybody. It is not the white skin. It is not the national origin. It is not the shared English language.

It is the character that is whiteness. We white people are formed this way, and it is invisible because it is all we know.

We who are white are not the neutral beings of Earth, unhyphated humans. We are white, and as surely as we white people can discern non-white people (“Where are you from?”), white people have a distinct nature that everyone else can see instantly.

Ms. Massery could no more help herself and resist this hatred than she could avoid the gravity that held her fast, blocking Ms Eckford’s path.

White people don’t like to see this. We think that we’re not only the neutrals, but that we start always from innocence. “I didn’t mean no harm!” we say.

Well, maybe. But our habits and our reactions are bred into us, and it is with the greatest of difficulty and effort that we can see this, much less do anything about it.

In no way do I claim to be enlightened. I’m just working on my own shit, trying to figure this out.

Because what’s in Ms. Massery is in me, too.