Black and White; Truth and Lies
Some seventeen years ago now a man I didn’t much know but with whom I sparred asked a question of me that changed the course of my life: “You do know that I’m Black?”
I was born and raised in the 1950s and 60s in Southern California, living in a white suburb of Los Angeles, educated in schools with my white friends with white teachers, going to church with white people and taught by white pastors, working in jobs with white managers and white co-workers.
Sure, I saw that there were other people, too, but they were “out there” – in the other suburbs, maybe, the ones closer to the city core. Or “way over there,” on the East Coast or the South.
No real, overt animus that I knew of. But I didn’t know of them, really. What I saw was on television; what I read was in books and the newspapers, and I was puzzled by headlines in the 50s and 60s about events that seems disconnected from my own reality. Firehoses? Dogs? Marches? Boycotts?
They seemed like events that happened like hurricanes or droughts, and not something that involved people. Or really, people like me.
I was exposed to the full canon of American culture – its literature, its entertainment, its religion, its economic model – and thought that this is what reality is, that America just is, and is better than any other. There were no losers and failures because we were all promised success, and there were no doors closed to us that could not be opened by a request or a desire.
The America I learned about was created from scratch by hardy Christians from Europe who conquered a land waiting to be conquered, and brought prosperity from sea to shining sea. America fought a noble war to free ourselves from England to be a land of liberty, and fought an unpleasant war to determine whether people had the right to be owners of other people.
What we had in America was liberty and freedom for all. I recited those words five days a week at the beginning of every school day before we began reading our histories of America and our books written by Americans and watching filmstrips created by Americans.
Not a thought passed my mind during any of my education through college that I was exposed to the creative works of one class of people in America: white straight males, usually Christian or deeply enough submitted to keeping the boat unrocked that these creatives went along with what was.
And what was, was America. Beacon of liberty and freedom, fighter of oppressors and destroyers, rescuer of peoples in many lands to help them become partners of American prosperity under the wise aegis of America. What mattered in the world was solely what the world did to accommodate and acknowledge the position of America as the leader of the world. The “free world,” we called it, but we knew that it meant “the entire world.”
It made sense, it cohered, it worked. And I was in the middle of it as a successful white Christian man.
I never once thought that the world that is right now had no discernible parentage from the world that was. To my mind, it was a smooth, untroubled pathway from the landing of the first European colonists in New England to the prosperity of post-war America, a prosperity that America deserved for being both kind and good.
I was not yet a teenager when I watched JFK’s funeral and then live, on TV, the murder of his alleged assassin. I did not comprehend what it meant to have a military veteran in the South be killed in his driveway, did not comprehend what it meant to have a radical religious leader be shot on the stage by a member of his own team, did not comprehend what it meant to have a pastor shot on the balcony of a hotel in a town where he was organizing a labor protest to help sanitation workers, did not comprehend what it mean when a presidential candidate was shot in a hotel kitchen.
They all seemed like aberrations of the American dream of prosperity and hope, and I could not find a way to fit them into my understanding, so I discarded them as events that just happened. We would just continue to prosper.
I grew older in years, went to college, got a job, then another job, then another job, trying to find what it was that might interest me, until I found that I had a knack for thinking about problems, explaining them, and then teaching others how to solve those problems. I built a successful career from that knack, and retired this year, my career complete and my life a success.
But somewhere in the middle of that success and that career I found myself discontented. It was the typical mid-life crisis that I knew might happen, and then here I was, having it.
The questions started.
What do I do after I’m done with all this?
What do I really want to do?
What can I do that will leave a mark on the world to remind others of my presence?
Why am I just not happy?
I should have been happy. I’d landed a great job and built a career in an industry that didn’t exist in my teens, twenties, or even thirties. I’d married and we had kids who were building their own successful lives.
Is this it?
I began to look for solutions to my issues, answers to my questions. I took classes and talked to people, talked to therapists, journalled, wrote. Thought a lot.
Sometimes it seemed like I reached a place where I could land. But it wasn’t a landing. It was a pit stop for the next part of the quest for answers to my discomfort and disconnect.
I ended up in a group of men who were managing their own crises and discomfort, and we tried to talk about what we were thinking and feeling.
But you know what I discovered first?
None of us knew how to talk about our thoughts and feelings.
We had all been formed to be successful, independent, fulfilled, uncomplaining men. Well, not all of us. But enough of us.
I had become such a man. I could spin a good story about my success and my career, build out a presentation on how I didn’t really need anything and everything was fine except I couldn’t quite put my finger on something that was bothering me.
And so I did what we all do as men: I made light of my situation. Told jokes to make them laugh. Said the stuff men say to show that we’re in the know, we know we don’t really share the stuff that would be truth but we say the stuff that we wish were true, the stuff that we would have on the inside to match the outside we were showing the world. Each other. And even ourselves.
Now, one thing that was highly unusual for my social circles and work circles and church circles is that we weren’t all white men.
We had one Black man, and as the good American I was, I studiously avoided making any note of it. Good white Americans don’t see color. We are glad that God made everyone the way they are, and some people look different from us, but that’s okay because red and yellow, black and white we are precious in his sight. Right?
And I could swear on a stack of holy texts that my outward expressions of that inward sense were true. I didn’t see color. I didn’t have a racist bone in my body. I didn’t see differences. And I knew, really knew that we were all exactly the same, and that the differences in our life experiences were due to chance and misfortune and bad luck.
So I made jokes, like everyone else, and I didn’t see the effects because who is so narrow-minded they cannot laugh at a joke? What does it really matter? Whom does it harm?
Until one day it mattered, and the harm was exposed.
The lone Black man in the group, a man I deliberately would not acknowledge as Black (after all, good people do not notice color, right?), exploded, directly at me: “You do know that I’m Black?”
That stopped the conversation. I apologized, I think, but I don’t really remember much after that.
I felt terrible. I wasn’t a bad person. I meant well. I told some jokes. What did I say that was so wrong?
But you know what?
I did know what was wrong.
I was incapable of seeing him as he was, a Black man, because my entire life had created in me a person that could not see people as they were, but only what they were supposed to be in the world I lived in.
I didn’t know a damn thing about him, other than his name and a few details about his job, marriage, and kids.
Somehow we ended that meeting and somehow I got home, but I was shook.
I, this good person, this Christian man, this man who was solid conservative with good values and a good church and a good family, had made an entire ass of myself because I was just plainly ignorant but supremely confident that what I said was just jokes.
Now, this is way before the beginning of social protest that culminated in the Black Lives Matter movement. It was in the beginning years of the eight-year Obama presidency. (I hadn’t voted for him because he was inexperienced, and not because he looked different than every previous president because whether in friendships or employment or politics, I didn’t see color.)
I had not been exposed to media or education or literature that came from anyone but whom I was used to hearing from and reading and watching.
I was at sea.
I did not know anyone who could help me learn what I needed to know.
How do you educate yourself when you realize you are stone-cold ignorant of a topic?
So, I just started with what I could find. Here is a Black speaker about politics in America. Safe, because he’s conservative. I’ll read his stuff.
Here’s a book mentioned by that speaker, written by a Black author. Safe. I’ll read that.
Each time I came across a resource (which at that time seemed rare and widely spaced), I’d consume it, note what and who was mentioned, and go find that.
I built out my own self-education program to answer that question.
And curiously to me, I began to notice that the vast majority of my resources sounded so unlike my education and experience that I felt lost, not by the information, but by the context.
Reagan was a bad guy because he broke Black families. But Reagan just wanted to reform welfare!
Trickle-down economics destroyed the middle class? But it’s obviously true that rich people are the engines of the economy!
Red-lining was more than just helping Black people to live in their own Black communities, and by red-lining America robbed Black Americans of several generations of wealth accumulation? But don’t people want to live with their own? Who’s against that?
I could not read what I read, listen to what I heard, see videos that I watched, and not realize that my education was not just incomplete.
It was entirely wrong, misleading, and such a fantasy that nothing I could trace from the past could explain the world of today using just the resources written by and taught by and examined by white Americans.
The stories about the founding of America were about the successes of Europeans, but never was there a discussion about who was here before, what happened to them, and why.
The stories about the Revolutionary War talked about freedom and liberty from the tyranny of England, and yet I do not recall a single story about the reality of the heroes of that revolution as white slave masters.
The stories of the Civil War were about battles and bravery, but never about the reality of a nation so fully committed to enslavement that the question was about states’ rights and not the more obvious question of whether freedom and liberty for all meant all, or just some.
The global power wielded by America often was to prop up or install dictators that would turn their countries into resource exporters to the United States, turn their countries into docile colonies to support America’s right to rule the world.
And the story of Black people in America was not about a vaguely uncomfortable situation of mandatory work but about an entire people turned into property for the enrichment of their owners.
I can distinctly remember a point early on in my self-education when I had this realization:
“If I decide to continue on this path, I will give up everything I’ve believed, and there will be no turning back.”
And I can also remember that at the same time, I also realized this:
“I’ve already decided.”
There was, indeed, no turning back.
And because I realized that I had decided nothing I’d learned and believed was trustworthy, I threw everything out as no longer to be my default belief.
I began to consume more and more content from Black American creators. Books, movies, videos, music, poetry…the list was extensive.
I had to figure out why it was that my education and experience as a white American made no sense to explain America, but what I was learning from Black Americans explained so much of the discrepancy between the paper words of America and the active policies of Americans.
Growing up as a white American, I had been lied to my entire life.
Nearly everything told to me and shown to me was just…nonsense. Fantasies to explain motivations that weren’t true. Theories to connect events together that were impossible to believe.
Hence the title of this piece: Black and White; Truth and Lies.
I don’t mean by this that only Black authors tell the truth and white authors always lie. It’s not that simple.
The stories created by white American authors were to help explain the perspectives and beliefs of white people, but those perspectives and beliefs were built upon fantasies. They weren’t entirely wrong, but they certainly were false.
The stories created by Black American authors weren’t uniformly true, and often contradictory. But they had something white American authors lacked: the ability to tell the truth because there was no personal investment to shape a story to make them look good.
I found much more criticism and analysis in the works of Black American creators because they also (and at a much greater level) did not believe the stories they were told by white Americans, mostly because they knew from experience that the stories were lies:
- You won’t be arrested or beaten or jailed if you just comply.
- If you work hard, you’ll get ahead.
- Anyone can get the education they want.
- You just need the money to buy a house, and you can live wherever you want.
- If you don’t like your school, you can just move to another district.
- The history of America shows some rough times, but we’ve come so far that America is just about perfect now for everyone.
- If you serve your country, you will be respected for your service and treated well as a veteran.
- The only reason you can’t find a job is because you’re lazy.
And so on.
It’s just easier to tell stories that make America look good, that make white Americans feel good, that remind us of our patriotism and heritage as reasons for the goodness of America rather than do the very difficult work of challenging our own stories.
We like the world we live in because we created it to please us. Our world centers us as white Americans. We are endlessly coddled and feted and enabled to success by government programs and by social conditioning and by class-based opportunities to such an extent that we really don’t see any of this. It just is. And it is just.
On the larger scale of “I don’t see color” is the “we aren’t any different than anyone else.” We don’t see that our middle-class wealth is the direct result of government policies and funding starting in the 1930s and 40s with suburbs and then mortgages guaranteed by the federal government, with freeways built with government funds to let us live away from the cities full of the wrong kinds of people, with education systems design to make sure that primary schools are funded by homes whose values are created by government policies to colleges that admit candidates based upon their superior education in those schools, to jobs that go to candidates from those colleges, to second- and third-generation homeowners whose wealth comes from assets created and protected by federal funding and policies.
So it is difficult, perhaps more difficult than a camel passing through the eye of a knitting needle, for we as white Americans to see the truth about ourselves and our world, to see that the stories we are told and the stories we repeat are based upon the flimsiest of data, to see that if we have our guaranteed place in society taken away, we have nothing in us to fall back upon.
But I believe it is a good thing to at least want to know why it is we believe these stories, and to want to find a way to better understanding.
In the end, I did find a way forward to, yes, see my friend as Black.
It has taken me years to learn more. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on my education, trying to recover what was taken from me by the stories I was told that set me up to be the worst version of myself. I don’t see myself has having arrived at understand, but I know enough now to know that I have much to learn still.
It’s a different place to be than where I was, once confident in my ignorance. Now I’m usually not quite sure. I have to read up some more. Think some more. Listen to others, especially when they contradict me and each other. Like the blades of a pair of scissors that cut best when they are sharp with their hardest edges fighting the other to slice through a sheet of paper, I find truth when I put the strongest arguments before me and let them cut through the noise.
I’m not arrived, yet.
But I know I’m traveling.
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