What Huckleberry Finn teaches us about seeing past race and status

In this blog entry, John S.W. Park, author of Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, uses Mark Twain’s character to address lessons about illegal and undocumented immigrants

Huckleberry Finn has two interrelated problems: first, when he discovers that Jim is a runaway slave, he can’t bring himself to tell someone, and so he can’t seem to send Jim back into slavery even though he thinks that he ought to report fugitive slaves; and second, throughout Twain’s novel, Huck can’t seem to see Jim or other black people as full persons, as persons who deserve to be free.  Even at the end of the story, it’s not clear that Huck has changed his mind about slavery or its underlying morality, and Jim is free not because white people thought that slavery was wrong or that it ought to be abolished, but because Miss Watson had died and she had freed (just) Jim in her will.  Unlike many characters in 19^th and 20^th century novels, Huck doesn’t change in any fundamental way as a result of his adventures, nor does he reflect on what he’s experienced.  He doesn’t “solve” either aspect of his problem: Jim is free, so telling on him is moot, and when Jim saves Tom Sawyer, Huck concludes from this act of sacrifice that this black man was really “white inside.”  Huck never sees past Jim’s race or status.

The primary arguments within my book, Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, reflect on both aspects of Huck Finn’s problem. I’ve tried to show how these dilemmas have been and are still so intertwined.  After slavery, law continued to define people as “unlawful,” as out of place, and the example of illegal Chinese immigrants is but one example among many from the 19^th century.  They were not the only unlawful people during that time: Native Americans were sometimes described as “off of the reservation,” and so often that “off of the reservation” became a colloquial phrase in English to denote anyone who was dangerous, out of his mind, and out of place.  In the original meaning, it referred to a Native American who should have remained within a federal prison system designed for conquered Native American people.  “Reservation” had two common meanings: the first referred to Native American settlements controlled by the federal government; and the second referred to areas where wild animals were protected from hunting.  A Native American who was “off of the reservation” could, in theory and in practice, be killed, as if he were a wild animal.

A great many (white) Americans have had problems seeing people of color as people.  People of color have also had trouble seeing one another as people, as they too are often infected with white supremacist ways of thinking.  American law—once it defines a group as “illegal” or “unlawful” or “out of status”—can and did blind a great many people to the common humanity of the other, so much so that they can come to tolerate a level of abuse and degradation against the “illegals” that is shocking and unconscionable.  Law dehumanizes before it kills.  Because law and legal institutions can have this power, the objects of the law have attempted to hide their status, their stigma, and they have tried many different ways to “cover” their illegal status or to “pass” as someone who doesn’t have it all.  By the mid-20^th century, thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants lied about who they really were, all in attempts to “pass” as American citizens or legal residents.  Many people who are out of status now try to “pass,” too, and the ones who drive well below the posted speed limit or never mention legal status at all are doing their best to “cover,” just like other generations of “illegal” people.  Meanwhile, many Americans who complain about these “illegals” rarely bother to question the morality or justice of a system that gave them citizenship simply because they happened to be born here, which really isn’t an “achievement” nor reflective remotely of any kind of moral desert.

We all love Huckleberry Finn, especially when he decides to go to hell and to save Jim, but we should endeavor to be the opposite of him.  We should look past race and status, even if this means ignoring some of our own laws.  We should see and acknowledge, first and foremost, the humanity of everyone around us.  We should be reflective of our common history, and we should realize that we now celebrate people who have resisted American laws that once reduced people to things, or framed some immigrants as though they were a form of pollution or a dangerous kind of “problem” rather than a group of people.  We should stop criminalizing people for crossing international boundaries in search of a better life.  We should take seriously our common obligations to one another as human beings, either by helping to make a better life possible for all people irrespective of where they are, or by showing compassion to people coming among us when their homes and countries fall apart.  In other words, unlike Huck, we should grow up.

Wayne Brady, Bill Maher, and Black Men Who Remain Invisible

In this blog entry, Adia Harvey Wingfield discusses the themes and examples about black masculinity that form the basis for her book No More Invisible Man.

Several news headlines recently highlighted the relatively long-running tension between political comedian Bill Maher and actor/singer Wayne Brady. Maher, known among other things for questioning whether mogul Donald Trump is descended from monkeys and for using explicit epithets to describe politician Sarah Palin, has made several comments suggesting that Brady’s clean-cut, easygoing persona makes him antithetical to “real” black masculinity (a point Brady mocked in 2004 on an unforgettable episode of The Chappelle Show). Brady has responded by critiquing the racialized and gendered assumptions behind this statement, but also by suggesting that if Maher wants to continue this line of discussion, he would be willing to embody these stereotypes and “beat [Maher] in public.”

The dialogue between Maher and Brady reflects two of the images of black masculinity that I try to counter in my recent book No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work. I argue that in cultural imagination and even in much sociological research, black men are often cast as either tough, dangerous, and threatening, or as high-level elites who must be easygoing and appear completely assimilated. Yet these depictions represent two polar opposites, leaving the experiences, lives, and realities of middle class, professional black men understudied and ignored. No More Invisible Man attempts to correct this by drawing attention to these men who are invisible in sociological research, media, and much of America and highlighting the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities they face in professional, white male-dominated occupations.

In my book, I build on Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic theory of tokenism to understand black professional men’s work lives. Kanter argues that those in the numerical minority encounter certain perceptual tendencies that affect their interactions with members of the dominant group. These include increased pressures related to their performance, dominant group members’ efforts to emphasize their differences from those in the minority, and challenges subordinate groups face assimilating into the majority. In my study, however, I found that intersections of race, gender, and class, coupled with the gendered characteristics of the male-dominated occupations in which these men worked, meant that black professional men imperfectly fit the tokenization paradigm that Kanter describes. Instead, I argue that they experience a phenomenon I describe as partial tokenization, which impacts their interactions with women of all races, with other men, their performances of masculinity, their emotional performance, and their general challenges within the work environment.

This matters because we know so little about the occupational experiences of black professional men. As the United States becomes an increasingly multiracial society, it is important to be aware of the persistent challenges that remain for racial minorities in various sectors, and to be mindful of the ways that structural processes like partial tokenization may perpetuate inequalities. Having a clear sense of the ways black men experience the professional workplace can help to address ongoing patterns that make their occupational ascension more (or less) challenging than comparably situated others.

In writing No More Invisible Man, I hope to do several things. One is to add to the literature that explores the experiences black men face in the United States and to document the sociological realities of those who are not part of the urban underclass that generates the most attention. Another goal is to highlight that even though black professional men enjoy material and occupational success relative to working-class and poor blacks, they still undergo very particularized difficulties in the workplace. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that black men’s experiences at work and in society at large reflect not just race but the ways that race is shaped by gender and class, and that understanding the ways these categories overlap is essential for making sense of issues of power and inequality that persist in America today.

March Madness: Looking back at an infamous NCAA game

In this blog entry, Gregory Kaliss, author of Men’s College Athletics and the Politics of Racial Equality writes about an infamous NCAA tournament game.

Next week, the Dallas metropolitan area will host the South regional of the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, the first time since 1994 that the area will host these later-round games. But many may not realize that the city’s involvement with the tournament has deeper roots, and one of the most famous—or, really, infamous—regional final weekends in tournament history took place in Dallas in 1957.

That year, the regional semifinals featured teams from Southern Methodist University, Oklahoma City University (OCU), St. Louis University, and the University of Kansas—whose star sophomore Wilt Chamberlain made the Jayhawks the odds-on favorite to win the national championship. There was only one problem for Chamberlain and his KU teammates—he and senior guard Maurice King were black in a region unaccustomed to hosting integrated sports competitions. The responses to the integrated KU team—from fans, opposing players, and the media alike—undermined the idea of sports providing a “level playing field” for racial equality.

The first sign of the team’s unwelcome came in the form of their housing—unlike the other teams, who stayed in downtown Dallas hotels, the Jayhawks booked rooms in Grand Prairie, where they took their meals in a private room because no restaurant would serve an integrated squad. Although Chamberlain, because of his celebrity, had been able to eat anywhere he liked in the still-segregated town of Lawrence, Kansas, racial lines mattered more in Texas.

The team’s reception on the court was even worse. In the team’s first game in Dallas, they struggled to a hard-earned overtime win over SMU, as a hostile crowd verbally abused the Kansas players and threw trash and other objects at them. According to Chamberlain, the fans “booed and jeered” and used a variety of derogatory terms, including “‘nigger’ and ‘jigaboo’ and ‘spook’ and a lot of other things that weren’t nearly that nice.” Pleased to escape with the win, which they earned in part because King had blocked a last-second shot in regulation, the KU players assumed the worst was over, since the hometown SMU team had been eliminated.

They were wrong. In fact, the team’s second game against OCU involved even worse crowd behavior. Dallas fans, outraged that an integrated team had defeated their school, switched allegiance to OCU and continued to taunt and harass the KU squad. To make matters worse, Oklahoma City coach Abe Lemmons and several of his players participated in the unruly behavior. Before the game, Lemmons warned referee Al Lightner that there would be problems “if that big nigger [Chamberlain] piles onto any of my kids.”

As Kansas pulled away to a convincing victory in the second half, the chaos became even more intense. Not even pleading from the SMU athletic director and other public officials could calm the outraged fans, who threw a variety of objects, including coins, paper airplanes, seat cushions, and food, onto the court. After the game, an armed cadre of police officers led the team off the court and traveled with them to the airport.

The media refrained from condemning, or even describing, these events. Hardly a word about the abuse suffered by Chamberlain and King made it into the press immediately following the contest. Acknowledgment of the game’s racial dynamics occurred only after the game’s referee, a resident of Oregon, complained about the racial epithets and violent behavior. But even then, most newspapers distanced themselves from the controversy, refusing to take a stand. In doing so, they prevented these sports contests from having larger meanings outside the arena; they did not use these games as opportunities to consider the many consequences of segregation and racism.

On the surface, the story of the 1957 Dallas regional final is a painful curiosity, a relic of a different era when Jim Crow reigned supreme. But the media silence surrounding the events is a reminder that silence can condone injustice, that dialogue is the first step towards creating social change. Sports can bring out the worst in us, as the response to the Jayhaws shows, but if we encourage meaningful dialogue when we talk about sports, they can also bring us together. Let us hope for that outcome, no matter the teams in the upcoming tournament.

Uncovering the life and work of Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim)

In this blog entry, Justin Gifford, author of Pimping Fictions, explains how he came to tell the story of African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

In my journey to uncover the life and works of Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim) I have made many surprising discoveries along the way.  I began my search by traveling to black neighborhoods in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and many other American cities in search of Beck’s books. Scouring used bookstores, thrift shops, and bootleg video stores, I discovered hundreds of black-authored paperback novels inspired by the works of Iceberg Slim.  I began collecting, reading, and categorizing them all in order to get a picture of the entire literary scene he helped create.

The next big breakthrough came in 2004, when I met Robert Beck’s second wife, Diane Millman.  She was selling all of Beck’s old pimp suits, alligator shoes, and silk shirts on ebay to raise money for charity.  I purchased all of these items, and then I flew to Los Angeles to interview her, as well as Beck’s publisher at Holloway House books, Bentley Morriss.  Millman and Morriss both supplied me with letters and other documents owned by Beck, and they have been ongoing resources for information for many years.

In 2008, Millman introduced me to Ice-T’s longtime manager, Jorge Hinojosa, who at the time was creating a documentary on Beck, titled Iceberg Slim:  Portrait of a Pimp.  Hinojosa brought me onto the project as a research consultant, and I was given the rare opportunity to appear in the film as a literary expert on Beck.  This is where my book really took off.  I suddenly had the chance to view rare archival materials that no other scholar had ever seen—FBI records, photographs, and even an unpublished Iceberg Slim novel, titled Night Train to Sugar Hill.

I also was fortunate to gain access the insider perspectives of the former editors, authors, family, friends, and fans that knew Beck and his works best.  I have had the privilege of talking to a range of important figures about Iceberg Slim and his legacy, including comedian Chris Rock, Los Angeles poet laureate Wanda Coleman, and pioneering author of underground black literature, Odie Hawkins.  Pimping Fictions is the result of countless people’s generous contributions over a period of ten years.  

 

 

 

 

Visions of the ENVISIONING EMANCIPATION authors

This week we showcase images of Envisioning Emancipation authors Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer at their recent events at the International Center for Photography in New York City, the National Archives in Washington D.C. and The Free Library of Philadelphia.

Captions (from top to bottom):

At the Free Library of Philadelphia: Barbara Krauthamer (left) and Deborah Willis (right); Deb Willis with Photographer William Williams.

At the International Center for Photography in New York City: Barbara Krauthamer (left) and Deborah Willis (right)

At the National Archives in Washington, D.C.: Barbara Krauthamer speaking with one of the curators of the “Discovering the Civil War” traveling exhibit ; The authors signing Envisioning Emancipation; the authors with Alelia Bundles, journalist and granddaughter of Madam CJ Walker.

 

 

 

Remembering Harold Washington

Gary Rivlin, author of Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency, reflects back on Chicago’s first black mayor on the anniversary of his passing.

He was the first black mayor of Chicago, a city whose black populace had endured innumerable indignities at the hands of its fabled political machine. Yet to sum up Harold Washington as a racial pioneer and little more is to diminish the man and all that he accomplished. Behind him amassed a multiracial coalition consisting of blacks of all political stripes along with white progressives, Latinos, Asians, and gays, all organized around progressive totems like affordable housing and a more equitable distribution of city resources. Jesse Jackson would get his political start in Chicago; so, too, would a young community organizer named Barack Obama, who found inspiration in Washington. For decades anti-machine crusaders had tried but failed to reform. But even today Washington, who served during the 1980s, still looms as a before-and-after figure in the city’s history. Under Washington, Chicago saw the implementation of any number of good-government reforms, from the freedom-of-information act he signed to the steps he took to tame a bloated, inefficient city budget. He opened up the contracting process to women- and minority-owned businesses, shifted the focus of economic development from downtown to the neighborhoods, and gave voice to Latinos, gays, and other Chicagoans long locked out of City Hall.

Harold Washington died 25 years ago yesterday. His death represents one of those where-were-you-when-you-heard the news moments, at least for Chicagoans of a certain age.  Me, I was in my car, listening to NPR on my way home from some last minute Thanksgiving shopping. There was something strange about how the world learned the news: from Tom Bradley’s office, in Los Angeles, which had sent out a press release offering the mayor’s condolences. I was a staff writer for the city’s alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, and I nosed around in search of an explanation. It turns out that allies of Washington were keeping the lid on the news of the mayor’s death until their preferred successor could make it to the hospital, where he would appear with the doctors in a press conference. Meanwhile, word of Washington’s passing had spread among a small fraternity of black mayors of large cities. Putting the kibosh on tragic news for political reasons; It was quintessential Chicago.

Like a lot of Chicagoans, I was crushed by the news of Washington’s death. I was sad for myself, no doubt. I had just done the first of what was supposed to be a series of interviews with him: about his life and his time as mayor for the book that eventually would be called Fire on the Prairie. From my narrow perspective, I’d be denied the pleasure of spending time with an interesting and larger-than-life figure. But mainly I was crushed by what it meant for the city and the movement I believed in. Imagine the fierceness of the legislative opposition Barack Obama faced in the last two years of his first term: that was nothing compared to the nastiness and resistance that confronted Washington at every turn through his first few years in office.  Finally, he consolidated his power with his election to a second term. But then six months later, he would be dead and the multiracial progressive coalition that had assembled behind him fell apart.  Within a few years, again Chicago would be run by a Daley.

Speaking of race and class matters at colleges elite and otherwise

This week in North Philly Notes, Elizabeth Aries, author of Race and Class Matters at an Elite Collge and Speaking of Race and Class, looks at the potential impact of the outcome of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which considers race as a factor in a university’s admissions process.

There is much at stake in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which came before the Supreme Court last week. The Court will determine whether universities can legally continue to consider race as one factor in their admissions process. If they are not allowed to do so, the racial and ethnic diversity of students on our campuses will diminish, as will the educational benefits that ensue from having a diverse student body. 

My books, Race and Class Matters at an Elite College and Speaking of Race and Class have focused on those educational benefits.  I illustrate what, if anything, students actually learn from being with classmates of different races and social class backgrounds inside and outside the classroom. For both books, I followed a group of black and white students, both affluent and lower-income, over their four years at a liberal arts college, interviewing them at three points along the way. The educational benefits of diversity are real and they are important.

Many students come to college from segregated communities and high schools, having acquired widely held racial and class-based stereotypes that persist unchallenged without contact with the people they have stereotyped.  College can provide students with the opportunities to get to know and understand classmates not of their race and/or class, to have their stereotypes and world views challenged, to see the world through a new lens. 

The majority of white students in my study entered college having thought little about race or its consequences for peoples’ lives. Some never thought of themselves as even having a race. Some came to campus believing racial discrimination was a thing of the past, having never personally observed it. But as white students made friends with black classmates, and heard about friends’ encounters with prejudice and discrimination, they recognized that racial discrimination is still a reality. Those who had been taught a color-blind philosophy, taught not to think that race even really exists, found it shocking and upsetting to learn from minority friends about their experiences with prejudice and discrimination, and came to understand that race affects the experiences and opportunities people have. Over their years at college cross-race relationships led many white students to think more about race and racism and to become aware of their white privilege. Racial stereotypes were undermined as white students discovered the diversity within the black student community on campus – the great variability in language, tastes and preferences, in social class, religion, or identification as Caribbean American, African American or African. Given this diversity, it was hard for white students to hold on to the notion that blacks were poor, lived in the inner city, dressed in baggy clothes, spoke Ebonics and listened to rap music. Many students came to realize their racial stereotypes were incorrect and limiting.

Bringing students to campus from widely discrepant economic backgrounds also produced important learning. Students did not fail to notice what classmates had and did not have, not only in terms of material possessions, but in terms of the opportunities they had to go out to eat, take spring break trips, to make connections to pre-professional summer jobs and to good jobs after graduation. Many affluent students who had grown up in the bubble of their affluent communities had been unable to see outside that world. Some considered themselves to be “kind of poor” because their families lacked the extreme wealth of others in their communities. Friendships with lower-income students made them aware of just how privileged their families were, gave them a deeper awareness of class inequalities, of their own unearned privileges, and of the important role social class plays in shaping people’s lives and opportunities. Many lower-income students entered college with extremely negative stereotypes about the wealthy, seeing them as arrogant, spoiled, snobby, entitled, exclusive, as all about showing off their wealth. Through relationships with affluent classmates they, too, recognized that many students did not fit their stereotypes.

Colleges and universities educate students who will become our future leaders. If we, as a society, value equity and social justice for all citizens, we must produce leaders who have had their stereotypes challenged and are able to understand the world from perspectives different from their own. The impending Supreme Court decision may well reduce the opportunity for this kind of learning to occur.

To Read Chapter 1 of Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, click here
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1941_reg.html

To Read Chapter 1 of Speaking of Race and Class, click here
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2248_reg.html

Examining how narrative accounts of mob violence produced by vigilantes legitimized frontier justice and lynching

This week, Lisa Arellano, author of Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, describes what triggered her interest in writing about vigilantism and vigilante narratives.

People are sometimes surprised that I have written a book about vigilantes.  I spent most of my college and early graduate school years studying political movements and the ways that people use language and stories to create ideas about their identities, and possibilities for political change.  When I finally found my way into a history graduate seminar, I discovered that history sometimes works in very similar ways.  So now, I work on politics and history and on the ways that these two types of knowledge intersect. 

I remember very clearly the moment in graduate school that triggered my interest in vigilantism.  During a history seminar, we were reading Neil Foley’s The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture.  Foley quotes a Mexican American man who said, about a man who immigrated to the U.S. after him, “I’d lynch him if I could.”  My fascination with that formulation was the genesis for my dissertation about vigilantes.  What was this man trying to express about himself and his place in the U.S. when he made this claim?  As someone who grew up in the West, I was already familiar with the positive spin sometimes put on frontier vigilantism.  The writings of anti-lynching activists like Ida B Wells and Walter White had familiarized me with the horrors of Southern lynching and the work of scholars like Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Robyn Wiegman had helped me to think about the narrative and representational qualities of lynching violence.  The line from Foley’s book seemed to be about all, and none, of these familiar aspects of vigilantism and lynching.  The primary goal of my dissertation was to explain how all of these pieces were connected.

After travelling to archives around the country, and after looking at a wide array of different kinds of records left by vigilante groups, I discovered that oftentimes vigilantes worked very hard to leave glorified accounts of what they had done. They actually wrote histories of their own movements in order to create a favorable record of their actions!  These vigilante histories are still the centerpiece of my work and are the basis of my argument that a particular narrative formation was what created the form of violence we know as lynching.  According to this vigilante narrative, “an ideal vigilance committee convened and acted in an organized and even-handed fashion in response to uncontrolled criminal conditions and was roundly supported and applauded by its community for doing so.” 

When it came time to revise my dissertation for publication as a book, it was important to me to that I offer a fuller explanation of the ways that the vigilantes’ histories and accounts about themselves became so widely influential in histories of the region.  Some additional research on western archivist and historian Hubert Howe Bancroft allowed me to link up the vigilantes’ histories about themselves with histories about the west and with the process of regional archive building.  The vigilantes, their historians, and early local archivists and history writers did a remarkably good job creating positive accounts of vigilantism until Ida B. Wells intervened.  Among the anti-lynching activists, it was really Wells who figured out how important language, stories and narratives were in legitimizing vigilante practice.

While Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs is about the past and the ways that we remember and write history I believe that its most important lessons are for the present day.  The vigilante narrative continues to appear in a variety of contexts—from border patrols to community anti-crime groups.  The historical vigilantes help us understand how and why these practices can be understood, by some, as heroic (as well as the reasons that this self-understanding is often misplaced.)  The vigilante example also clearly demonstrates how violence, like politics and history, is both constituted and legitimated through language and stories.  My new research focuses on violence, gender and sexuality from 1950 to the present in order to understand these ideas in a different context.

Honoring a famous Olympian gold medalist

With the Summer Olympics starting in London this Friday, we repost our Q&A with 1968 Olympic Gold Medal winner and co-author (with David Steele) of Silent Gesture, Tommie Smith.

Q: Congratulations on your book. Why did you wait almost 40 years to tell your story?

A: My life wasn’t ready to be told in story until there was a closure with my athletic, teaching, and coaching career. The time I needed to devote to such an adventure was too great. You have to begin somewhere to be great. The race began in 1968 and now it is time to tell the journey of “how did I get to this race, and where did I go when it was over?”

Q: You say you “never regretted” your actions on the victory stand, “and never will”—that it was, as you write—“something I felt I had no choice in doing.” Did you think at the time that your protest would become one of the most famous protests in sports history?

A: I do not feel remorseful about the act on the victory stand as it was an act of “faith.” Because I believe in “hope” for our changing society, the evidence of non-equality had to be challenged. At the time, my “visual” on the victory stand was not thought of as a portrait to be classified as a picture of history, but as a cry for freedom.

Q: Do you think that such a protest could take place now?

A: Making the same gesture now is defeat; let us repeat the cry with sounds of understanding and deliverance.

Q: Can you briefly describe the Olympic Project for Human Rights and discuss your participation in it?

A: The Olympic Project for Human Rights was a non-violent platform used in the athletic arena as a cry for freedom. It originated on the San JoseStateUniversity campus in 1967. I was one athlete who chose to involve myself for the human rights issues. 

Q: You and your family received death threats and hate mail before and after Mexico City. Were you prepared for this? How did you handle living in fear?

A: My family received hate mail and death threats which altered our daily routine, but we had to continue to remain calm and socially aware. There are still some [people] who do not change and there are some who have made progress.

Q: You have been “forever linked” with John Carlos (Bronze medal winner at the 1968 Mexico City games) on and off since the Olympics. How has your relationship with him been over the years since your “silent gesture”?

A: I had not known John Carlos until my senior year in college, in 1967. Since then, my response to John has been a respectful acquaintance.

Q: You talk about how San Jose State welcomed you back and dedicated a statue to you and John Carlos. How have attitudes towards you—and your actions—changed over time?

A: When I returned to the San JoseStateUniversity for the statue dedication, attitudes were fresh, warm and respectful. The student body and administration was knowledgeable and unafraid in their quest to identify pioneers from the past and ideally, former students such as John Carlos and me.

Q: You have worked as a track & field coach and talk about your coaches in Silent Gesture. Do you have any particular mentors and coaches that influenced you?

A: There are two coaches in my past that I will forever remember because of their knowledge and their social attitude. They were positive “in the time of need.” Lloyd C. “Bud” Winter, my college coach and Bill Walsh, my professional football area coach with the Cincinnati Bengals.

Q: Silent Gesture dispels the rumors that you were a member of the Black Panthers. Your book also clears the record that the Mexico City Olympic Committee did not take for your medals back, or throw you out of the Olympic Village. Can you discuss these rumors?

A: Tommie Smith has never been a Black Panther. I am still in possession of my gold medal—I won the race fair and square, and so the medal is mine. I stayed in the Olympic Village until the race was over, and I returned the next day to get my belongings. As I was leaving, the press was everywhere, so kicking me out of the Olympic Village was a “helpful exit.”

Q: I understand at one point in time you were interested in selling your medals. Is that true? Why did you consider this?

A: I will answer a question with a question…Can you find a Humanitarian donor for $500,000?

Q: You are a hero to many for your actions—who were your heroes?  

A: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who had a Dream of Freedom and Equality, and my father, Richard Smith, who taught me pain is obvious, but how you react is not.

Q: What do you think your legacy will be?

A: I want to leave a legacy that says, “Tommie Smith was a Man who also had a Dream and a Vision and his Standing was not in vain.”

Why We Need to Name Whiteness

In this blog entry, George Yancy, author of Look, A White! provides lessons on white privilege as he chronicles the shock, bewilderment, and anger his students experience as they realize just how pervasively race functions in our society and in their lives.

I am constantly reassured by my white students that racism is a thing of the past. They seem eager and proud to correct my apparent misunderstanding about the pervasive reality of racism. “We are not like our parents and grandparents. We live in a different world.” Some even occasionally make reference to our first African-American president as confirmation of our post-race moment and our “colorblind” ethos.

I teach courses in the area of critical philosophy of race at a predominantly white university. What I have discovered is that most of white students have not thought about race in any sustained way. Part of the problem is that whiteness constitutes what I refer to as the transcendental norm, that norm in terms of which only nonwhites are raced. In fact, most of my white students have no understanding of how white privilege works, how, because they are white, they are perceived as just persons and not as raced, and how they have come to adopt, uncritically, a metanarrative about success, economic mobility, and social respect that includes absolutely no reference to whiteness as a site of exclusive historical power, citizenship, and privilege.

Denying the reality and significance of race is not a problem for just my students. The problem is also prevalent in the profession that I have chosen. Given the often myopic view about what constitutes philosophy and what constitutes “genuine” philosophical problems, especially as dictated by philosophical gatekeepers who think that race is not a topic worthy of philosophical discussion, I often find myself fighting on two fronts. Pedagogically, I find myself confronted by hostility and defensiveness on the part of my white students, especially as they deny that race continues to matter. Professionally, I find that I am up against a certain abstract and purist conception of philosophy that relegates anything that has to do with the inchoate and messy domain of embodied social reality (like race) to sociology or anthropology. This is one way that philosophical borders are policed; indeed, this is one way of restricting what constitutes philosophical intelligibility.

Look, a White! performs, without hesitation, the act of calling whiteness out of its normative shadow. Naming and marking the rigid philosophical values and demarcations within the profession of philosophy, along with marking philosophy’s attempt to exclude certain topics and, by implication, certain non-normative white bodies, requires unambiguous forms of declaration: “Look, a white!”

The practice of naming reality is one way that I have been able to get my white students to give attention to the centrality of race within our country and within their everyday lives. After four weeks of critically engaging the topic of race, many of those white students who were initially skeptical about or who outright denied the relevance of race within our contemporary moment have experienced shock, bewilderment, and anger once they have come to see just how pervasively race functions in our society and in their lives. They all get to witness collectively not only just how mistaken they were about the centrality of race and racism, but they also come to explore the source of their naivety regarding race and racism.

To encourage my white students to see just how whiteness operates in their daily lives, I have assigned a journal project where they are required to keep a detailed record of experiences that have racist implications, no matter how vague or implicit. Many of them have been deeply saddened and disillusioned by the results. However, they come away from the project able to offer a more critically informed narrative about racism in their lives and in our country. The objective is to get them to name, in this case, instances of white racism, and to do so courageously: “Look, a White!”

For example, one student wrote, “We were watching a television show and one of the characters who was black came on screen; one of my [white] friends then said, ‘My dad calls them coons.’” Another student wrote, “The first day back from Spring Break, we had a new…student move in. When [my] other floor-mates came and noticed this, one ran down the hallway (possibly inebriated) screaming, ‘There’s a nigger on the floor now, guys! Watch your stuff!’” Another student noted, “Today, I was hanging out in my room with three of my friends. We were looking back and enjoying a good laugh at old Myspace pages. My roommate was looking at her old friends on Myspace, and she goes: “Oh my gosh I had a black friend?!’” Lastly, another student wrote, “When I was on the elevator…I realized as a black man and woman walked into the elevator with me, I was clutching my bag close to my body and moved it to the shoulder away from them. I had no reason to clutch my bag other than the fact that they were black.”  Whether observing white racism in others or within themselves, my white students came to see and nominate reality in important ways that reveal complex layers of racism that are so mundane that they are invisible. I have had my white students complain that now they see the operations of race and white racism everywhere they go.

Look, a White! was intended as a gift to white people, an offering to encourage white people to name white racism (including their own) with as much honesty as possible. Yet, the book is not just about naming what is there, pure and simple, but it is about providing a critical framework for recognizing that there is something there to name at all.