On Whiteness in Cincinnati

Now that the draining torments of the 07-08 academic year are over I finally started reading W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, which so far is amazing. The author's voice and style is incredibly elegant and the prose is more than enlightening. I stand on the periphery of the white power structure peeing into Blackness from the outside, trying to understand where the moral and spiritual high ground should be for a conscious white man. And I live in a city where I feel like my race seems to make me consistently regarded with suspicion and contempt. In his memoir Ghetto Celebrity Donnell Alexander describes a scene where his new white in-laws get together with his family, working-class Black folk from gritty Sandusky, Ohio. He is amazed at how differently Black and white folk seem to conduct their lives. And he describes how whites always seem to be vaguely threatening through his eyes. Too much unwritten and brutal history has passed between the two peoples for them to ever be on neutral terms. Alexander writes that to him white people can never be benign.

"...to be poor in a rich society entails having the status of a social anomaly and being deprived of control over one's collective representation and identity: the analysis of public taint in the American ghetto ... serves to stress the symbolic dispossession that turns their inhabitants into veritable social outcasts."

- Loic J.D. Wacquant , "Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American and the French Urban Periphery", from The Urban Sociology Reader, Jan Lin and Chistopher Mele, eds., Routeledge 2005


Living in battle-scarred inner city Cincinnati I feel that mix of pain, anger, resentment, and distrust in the eyes of Black folk everyday. When I ride the bus and tell a young mother her child is cute, when I greet neighbors who are predisposed to be less than cordial to me, when I shop at a ghetto convenience store and the old men loafing out front look at me with concern and surprise. Perhaps I am merely arriving at the inverse of the double consciousness that DuBois describes having had since childhood. My teacher Dr. Taylor tells me that constantly seeing one's own Blackness through the eyes of whites is a form of mental prison.

I read about the Black cops who showed up after the regular burglaries that were perpetrated upon the home of Paul Clemens' family in Made in Detroit: A South of Eight Mile Memoir. Clemens was raised white, urban, Catholic, and working class - like the German American proletariat I am connected to on my father's side. Clemens version of my father's Price Hill was the Northeast corner of Detroit proper where 8 Mile meets Gratiot. By the time Clemens was a teen Detroit was a chocolate city; he had become the anomaly. He analogized it to being a stubborn white Rhodesian living in Zimbabwe.

I was riding the bus from campus the other day with my friend Allen, a portly middle-aged Black man who draws comic books from the bell closet in the hotel we used to work at together. He chatted with the other African American passengers on the bus and, ever the popular comedian, cracked jokes with them. When I chimed in right on cue with my part of our usual comedic routine the response was lowered eyebrows and glares from the bus' black passengers. I am still trying to figure that out.

I noticed that I have a lot more rapport with the African students I meet than the most of the Black folks in the city. To Africans I am simply another foreigner in the land they have adopted to pursue their studies or find a job. Like the girl from Kenya I met waiting for the #17 bus last week, they are usually impressed that I know a little about Africa's geography and history.

With Africans there is no wall. I can introduce myself to them and hit it right off by guessing where they are from by having memorized all the primate cities on the continent. We can talk honestly and openly. There is also some of the naivety and openness that comes of not being raised in a big city on both out parts. Africans usually seem laid back to me; no such dynamic with people raised in the 'hood.

But with African American strangers DuBois' posited veil always gets in the way. I am the inheritor of a legacy of abusive privileged. My Black history professor occasionally reminds me that I stand to inherit racial power, an observation that is often hard for me to wrap my head around. Me? I'm nobody. I'm less than nobody - I got no kinda real job, six figures of student debt, and I'm working on a liberal arts degree that is notorious for having no employment prospects. I've been close to homelessness at times. My friends are all broke-ass artists and general social deviants and my relatives are working class. I mean I had friends growing up who didn't have running water and who lived back in the woods and raised most of their own food because they didn't trust modern mainstream society. I learned how to drive on a tractor and my first job was shoveling manure. I am whiter than what would happen in Barney Fife, Lawrence Welk, and Hank Williams had a genetic-experiment lovechild, but I hardly feel like I am privileged. I have worked damn hard to make it through college. But I guess my whiteness is an asset that I take for granted. I don't have to fear the police, worry about discrimination, or deal with the host of mutually reinforcing forms of structural disempowerment that African Americans struggle against every day.

And as my Race in Modern Society textbook informed me last week, being poor and white is not the same as being poor and black. Poor whites can go to college, learn to speak like middle-class suburbanites, and blend in with mainstream culture. African Americans can never do that, and the legacy of poverty they inherited means they can never earn their way out of the racial wealth gap we have in this country. Whites earn several times what Blacks do on average, while they have ten times the accumulated wealth. European immigrants enter the country as Others, but within a generation they have become racially, and culturally, normative. Skin color is a barrier in this process. A Ghanian immigrant and a Polish immigrant cannot both become the same kind of Americans.



Maybe this is all in my head, but ever since I moved here I can't shake the feeling that most of the Black folks I live amongst are seriously pissed the fuck off, and that my skin color is a constant symbol of their rage. How do I sympathize with that in a way that seems sincere and informed, and not naive, hackneyed, or trite?

I pray that DuBois' text enlightens me and gives me some of the tools to help in the struggle his life so famously embodied.