White Terrorism: The Ordeal of Black Philosopher George Yancy

• • white racism

On Christmas eve in 2015 the leading Black philosopher and New York Times opinion writer, George Yancy, penned a poignant “Dear White America” article in the Times. Yancy bravely sought to encourage each white reader to, as he summarizes in his disturbing new book Backlash

risk yourself, to undergo a process of moral and existential perplexity” and to assess very deeply what being white in America means. He also sought action from white readers, calling for “a refusal to lie, a refusal to live another day within a white supremacist system where Black people and people of color continue to be oppressed. . . . I wanted you to tell the truth to yourselves and tell it to others.

Yancy is writing from what I have termed in the The White Racial Frame book as strong resistance counter-framing. Counter-frames are grounded in counter-system thinking and have been very important for Black Americans in surviving and resisting oppression over many generations. In these anti-racism counter-frames whites are defined as highly problematical, and strategies on how to deal with whites and white institutions are expressed and foregrounded. As Backlash illustrates, a well-developed Black counter-frame includes deep understandings of how white racial hostility and discrimination operate and how to deal in everyday practice with white discrimination, including teachings about safety for Black youth and passive and active strategies of anti-racism resistance.

Resistance counter-framing like that demonstrated by Yancy is necessary in this highly racist society. The “Dear White America” letter was not long out before white America roared back angrily in reply. Hundreds of whites replied to Yancy’s honest pleas and counter-framing with vicious replies developing most of the major racist themes long common in this country’s omnipresent white racial frame (defined below). These came as online comments, emails, phone messages, and letters, and have continued to the present. Many missives were filled with intense emotions and extensive and venomous “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger” language (no exaggeration). This is indeed, as Yancy puts it, “21st century white terror.”

The impact on Yancy and others around him has been severe. He has feared for himself and family and colleagues, to the present day. Campus police have monitored his Emory University office, patrolling his office floor; his department has had to quit providing his office hours to callers; his department chair, higher administrators, and other colleagues have been attacked as well, some called “nigger lovers.” At other universities, his talks have required the presence of police officers to protect him from possible white violence. His colleagues across the country have circulated large-scale supportive petitions on his behalf.

Yet Yancy did not submit to this extreme, often violence-oriented white onslaught quietly. A major countering effort can be seen in his Backlash book, in which he critically recounts and counter-frames many white-racist responses. This book clearly took great personal strength to write and has much that Americans, whites in particular, must read and heed if this country is to survive even remotely as just and democratic. Here he emphasizes the personal impact of everyday racism most African Americans face–some more than others, but virtually all too often, and ranging from subtle, to covert, to blatant discrimination. Yancy’s book makes clear what it means today to be Black, to live in an often threatened Black body, and to be a recurring target of chronic racist framing. As he insists, this is a “window into the life of a Black philosopher who believes that the practice of philosophy, the love of wisdom, must speak to those who formally reside outside of” academic settings.

What is this horrifying white racial frame to which Yancy has had to respond? It is far more than just prejudice (bigotry, animus, etc.) Some years back, in the books Systemic Racism and The White Racial Frame I suggested the analytical concept of the white racial frame. Since its development in the 17th century, this white racial frame has been dominant, a framing that provides a generic meaning system for a highly racialized U.S. society. For centuries this powerful racial frame has provided the broad white-generated worldview from which whites (and many others) regularly view society. It includes (1) racial stereotypes/prejudices (the verbal-cognitive aspect); (2) racial narratives & interpretations (the integrating cognitive aspects); (3) racial images (the visual aspects) and preferred language accents (the auditory aspect); (4) racialized emotions; (5) and inclinations to discriminatory action. This broad framing has a very positive orientation to whites as generally virtuous (pro-white subframe) and a negative orientation to racial “others” frequently viewed as unvirtuous (anti-others subframes). The pro-white subframe aggressively accentuates white superiority, civilization, virtue, and moral goodness.

There are numerous major themes from this old white racial frame’s anti-black subframe in the messages Yancy received. As he underscores in his book, these commentaries are far more than signs of “white fragility,” for they signal old white racial “world-making” that is usually imbedded in white character structure. Some of these white racist messengers, often angry white men, use racialized sexual references (e.g., speaking of the supposed threat of Black men to white women) or references to Blacks being excrement (“shit,” this and that). There is a recurring animalizing of Yancy and other Black Americans, including President Barack Obama, something whites have been doing at least since the founding era. White messages regularly describe African Americans as apes or ape-like. White images of Africans and African Americans as ape-like or ape-linked date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are another way of portraying Black Americans as racially inferior. For example, our third president Thomas Jefferson, a theorist of supposed “liberty and equality,” wrote in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, that Black Americans are racially inferior to whites in many ways, including reasoning, imagination, intelligence, and beauty. He further asserted that even black Americans prefer white Americans’ beauty, “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan [Orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species.” That is, as a prominent white-racist thinker, Jefferson believed the imperialist myth that in Africa nonhuman primates actually had intercourse with oversexed African women.

Sadly, such ape imagery remains commonplace not just in the attack messages Yancy has received but also all over the Internet. One recent online study of 447 self-proclaimed white nationalists found that, using a scale from zero (as ape-like) to 100 (as human), they rated blacks and other people of color as much more apelike and much less human than whites. Numerous other studies (see here) of ordinary whites, the latter mostly not openly connected with white nationalist organizations, reveal this regular linking in white minds of apelike imagery to Black people, such as in the commonplace form of everyday “nigger” joking.

Perhaps most disturbing in these white commentaries to Professor Yancy is the constant threatening of violence against him and other Blacks. Most of these violent verbal attacks appear to come from white men of various ages and classes. There is much anger in their messaging, like this one: “Somebody needs to . . . knock your fucking head off your shoulders.” As Yancy underscores,

there was very little love shown toward me. There were white threats of physical violence, talk of putting a meat hook in parts of my body, threats of knocking my “fucking head off” (their words), of beating me and leaving me dead, and vile demands that I kill myself immediately.

This viciousness came in response to Yancy’s honest pleas seeking to move whites to understand who they are racially and the scale of the racial oppression they have created.

Striking too in these hundreds of attack messages is the high level of white emotion. Many whites, especially white men, pride themselves on not being emotional; they reserve emotionality for those who are not white or male. Yet white men are probably the most emotional Americans when it comes to racial issues, especially when their racial status, enrichments, and privileges seem endangered, Coming through the many white verbal attacks on Yancy is stunning white emotionality, including anger, fear, outrage, bitterness, and, almost always, arrogance. Hundreds of the comments have a tone like this: “Dear nigger . . . fuck you. I am a racist. I’m ok with that now thanks to your nigger community and their actions over the last few years.” These hundreds of comments clearly demonstrate how most elements in the dominant white racial frame are very emotionally loaded.

Yancy’s belligerent responders also demonstrate great ignorance about many racial matters. For example, their white comments often reflect a serious illiteracy in regard to what the word “racism” means, especially in its origin. They periodically call Yancy a “racist” for calling out the white-racist ideas and discriminatory patterns of whites. The term “racism” is widely used by whites and many others for an individual’s ideas and actions, yet the modern term “racism” was originally constructed to refer to collective ideological and systemic racism. The first modern use of term “racism” was by German researcher Magnus Hirschfeld (in his 1933 book) for what German Nazis were systematically doing to European Jews, Roma, and Africans —that is, extreme ideological and institutional racism. This was far more than a matter of Nazi prejudices. Today, white racism also involves the deep structures and surface structures of racial oppression. It includes a complex array of white anti-other (e.g., anti-black) discriminatory practices, the unjustly gained economic/political power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines (unjust enrichment/unjust impoverishment), and the white racial framing created by whites to rationalize white privilege and power. This racism is a material, social, racially framed reality—that is, manifested in all societal sectors, institutionally enabled, and socially reproduced for about 20 generations. White attempts to apply the term racism to yet other groups demonstrates not only ignorance of its history and reality but also, and quite remarkably, that most of these whites actually do understand at some level that racism is undesirable and immoral.

The many racially hostile messages recorded in Backlash further suggest that our contemporary era of overt and politicized white racism has liberated many whites from the necessity of suppressing their extensive white racist framing of society in public settings. For example, there is recurring positive reference in these attack missives sent to Yancy, and in similar hostile communiqués on white nationalist websites, to the white nationalism of our current president, Donald Trump, including recurring phrasing similar to Trump’s main slogan (e.g., “make America white again”). Such racially framed sentiments are not just limited to more extreme white supremacist missives and websites, for much recent social science research shows that central to the thinking of many of Trump’s many white voters has been great worry about their losing their “superior” racial status in US society.

Perhaps the most poignant and deeply insightful aspect of Backlash is Yancy’s reflections on being Black and the matter of death resulting from white terrorism’s many forms. Yancy describes an incident when he was growing up in an impoverished urban area. Having gotten a telescope as a present, a white officer saw him with it, and framing him as a poor Black youngster, almost shot him because he thought it was a weapon. Reflecting in the book on this incident, Yancy concludes that he cannot be a complete pessimist because he is alive today, yet “being alive feels like borrowed time.” Being Black, that is, means the constant and well-institutionalized possibility of racially marked death at any time of life. This is the critical difference between blackness and whiteness, for no institutionally grounded practices have marked “whiteness as a target for death” at any time. So, given the entrenched reality of persisting white racism, Yancy also concludes he cannot be truly optimistic in regard to the possibility of substantial racial change in this society.

Racism and Family: Reflections on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Book

• • family, white racism

As the nation—and even the world—approaches yet another Rev./Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, some will be reflecting on how far we’ve come since King’s time. Others will be calling for renewed vigor toward activism and social justice, noting how far we still have to go toward King’s “dream.” Last year I was one of those voices. This year, however, I am instead overwhelmed by tremendous grief. The racism King deplored and gave his very life to combat simply will not leave us. It seems no sooner can I experience the joy of connecting to another person than it is cut short by the cold hard truth of what racism does to relationships, and to our inner beings. And just as I am grieving personal loss, I too am grieving the loss for all of humanity. That too many of the human species are condemned to lives far dimmer than what the bright light of their spirit could hold, if it weren’t for the invention of race and its rules of division.

Between the world and me book cover

One analyst who shares my grief is Ta-nehisi Coates. I was deeply moved this summer after reading his new book Between the World and Me. After noticing some reviewers accuse Coates of overgeneralizing about whites and/or police officers (see here for example) I knew I had to get a copy to read for myself. I’m all too familiar with my students and others reading things that aren’t there when it comes to racism. Not surprisingly, I found Coates was not the mythical creature he was purported to be. (You know, the one that hates all white people and won’t give even them a chance–e.g., like the black person “who took your job,” or the “close” black friend you have). However, we still have yet to have a documented/verified sighting of such a black person!

No, far from being exclusionary or categorically dismissive, Coates places the blame exactly where it should be:

‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. . . . without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for a want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all of history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been ‘black,’ and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us. . .(p. 42)

These very fences are directly responsible for many of the losses I am grieving. I connected so deeply to Coates’ writing because he wrote as a parent torn between the beauty of a child who believes he can dwell above the veil, beyond the veil (see W.E.B. Du Bois), and the harsh reality that one’s job as a parent is to protect one’s children of color from being slaughtered by these fences—-all the while knowing in the end we will have little to no control when the unfairness of it all crashes down onto them. I am the one they look to, to tell them they can be anything they want to be when no one else will, but as a person who values honesty, I cannot lie to them. And as a parent who wants them to succeed, thrive, and prosper, I cannot ill-equip them by shielding them from these truths.

Comedians make jokes sometimes about the different parenting styles of whites and blacks—-as if they are simply differences in regional dialect or those color/hue palette variations like eye color that make the world go round and keep it interesting. But Coates so astutely implicates the very white power structure above for the perceived harshness of some black parenting styles. Just underneath that gruffness is nothing but racism-instilled fear:

This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you to contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. . . .This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. . . It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.(pp. 90-1).

These many costs of racism that take grave tolls on black bodies and minds have been documented empirically in Joe Feagin and Karyn McKinney’s book, The Many Costs of Racism — high rates of hypertension, workplace-induced carcinogens (i.e., much environmental racism), and other factors all ultimately resulting in lower life expectancies. Thus, one piece of my grief, for example, is that my children will never know their African American grandmother, who died at only 52, and was one of the most hardworking, loving, giving, caring, and musically talented members of the family. Yet many African Americans might only dream that their children had been able to see the age of 52—instead, their children, such as (most recently) Prince Jones, Michael Brown, Trayvon Brown, Tamir Rice, and far too many others must be mourned before they can even be parents themselves, much less barely finish their childhood.

Coates wrote Between the World and Me in the form of a letter to his son, who cried in his room inconsolably after learning of the Michael Brown verdict. Coates knew that telling his son everything’s going to be all right was not an option. After the book’s printing, no doubt Coates would not be surprised there would be no justice for Tamir Rice either. Racism literally takes away life, which is bad enough. But for those of us who remain, while we remain, racism does damage to our lives as well.

So I am grieving today that I had to have “the talk” with my 8-year old black son. Much as I wanted to put it off longer–the child still believes in Santa Claus–a well-meaning white family member forced my hand, by giving him the toy gun he asked for for Christmas. I had to tell him that a police officer might shoot and kill him with the justification that he thought he was holding a real gun. Lest his naïve white mother be talking about something she was clueless about, he turned to his older sister for some sort of confirmation or denial. When his sister–with hair like his and skin like his–told him, “yes, it’s true,” at that moment he knew that all the nice refrains in school about the police officer being his friend were but one version of the real story.

I am grieving that “the talk”–that was once associated with getting one’s driver’s license and becoming a young man–is now a talk for little ones who still take their steps down a staircase two feet at a time.

And while I shoulder this, I am also grieving a three-year relationship with the beautiful African American man I thought was my soul mate. Though each of us was raising children of our own, it was mentioned that my parenting was perhaps too optimistic. “We did not choose our fences” (Coates 2015:42), but those fences inevitably mean we only could connect but so much, and but for so long. Imagine how much more energy one could devote to strengthening one’s relationships if one’s body were not constantly drafted into the war of fighting racism. Perhaps fortuitously, a skilled and talented DJ chose “Footprints” as part of the soundtrack to our first date. It begins with a mother saying a routine “hurry back” goodbye to her son, only to lose him forever in a shooting—-much akin to the grief Coates chronicles in his interview with the mother of Prince Jones.

Some have told me Coates’ book was so painful, they had to put it down. While decontextualized excerpts from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech have been used at times as some kind of “Kumbaya, why can’t we all just get along anthem,” Coates instead uses the concept of the “dream” to refer to the deluded whites who think the world is a meritocracy, the world is their oyster, and when and if problems arise, justice wins out in orderly fashion. Those whites and others who buy uncritically into the “dream” still understand racism as an aberration to an otherwise ethically grounded society, much as the occasional natural disaster. Coates notes that

Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’. . .But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. . . [whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power” (pp. 7-8)

Those who subscribe to the “dream” are usually ignorant of the fact that racism in the form of slavery and Jim Crow forms fully 83 percent of our nation’s history so it’s foundational and ongoing, as opposed to a temporary hiccup. When Michelle Alexander reviewed Coates’ book for The New York Times review of books, she read it twice–the first time she was so disheartened that he offered no optimistic, visionary, inspirational vision for the future, that she had to read it again a second time with new adjusted expectations. Coates does not provide a way out of the mess. And although I do not share Coates’ atheism/agnosticism, what lover of justice among us has not questioned why a benevolent God would allow the ugliness of racism to continue to rage with no end in sight?

I led two community discussions on Coates’ book in Fall 2015, and I asked my fellow readers whether they thought Coates was a pessimist. Though we did not find him to be offering optimism, we agreed that what Coates prescribes is instead consciousness. He calls us to be fully aware, cast off the denial, and pay attention. Indeed, to his son he wrote:

My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world” (pp. 107-8).

If one listens closely, there are moments of beauty of this world Coates celebrates throughout these pages. Those are the moments when one dwells outside the veil, when the fences have been temporarily lifted, when the softness dares to emerge despite the inevitable risk of pain that looms just behind. Coates eloquently shares with the reader the moments when he is bowled over by the bold no-holds-barred confidence of his son or his wife, or the way his fellow students groove to the music at a party. They exude a soulfulness and a zeal for life that he cherishes in those moments. Those snapshots in time become all the more beautiful when you are fully conscious of how rare they are, and how inevitably they will be interrupted.

In a bereavement workshop after the passing of my father, I was reminded that grief is an indicator of once having loved and being loved in return. Toward the end of his life, this man sent me a card every year on MLK day to acknowledge and honor my work. He would also remind me of the Buddhist teaching on impermanence–everything, whether wondrous or painful, too shall pass. Coates brings us face to face with the kind of pain that is like fire or looking into the son-—at some point, many readers feel compelled to put the book down and look away, it is too heavy to bear. Yet, even though he is a skeptic, he is fully conscious. His eyes are wide open, and he does not want to miss a moment.

So on this Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, while the national focus on race and racism only calls to mind the sadness and pain it inflicts upon my relationships with those I love most, I am also challenged to follow Coates’ lead: as I grieve, I will keep conscious. I will cherish the moments my love and I got lost in the music and there were no fences between us. I will cherish the moments my children played with abandon without a care to how boisterous they were, and no one was there to invoke our fear of sanctions that might befall them when their “race” trumped their youthful innocence in someone’s eyes. Most of all I will keep telling the truth, and I will not keep silent, about the racism that keeps us all from being able to enjoy so many more of those moments with each other.

~ Eileen O’Brien is Associate Professor of Sociology and Assistant Chair of Social Sciences at Saint Leo University (Virginia campus). She is currently researching race and hip hop (with Nosh McTaggart) and race/gender in military families (with Stephanie Byrd). Her books include The Racial Middle, and Race Ethnicity Gender and Class (with Joseph Healey).