Belonging: A Culture of Place (26 page)

WB: Well, if you reduce any group of people to a set of stereotypes you impair your mind and that was what was going on at Stanford in 1968. The university had invited some black students to enroll. It was not long after the Watts riots. The black students would call the white people on campus out to a place called White Plaza. The white people would say: “RIGHT ON.” I thought then, “well nothing good can ever come of this” because there are two sets of racial stereotypes involved. If you assume that all the good people are on one side and all the bad people are on the other side, you are just missing the point about what it is to be human. That is, we are each a mixture of good and bad, requiring some kind of judgment, sympathy, and forgiveness. You know Stanford?

BH: I know it well. I went there as a undergraduate. I studied writing there. I went to many a demonstration at White Plaza.

WB: Well, one day I was standing in the quadrangle and there was some kind of demonstration taking place. I said to the friend I was with, “What in the hell is going on?” Some white boy who was going by picked up on my “southern speech,” turned around and said in perfect fury “you, damn well better find out!” I thought guilt and anger were the wrong motives for a conversation about race. What I though was missing was love. And I started thinking about Nick and Aunt Georgie, a black couple who were my friends when I was a boy. I couldn’t speak for them, you know, a white man can’t stand and face the world and say that these old black people loved him back in the 40s. But I knew I loved them.

BH: The way that love guides you to stand for justice, to stand in solidarity is one aspect you share in the memoir portion of
The Hidden Wound
that I find especially moving. In these last five years much of my work on race has focused on the transformative power of love as a force that can lead us to social change. I am always moved by the particular moment in you book where you   are having the birthday party and Nick cannot come in the house because black and white can’t socialize together. You choose to leave the house to be with him. That’s just such a perfect metaphor for what it means to give up unearned white privilege.

WB: Well, it’s complicated. I was using my manners and it was manners my white elders had taught me.

BH: Yet you used those manners to intervene on a situation that was charged with the hidden violence of racism. And whether you were aware of it or not you showed what white people can do to challenge and change that violence. That’s why
The Hidden Wound
is still a valuable book. You bring complexity to our understanding of the intimacy between white and black people, an intimacy that certainly was on one hand created by the circumstances of oppression and exploitation, but as you show in this work that did not preclude the possibility of deep and abiding connections of care happening between white and black people even within this structure of domination.

WB: Well, there was a conventional structure called segregation. We weren’t calling it that. I don’t think we were calling it anything. I was just for most people the way things were. Certain assumptions were made, certain judgments were made, that was kind of a background but what was actually happening was that more often than not people were dealing with each other as individuals and there were all kind of exceptions.

BH: By that you mean folk were not staying within the rigid boundaries racism had set for them. They were not staying in their place.

WB: Remarkable things were going on that were exceptions to the rule. Kindness was going back and forth. And meanness was going back and forth between individuals, actual people. And so it’s not as if the abstract structure [of segregation] was a pattern you could lay the life of the time down on and pat it into a neat shape.

BH: That perspective of a humanizing relationship that often shadowed the constraints placed by racist domination may not have been shared by the black folks who were likely to be the targets of racial aggression if there did not “stay in their place.” That perspective may be informed by white privilege. But certainly growing up in the world of intense racial apartheid and segregation I know white and black folks found ways to meet and form intimacy despite the insanity of racial domination. By intimacy, I mean the kind of acknowledgement and understanding that can be the basis for love. That’s the connection you make in
The Hidden Wound.

WB: In those days white people told funny stories about black people, and black people told funny stories about white people. Segregation was happening but it was happening to us as we were. I took this up again in the essay you quoted from earlier “The American Imagination of the Civil War.” It’s about the way local life has been blurred by stereotypes of all kinds going back to the civil war era.

BH: I agree with you that we fail to render a holistic picture of what segregation was like if we only focus on oppressors and victims, but we must also be careful not to overstate the case, not to act as though the humanizing interactions white and black folks undermined the overall exploitative and oppressive structure. But like you, I believe we will understand race better if we look not just at the ways people were victimized but look also at the ways affirming ties of care, affection, and even love were developed within the context of segregation, that mutual emotional dependency you write about. That positive dependency breaks down when domination, the notion that whites are superior therefore deserving to rule over a servant class deemed inferior.

WB: That dependence was practical to some extent. We needed, or so we thought, those people to work for us. What isn’t being   acknowledged now is that white people are doing the same thing with Mexicans. As a racially designated subservient class, these people are hired to do the work we are “too good” to do. We don’t want to do certain fundamental work for ourselves. This is debilitating for us. The situation now is worse because there is no intimacy between races. You hear people say “My Mexican or So-So’s Mexicans.”

BH: But it is as though they are talking about inanimate objects and not people, like you identify my house, my car. Unlike other ethnic groups, Asian, and most recently Mexicans who are the new serving class, there is little intimacy between these groups and the white worlds they have to serve or serve. White people aren’t as fascinated by Mexicans in the same way that there has been this historical fascination with blackness. No matter how much people enjoy Mexican music, it’s never going to have a profound impact on the American culture, its never going to create a cultural revolution the way African-American music, in all its forms has. That symbiotic bond between black and white America is still unique. But these day it seems to primarily produce heartbreak. Racism intensifies because negative stereotypes is the only way of knowing and relating to the “other” that most use. We saw this during the Katrina catastrophe. When the amazing culture black people, especially the poor, helped create in New Orleans is not acknowledged. And the poor are just represented in the media as helpless victims or defeated predators.

WB: Well, the catastrophe seemed to be an ideal platform for stereotypes rather than actual people.

BH: Whether we are talking about disenfranchised poor black folks or migrant workers, some of whom are still black, the point is the refusal on the part of dominator culture to acknowledge their humanity. And poor working Mexicans are now prime targets for this brutal dehumanization.

WB: The migrant laborers don’t even have the protection of being   [human] property. If they were property, maybe people would try to take care of them.

BH: To the extent that they are viewed as objects, they are disposable. In the segregated world of the American South, black folks could not be disposed of because they were seen as necessary for the making of life. And what we know is white folks do not see Mexican workers as integral to their life and culture. There is usually no emotional engagement there — no care. In dominator culture it is usually the folks who have the least who give care to those who have the most. Recently, my mother was placed in a nursing home for a short stay. Most of the residents were white. But there was a plantation culture happening there, with the serving class, black folks and the served whites. Almost all of the folk giving care, dressing and undressing residents, washing bodies, wiping bottoms, cleaning up mess are, serving, are black. And the folks giving orders whether as high level administrators or as residents are white. Visiting mama in the nursing home, I observed the racial hierarchy, whites at the top, black on the bottom, whites giving orders, black folks taking orders. And yet here again, this is the superficial picture; the reality is more complex. For here in this place of sickness and death, there is a profound dependency of white needing black, of white depending on the kindness of black strangers. Underneath the surface there is a culture where bonds are established, where folk talk across race. Still, in many places in our society a more inhuman plantation culture (where whites dominate black people and other groups) is the norm. It seems as though our nation has created a modern context for slavery. Do you think slavery has ended or has it simply taken new forms?

WB: Well, I think it has taken on new forms. A lot of white people are thinking of themselves as slaves, and some of them are “successful” people. You have a whole society that is saying, “Thank God. It’s   Friday.” They are thinking of themselves as involuntary servants complicit in their own shackling.

BH: Yet they may think this way and have little concern or empathy for folks lower on the economic totem pole who really must work like slaves for inadequate wages. Migrant workers are the prime example.

WB: Why do we have these migrant workers? Because we [white people] think we are too good for physical work and physical reality.

BH: And many upwardly mobile black people feel the same, that’s why they want not to be reminded of our agrarian past or of the plight of those black folks who are the working poor, who must make their living doing physical work.

WB: Some groups of white people, such as the Old Older Amish, take responsibility for themselves. I’m told that when an Amish person dies, the young women prepare the body and the young men dig the grave. Certain essential things are taught to the young people who do that work. I think we [non-Amish white folks] are a people who have always needed people to look down on, people to do what we used to call “nigger” work. Yet on the other hand, there was also a saying here among some folk “I would never ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do.” Among farmers around here that saying was pointed directly at the racial structure. In other words — a part of my pride will be that I will not ask other people to lower themselves to do something I think I’m too good to do.

BH: For white folk who see certain kinds of work as beneath them, there has to always be a subordinated class to do the dirty work, whether that class has a racialized or ethnic identity. Sadly, many disenfranchised black and white poor people buy into this same logic and feel they are “too good” for certain forms of labor. Throughout my growing up the elders and my more modern   parents where clear that “all honest work is good work.” And we all taught that any labor done well, cleaning out a barn, the outhouse, cooking or serving done well, would be humanizing. This attitude towards work made black folk strong back in the day, a people of wisdom and integrity. Growing up the country black folk were a people of hard work, generosity, humility, and integrity. I see that wisdom in the portraits of Nick and Aunt Georgie in
The Hidden Wound.

WB: That’s right. Rural black people then were a people with wonderful knowledge, really essential knowledge. They knew how to make do, how to live on the margins. The chef Alice Waters has made a sort of revolution in our times by reminding people that good cooking depends on good ingredients.. On the farms around here, when Aunt Georgie was living, people would have been surprised to hear that there could be such a thing as bad ingredients — black and white; everybody had good ingredients. Cooking was uncommonly good everywhere you went. But the black people knew how to use the pieces of pork that the white people did not want to eat.

BH: I liken it to a culinary recycling. I can remember my grandmother laughing about the stuff white folks would throw away that they would take and make of it something mouthwatering, something delicious.

WB: Think of the beauty of their intimacy with the material life that they lived. They didn’t have much, but everything they had they prized. Aunt Georgie was a great embroiderer and a great quiltmaker.

BH: Fortunately, I had a community of folks in my life like Nick and Aunt Geordie. I came in to the last of that holistic, organic world with my grandparents. I grew up in that world of farming, of share cropping. Baba raised her chickens, made butt, made soap, and wine from our grapes. In my child mind their world was a paradise. They worked hard. They loved their land. And   they shared that love. When I left our little town in Kentucky and went to Stanford and met all those black people there who thought they were too good to do basic work, I could not relate to them. Urban black culture, city culture was just beginning to be the yardstick against which everything about blackness would come to be defined. All the aspects of our identity and culture that was deemed relevant came from the city. Gone was a world where black folks understood the limitations of white power. My Daddy Jerry, my paternal grandfather, as he plowed with his mule would say; “you see that sun — the white man can’t make it rise — no man can make it rise — man ain’t everything.” Daddy Jerry knew that there were limits to white power and to human power. We are living in a world right not where many black people and other people of color feel that white power is absolute. They see themselves as victims. They feel constant defeat and despair. In the culture of southern blackness, of Kentucky farm culture, you and I evoke, black folk were able to maintain integrity, dignity, creating beauty in the midst of exploitation and oppression. They did not give themselves over to sorrow. That did not mean they did not grieve. But even grief had its place. The important thing was to keep a hold on life.