White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (20 page)

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son

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Perhaps this is why national studies have found that next to having a Division I sports program, the most highly correlated factor with alcohol and substance abuse on campuses is the percentage of students who are white. The whiter the school, the bigger the problem—not because there’s something wrong with whites,
per se
, but because privilege encourages self-indulgent (and often destructive) behaviors, and allows those with privilege to remain cavalier about our activities all the while.

WHEN I WASN’T
getting high or visiting Monica, I was deepening my political involvement on campus and around the city. Although I first got involved with College Democrats, my political sensibilities had moved well to the left of the Democratic Party, and especially its conservative Louisiana contingent. Most of my activist time and energy was instead thrown into Central American solidarity work, opposing the arming of the contra rebels in Nicaragua who were seeking to overthrow the nominally socialist Sandinista government there, and opposing U.S. support for the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which had a penchant for murdering civilians in the name of anti-communism.

In the case of Guatemala, its dictator in the early eighties had been Efrain Rios Montt, whom Ronald Reagan insisted had “gotten a bum rap on human rights” and was “dedicated to social justice,” despite his policies of bombing peasant communities and other atrocities, which ultimately took the lives, in his term alone, of over seventy thousand Guatemalans. When I wrote an essay on the matter for the campus paper in the first semester of my freshman year, I received my very first (though certainly not my last) death threat, phoned in to my dorm room by someone whose family was closely connected to the military there and who promised that he could make me disappear. Undaunted, and even slightly amused, I threw myself into the work full-bore.

Working with the Movement for Peace in Central America (MPCA), I got my first taste of real left activism by organizing protests, teach-ins and other activities with a mélange of seasoned radicals, spanning the full spectrum of the ideological left. Having come from Nashville, where liberal Democrats were rare, to be in a place where we had the luxury of five different types of Marxists was interesting and a bit bizarre.

I never really considered myself a Marxist, mostly because I rejected the notion of any proletarian/workers dictatorship, which for most Marxists is a requisite component of their belief system. I was certainly anti-capitalist and still find the profit system inherently exploitative. But having never seen its opposite work either, I have remained agnostic on the issue of socialism. I am far more positively disposed to it than to capitalism, but am unconvinced that such a system can avoid falling into heavy-handed statist oppression, ultimately no better than the heavy-handed corporate plutocracy it would replace.

I also have to say, I wasn’t impressed with the organizational acumen of those who were proudly calling themselves communists. They had a hard time keeping MPCA functioning, so I never could figure out how people such as this were going to be able to run a government or society. The bickering about each faction’s particular dialectic made for tedious meetings and strategy sessions, which revolved around some of the most inane bullshit you can imagine. It was Marx versus Lenin versus Trotsky versus Mao versus Che Guevara versus Stalin (yes, there were actually some committed Stalinists in the bunch who always gave me the creeps and who believed Enver Hoxha’s dystopian regime in Albania was the only truly legitimate government on Earth). Even when you exclude from the group those members who were FBI plants—part of the ongoing disruption of the New Orleans–area CISPES (Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador), which had been exposed the year before I arrived in the city—there was still an amazing array of folks with whom one could choose to associate, or disassociate as the case may be.

By sophomore year, I was growing tired of MPCA, mostly because of the sectarian infighting, but also because I was becoming focused on a different issue that had been burning around the nation at the time on college campuses—namely, the anti-apartheid struggle, and the fight to get universities to divest of stock held in companies still operating in South Africa, thereby propping up the white minority regime.

Under apartheid, twenty-six million blacks in South Africa were denied the right to vote and were restricted in terms of where they could live, work, and be educated. The white racist government also routinely tortured anti-apartheid activists and had engaged in military subversion campaigns in surrounding nations like Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. All of this it had done with substantial economic and even military support from the United States government and multinational corporations. In the case of corporate support for apartheid, anti-apartheid activists noted that not only did the presence of these companies in the country send a signal that apartheid was acceptable to them, it also resulted in the economic support of the racist state and the transfer of technology and capital, both of which helped maintain the system.

Although Tulane was unwilling to expose its portfolio to scrutiny, the administration acknowledged that it continued to hold shares in roughly 25 companies that were still doing business with the apartheid government. This, combined with the offer of an honorary degree to South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-apartheid efforts in 1984), was too much for some of us to stand. To offer a degree to Tutu, making him part of the Tulane family, while we continued to turn profits from companies that were propping up the system he had dedicated his life to ending, struck us as hypocritical, to say the least.

In March 1988, a coalition of organizations joined forces to form the Tulane Alliance Against Apartheid. The Alliance made three demands: divestment from companies doing business in South Africa; the creation of an African American studies department at Tulane; and the intensification of affirmative action efforts, both for student recruitment and faculty hiring. The last of these was especially necessary, since in the 1987–’88 academic year there were no African American faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences or Newcomb College, the two principal undergraduate schools.

In the days following the announcement of the new organization, those of us in the Alliance constructed makeshift shanties (reminiscent of the dilapidated housing in which millions of South African blacks lived) on the main quad in front of the University Center, so as to raise awareness of the issue and to pressure the Board of Administrators to divest. A few days after the beginning of the shantytown occupation, we demonstrated at the Board’s quarterly meeting to demand divestment and to decry the offer of an honorary degree to Tutu so long as the school remained invested in apartheid-complicit firms. The Board was especially unhappy about the co-optation of their meeting agenda that day, as they had gathered mostly to announce the reinstatement of the school’s basketball program, suspended three years earlier by President Eamon Kelly, due to a point-shaving scandal. While they had been hoping for a celebratory meeting and media splash, we had tried to steal (and had at least partially succeeded in stealing) some of their thunder that day.

During this time we also sent the Archbishop a packet of materials concerning Tulane’s investments—what little information we had—and requested that he make a strong statement condemning the school’s role in supporting, even if mostly symbolically, South Africa’s racist system. We hoped he would either turn down the degree and boycott the school, or come as planned and deliver a withering indictment of the university’s investments. Either way would have been fine with us.

A few weeks later, I was awoken in my dorm room by a call from a National Public Radio reporter. “What do you think of the Archbishop’s announcement today that he would be turning down the degree from Tulane because of the school’s investments?” she asked.

Groggy from too little sleep—we had only torn down the shanties a few days before, in preparation for the end of the school year—I wasn’t sure whether the call was real or part of a dream.

“Excuse me?” I replied

“Yes, I was wanting to know if you’d heard the news,” she said, “and if so, do you have anything to say about it? Archbishop Tutu is traveling in Canada right now, and last night at McGill University he announced that he would be turning down the degree from Tulane.”

I was stunned, but pleased. The administration was shaken as news spread worldwide of Tutu’s boycott, and a few days later, his subsequent announcement that he would return all honorary degrees he had ever accepted from schools with investments in South Africa unless they divested fully within one year. Clearly, the university had been denied the moment they had hoped for, in which Tutu would be honored by the school and thereby lend anti-apartheid cover for their otherwise morally indefensible investment practices. Although Tutu’s boycott didn’t change the board’s mind about divestment, we anticipated that upon returning to campus in the fall, the movement would hit the ground running having obtained such a high-profile victory.

As it turned out, our optimism in this regard was entirely misplaced. Summer sapped the energy of the movement considerably as several of the key movers within the group graduated. Although I returned as a junior, and there were others of the original membership back that next year, we struggled from the outset to replicate the success of the previous semester. Membership waned and our direction seemed unclear. Although we continued to educate the university community about South Africa and the role of corporations in propping up the apartheid system, we stalled when it came to making any progress with the board. Most importantly, the organization in that second year became almost entirely white, and the alliance between the mostly white activists and the black-led organizations that had created the movement in the first place fell apart entirely, in a quiet but noticeable fashion.

Of course, none of us white folks were prepared to confront the reasons why such a racial split had opened within the organization, and why African American students, though clearly supporting the divestment struggle, had little to do with the formal organization pushing for that end. We did come up with some convenient excuses for it though, all of which let us off the hook entirely. As one white member put it, getting no argument from me in the process, the black students at Tulane were mostly “bougie,” from upper-middle-class families, and didn’t want to make waves. Aside from the fact that this was utterly untrue, who the hell were we to call anyone bougie? As if we were some hardscrabble working-class offspring of West Virginia coal miners or something.

Never did it occur to us that maybe black folks at Tulane were turned off by the way a handful of whites (myself included) had been elevated to the status of spokespersons by the media, and how we weren’t savvy enough to avoid the trap of our own mini-celebrity. Maybe they were pissed because the original focus of the group—which had involved not only divestment but also black studies and affirmative action—was slowly replaced with a single-minded focus on the one issue that was easiest for white Tulanians to swallow and would call for no sacrifice on our part, or alterations in the way the campus looked and felt. Maybe they fell away because we were so quick to jump to cavalier methods of protest like taking over board meetings and openly inviting arrest if necessary, without consulting anyone, and without discussing the privileged mindset that treats going to jail like just another rite of passage for students to experience.

Whatever the case, the movement floundered that next year, and white privilege got in the way of our seeing why.