Chapter One
FREEDOM NOW!
Bill Ayers I am invisible, understand, because people refuse to see me. -Ralph Ellison
Riding an early morning bus in New York City with our son Zayd, bright-eyed and chirpy, five years old and just beginning to read, the bus packed with commuters, the mood a resigned grumpiness as we groan down the avenue toward school and work: "Poppy," Zayd says suddenly in his large outside voice, turning to me expectantly. "What''s a kike?"
A sudden silence falls as dozens of eyes lift and, in my mind at least, begin to sizzle, laser-like, into my head. "What?"
"A kike. What''s a kike?"
I freeze. "Where did you hear that word, Zayd?"
"I read it," he replies proudly. "See?" He points to a stab of red graffiti slashed across a rear window. "I HATE KIKES," it reads-all uppercase-and it''s punctuated with a swastika. He''d sounded it out.
"A kike-a kike-"
I don''t want to be here, don''t want to be called upon to explain this part of our world to him, not yet, but here I am. Miraculously, I imagine the crowd receding, until there is only me and Zayd, his basic trust intact, his childish hope undiminished, and his deeply human sense-making engine firing on all cylinders. I''m his guardian and his guide at this point-I have to respond.
"Kike," I begin in as calm a voice as I can muster, "is a word full of hatred. It''s a word full of violence, a word used by people who want to hurt Jews, like hateful words meant to hurt Black people." I''m into it now. "It''s a lying word, because it says that some people are more human than others, that some groups are superior to others, that some are less than human. People who are filled up with hate might call you a ''kike.'' It''s the kind of word we should never use, the kind of word we always object to and oppose."
A little too didactic, for sure, too sermonizing, but I''m relieved to have been able to spit it out at all. Zayd''s face never loses its open and intent concentration. "OK," he replies simply. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Damn!" I feel like shouting. "Haven''t I done enough?" But I dutifully dig for a magic marker in my backpack and obliterate the stain.
"OK," he says again simply.
A child''s question: Why is that man sleeping in the street? Why is that woman bleeding? Why is he acting that way? The ground shifts and we adults are forced (or invited) to make sense again, to dig deeper, to discover something truer, and more complex. Children''s questions can be disruptive and disquieting, which may explain the knee-jerk answers we hear ourselves repeating: I''ll tell you later, or When you''re older, or When I have more time. Don''t ask. Don''t look. Don''t stare.
Our avoidance reveals our incomprehension, our personal dogmas and our easy beliefs, our own uninterrogated and insistent common sense. And it brings us face to face with our own fears-do we really want to open every door, to doubt every truth, to wonder again at every mystery? It''s a lot easier to simply live within the walls of our own self-constructed blindness: "I''ll tell you later"-the door slams shut and we sigh with relief within the illusion of safety.
What is racism? What is race? Prejudice? A scapegoat? Genocide? An ethnic group? One childish question leaps to another and another, and each asks us to reconsider the world, to confront our own gaps and ignorances, to rethink our taken-for-granteds. If we''re strong enough, or just lucky, we push tentatively through the cotton wool of our shackled consciousness, the pseudo-language of clich?s and slogans, and we take the question as a guide and a conversation.
If we think of children''s questions in this way, they may become occasions to notice the obstacles blocking our own paths, and if the questioning child tugs hard enough, we may even be stirred to action. I might have left the gruesome graffiti alone (as did hundreds of fellow travelers) had I not been prodded by my fresh-faced five-year-old who, without any drama or theatrics, simply assumed that I could be counted on to explain the world to him and then do the right thing.
What is racism?
Each of us could write a book. Mine begins with a privileged white child''s question: "Why is Celeste brown?" Celeste cleaned our house, and I''d just noticed something: color. "Shush," mother scolded. "We don''t talk that way." Why was this childish observation, of all the things we could choose to talk about, unspeakable?
I was raised on the idea that every person was worthy of empathy, each to be respected, none superior to any other. This lesson was a steady mantra throughout my childhood: Both my mom and the Declaration of Independence heralded the self-evident truth of equality among. As I grew, this explicit, articulated value seemed more and more at odds with the world as it was, and it presented itself as a contradiction: Do I say that the values my parents taught me were no more than fairy tales and hypocritical mind-candy offered to a credulous child? Do I note that the foundational documents of U.S. history include and embrace a cruel joke? Or do I try to enact and live by those values and thereby put myself in escalating conflict with my family, my community, my church, and my country?
I was also taught to stand up for what I believed, but again the contradiction: If what I believed was pretty much what everyone else believed, no standing up was needed; if my beliefs ran against the grain, on the other hand, no one really wanted me to stand up. Clearly, the road of life would be bumpy.
There was, years later, another moment of muteness when our three kids came home from junior high school one day with a story of a fistfight in the cafeteria. "Paul called Tony a ''po**ck,'' and then Tony called Paul a ''ni**er,''" Zayd reported, "and then they really got into it." After describing the fight and noting that both boys were suspended from school, our kids wanted to know, "Which is worse, ''po**ck'' or ''ni**er''?"
They had studied the Indian wars, the enslavement of Africans, and the Holocaust in Europe, and so we had a lengthy, engaged talk about the historical weight of words, the ways in which meaning can link to power and control, why calling a Jew a name in Germany, for example, might resonate with unique intensity and power. This led to an involved discussion of both the cooptation and sometimes the internalization of hateful language. Our friend Pat can call herself a dyke-but you better not.
When we went to school the next day, delighted to urge a broader discussion so that all the kids could benefit from reflection on these difficult and complex issues-issues already abuzz in the informal curriculum of the cafeteria-we were told that that talk would be troublesome. "We don''t have a race problem here," the principal assured us, "and this might stir something up. Besides," she continued, playing to other fears, "math exams are coming up." A teachable moment discarded and lost. And in that screaming silence a lens of distorted images, fears, misunderstandings, and cool calculatedness slips neatly into place. We are, each of us, born into race and place, and all the early lessons are about knowing something of each. But we are-I was-instructed in speechlessness.
Growing up in our constructed racialized surroundings, a cultural context that so few of us white people can even acknowledge, means that we draw a common-sense experience of race into ourselves with every breath, that we drink it in, beginning with our mother''s milk. A society founded on the attempted genocide of the original indigenous people, built on the labor of African slaves, Latino serfs and Asian and white indentured servants, made fabulously wealthy through conquest and exploitation, manipulation and mystification, a society like this one, is a society built on a solid-and shaking-foundation of racial subjugation. But we can never really understand what we can''t name, and we can''t ever solve what we can''t discuss. And race remains unspeakable: "We don''t talk that way."
* * *
In the mid-1960s, I became an organizer for the East Side Community Union in the Lakeview section of Cleveland, Ohio. The Community Union was an extension of the Southern Civil Rights Movement into the North-a grass-roots effort to organize disenfranchised and marginalized citizens of the ghetto into a powerful force capable of effectively fighting for their own needs and aspirations. I was drawn to the work as a self-imposed exile from what I found mind-numbing and soul-stunting in the prison of my privilege; I came in search of my own humanity as much as to be of use. Our creed and our theory was that legitimate and just social change would necessarily be led by those who had been pushed down and locked out, that struggling in the interest of the most oppressed people in society held the key to fundamental transformations-internal and personal as well as social and collective-that would ultimately benefit everyone. We saw our political and educational work as ethical work-organizing as righteousness. Our first job was to make ourselves part of our new community, to listen hard to what people told us, to be respectful neighbors. I was twenty years old.
As Alex Witherspoon pushed his dog-eared paperback copy of Invisible Man across the table toward me, he lowered his voice: "Here''s a present from me to you," he said. "The whole damned American story in a nutshell." The presentation felt oddly formal, uncharacteristically solemn, some kind of street-level awards ceremony. Thanks, I said, reaching out and taking his hand a bit awkwardly.
Alex and I had been cooking our meals together for months by then, haunting the barbecue joints and local dives together, walking the streets of Cleveland''s east side, rapping to the people and knocking on doors in order to "build an interracial movement of the poor." We were mapping the need, but we were also exploring the hope. "Let the people decide," we said, a mantra boiled down from our faith in participatory democracy. Were we friends? We were thrust together by our work, our intimacy almost entirely circumstantial, the stuff of shared risk and common experience. We sang together at community gatherings and prayed together at rallies. We picketed and demonstrated and inevitably, I suppose, found ourselves talking about our hopes and our fears, embraced by the quiet and the dark of night.
Alex was an avid reader-a small pile of books grew and morphed and shrunk like a living thing near his bed, and his back pocket always bulged with a read-in-progress. He''d suggested books to me before, but this exchange, hand to hand, was a first. Alex cared about me enough to want to teach me something-about America to be sure, but possibly about himself as well. The whole American story, he''d said. To me Invisible Man was a gesture of friendship.
Within a couple of years the East Side Community Union had become a vital part of the neighborhood. There was a large, dynamic welfare rights project affiliated with an emerging national organization; a housing and rent strike committee organized building by building, demanding fair rents and reasonable upkeep and repairs; a community health project led by two young doctors; a store-front office where people dropped in for coffee and conversation; and a preschool operated out of a church basement. All of these projects were built on the energy and intelligence of the people of Lakeview-energy, people, and intelligence that the larger society had ignored and beaten down.
Alex moved along the street with long, purposeful strides-tall, rail-thin, prominent Afro perched atop a deeply lined face; I, a kind of fresh-faced, white sidekick, wide-eyed and credulous, hurried to keep up. He was thirty-three-years old, a veteran of the Movement in the South with a proud record of arrests from the important campaigns; I was twenty and a college dropout, recently arrived from Ann Arbor intent on participating in the freedom struggle. We shared an apartment with other community organizers, all of us young, idealistic, and filled with the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement in full eruption-we took miracles to be our birthright. Justice was in reach, we imagined, and racism would soon be swept away-a revolution in consciousness, and then a revolution in fact, was just beyond the horizon. We felt blessed-sanctified-to be living in this time, of all times, to be present at the awakening: That year I became a volunteer in the army that would take on the American monster, end the American nightmare, and at long last heal the deep, deep American wound.
We were seeding then what we thought could blossom into a "beloved community," because, as Alex said again and again, "The ghetto''s got the richest soil in America to grow a world of peace and freedom." He''d laugh his deep, sly laugh, his eyes twinkling, and he''d take a hard pull on his Camel. "America''s stark-staring mad," he said, "and her best hope is right here in this clarifying wreckage. We''re going to make some American magic."
The magic began with Alex''s wild, unruly way of thinking-clarifying wreckage, he''d said-a mind-blowing twist on what had been a one-dimensional gray assumption of need and need alone. In our apartments and in our project houses we shared everything-food and clothes, resources and dreams-and the magic grew. For us the personal was political and the political personal-we ached to live in a world that could be, but was not yet, and so with one eye on that partially-mapped territory of our imaginations, and one eye fixed on the evident east side landscape of hard edges and serious struggle, we soldiered on.
Alex had been a militant with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the South and preceded me in Cleveland by a year, home to care for his mother and to help set up the Community Union. I''d left behind a map of my life already drawn, a territory of privilege and access that felt to me not only predictable but, by now, uninteresting, flat, and pointless. I yearned for something more vital, more purposeful, and I arrived in Cleveland as an exile.
The Movement was shifting away from attacks on the legal barriers to integration, and we organized, instead, around de facto segregation and issues of economic justice; we intended to build an unstoppable force of poor people in the big cities of the North, who, we thought, would not only improve their own lives, but would along the way turn the planet upside down. We borrowed inspiration and songs from the humanizing energy of the Southern Movement, but we were drawing new lines and plowing new ground in these concrete ghetto streets: "Oh Freedom, Oh Freedom."
* * *
Alex knew Invisible Man almost by heart, and we talked about it off and on for days, laughing at some scenes, practically crying at others. I''d read Richard Wright and James Baldwin, but Ellison opened another window onto a wider field.
"I am an invisible man," the narrator begins. He is alive but flailing unseen in a void, the frightful struggle against powerful forces actively determined to erase his humanity and subjectivity, to look through him and to turn him into an object, a thing: "[T]hey see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me." That anguished and very personal cry that refuses to be swallowed up in the vacuum-it outlined a universal horror so clearly that it felt like a description of a part of my own life as well. And yet it perfectly fit the madness of racism.
One morning as we sipped coffee and munched eggs and toast at a diner, still talking about Ellison, Alex surprised me. "We haven''t even mentioned yet the most important line in the book," he said in what seems in retrospect like a running tutorial. "And it''s right up-front in the prologue." I didn''t know what he meant. "Remember the part where the preacher takes as his text the ''Blackness of Blackness,''" he said. "And he chants out ''black is ... an'' black ain''t''? When I first read that I practically stopped breathing." He looked at me hard for a moment. "Why?" I asked. "I mean, that''s it: Black is ... an'' Black ain''t. The whole thing-race itself, man-it''s a joke, but you can''t laugh ... It''s a fantastic joke, and it''s killing us-all of us in America." Invisible Man was an atlas, and Alex, my geography teacher.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Race Course: Against White Supremacyby Bill Ayers Bernardine Dohrn Copyright © 2009 by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Excerpted by permission.
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