We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (21 page)

Inspired by the Movement for Black Lives, the artist Carrie Mae Weems has recently turned her eye toward the notion of grace. She sees grace in the resolve of young Black protesters and the gentility of elderly Black women. Grace is the horizon of feeling that Kendrick Lamar describes when he raps in his verses of fighting and in his choruses of freedom.

“Grace implies freeing the bondage of the human spirit and suggests the breadth, scope, and depth of our humanity in the face of violence—acts that may be found in our everyday lives or reflected in public moments of collective grief,” Weems has written. “Grace is meant to activate us, to propel us, to challenge us to see what we might prefer to remain unseen, and to act where we have been complacent and unable to move.”
⁷

Finding grace is an individual process that changes the social. It is about seeing each other in the world and seeing one’s own place in the world anew. In that way grace can counter the lies, refusals, and aggressions that drive us toward segregation. We live in serious times, in which we need to be roused to the inequity in our neighborhoods, our schools, our metro areas, our justice system, our culture. Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It is about learning again to look, and never stopping.

The film concludes with a tapestry of diverse couples in love and families at play. The South, which has been strip-mined for its real gothic horror, its brutal and violent racial ordering of life, its drama of division and death, has now transformed into a place of grace. As the Black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper put it, “[Beyoncé’s] South is hot sauce, postbellum swag, and grandmothers who remind you that you gon’ be alright.”
⁸

Yet it does not feel exactly like a happy ending. As Beyoncé wanders the ruins of the war fort in her
kente
dress, looking and singing directly to us, we wonder about her transformation. How easily could her newly won sense of self-love be undone? Did her lover deserve her generosity? Had she simply folded? Or is this indeed grace at work?

James Baldwin’s most revolutionary and misunderstood idea, notes the intellectual Robin D. G. Kelley, was that love is agency. “For him it meant to love ourselves as black
people
; it meant making love the motivation for making revolution; it meant envisioning a society where everyone is embraced, where there is no oppression, where every life is valued—even those who may once have been our oppressors,” Kelley wrote. This did not mean that Blacks should capitulate before whiteness and systemic racism, but exactly the opposite. He wrote, “To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us.”
⁹

Each of us is left with the question: Can we, given all the pain that we have had inflicted upon us and that we have inflicted upon others, ever learn to see each other as lovers do, to find our way toward freedom for all?

The horizon toward which we move always recedes before us. The revolution is never complete. What we see now as solid and eternal may be disintegrating inward from our blind spots. All that signifies progress may in time be turned against us. But redemption is out there for us if we are always in the process of finding love and grace.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THE CRISIS CYCLE

1. 1.
   Ruth Gilmore,
   Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
   (California: University of California Press, 2007): 28.
   

2. 2.
   East Asian American groups usually tend to fall between whites and other communities of color in all categories except educational attainment, income, and life expectancy, where they do slightly better than whites.
   

3. 3.
   Lindsey Cook, “Why Black Americans Die Younger,”
   U.S. News and World Report,
   January 5, 2015,
   http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/05/black-americans-have-fewer-years-to-live-heres-why
   .
   

4. 4.
   Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century,”
   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
   112, no. 49 (September 17, 2015): 15081.
   

5. 5.
   David Graeber, “The Bully’s Pulpit,”
   The Baffler
   28 (2015),
   http://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit
   .
   

6. 6.
   Donald Trump,
   Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again
   (New York: Threshold, 2015).
   

7. 7.
   Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz,
   The Art of the Deal
   (New York: Ballantine, 1987): 71–2.
   

8. 8.
   Graeber, ibid.
   

9. 9.
   Most districts were in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. But districts in Arizona, Connecticut, and Utah also made the list. Nikole Hannah Jones notes that the official U.S. Department of Justice list did not appear to be as up-to-date as the list that she and her team at ProPublica produced.
   

   Nikole Hannah Jones, “Lack of Order: The Erosion of a Once-Great Force for Integration,”
   ProPublica
   , May 1, 2014,
   https://www.propublica.org/article/lack-of-order-the-erosion-of-a-once-great-force-for-integration
   .
   

   Department of Justice, “Educational Opportunities Section. Open Desegregation Case List,”
   http://media.al.com/breaking/other/OpenCaseList%20byDistrict%20Public.pdf
   .
   

IS DIVERSITY FOR WHITE PEOPLE? ON FEARMONGERING, PICTURE TAKING, AND AVOIDANCE

1.   
   1.
   Ryan Lizza, “The Duel,”
   New Yorker
   (February 1, 2016): 38–39.
   

2.   
   2.
   Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz,
   The Art of the Deal
   (New York: Ballantine, 1987): 53.
   

3.   
   3.
   Paul Lewis, Maria L. La Ganga, Sabrina Sidiqui, and Nicky Woolf, “Donald Trump cements frontrunner status after big win in Nevada,”
   Guardian,
   February 24, 2016,
   http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/23/donald-trump-wins-nevada-caucuses-results
   .
   

4.   
   4.
   Lizza, ibid.
   

5.   
   5.
   Tyler Cherry, “How Fox News’ Primetime Lineup Demonized Black Lives Matter Protestors in 2015,”
   Media Matters for America,
   December 29, 2015,
   http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/12/29/how-fox-news-primetime-lineup-demonized-black-l/207637
   .
   

6.   
   6.
   Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,”
   The Feminist Wire,
   October 7, 2014,
   http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2
   .
   

7.   
   7.
   Lorenzo Ferrigno, “Donald Trump: Boston beating is ‘terrible,’”
   CNN.com
   , August 21, 2015,
   http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/politics/donald-trump-immigration-boston-beating
   .
   

8.   
   8.
   Inae Oh, “Trump Supporter Shouts for Black Lives Matter Protestor to Be Lit ‘On Fire’,”
   Mother Jones,
   December 15, 2015,
   http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/12/donald-trump-black-lives-matter-protestor-light-on-fire
   .
   

9.   
   9.
   Ali Vitali, “Trump ‘Diversity Coalition’ Holds Hectic First Meeting,”
   NBC News,
   April 18, 2016,
   http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-diversity-coalition-holds-hectic-first-meeting-n557911
   .
   

10. 10.
    Lisa Wade, “Doctoring Diversity: Race and Photoshop,”
    Sociological Images
    . September 2, 2009,
    https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/09/02/doctoring-diversity-race-and-photoshop
    .
    

11. 11.
    Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (June 2013): 2154.
    

12. 12.
    Tamara Winfrey Harris, “Black Like Who? Rachel Dolezal’s Harmful Masquerade,”
    New York Times
    , June 16, 2015,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/rachel-dolezals-harmful-masquerade.html
    .
    

13. 13.
    Deena Prichep, “A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure,” NPR, December 29, 2013,
    http://www.npr.org/2013/12/29/257765543/a-campus-more-colorful-than-reality-beware-that-college-brochure
    .
    

14. 14.
    Wade, ibid.
    

15. 15.
    Terry H. Anderson,
    The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 14–15.
    

16. 16.
    See especially Ira Katznelson,
    When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
    (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).
    

17. 17.
    Anderson, p. 82.
    

18. 18.
    President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Commencement Address at Howard University: ‘To Fulfill These Rights,’” June 4, 1965. Available online at the LBJ Presidential Library website:
    http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650604.asp
    .
    

19. 19.
    Lisa M. Stulberg and Anthony S. Chen, “The Origins of Race-Conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions: A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Change in Higher Education,”
    Sociology of Education
    87, no. 1 (2013).
    

20. 20.
    For a good discussion of the case of the University of Michigan, see Ellen Berrey’s
    The Enigma of Diversity
    (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
    

21. 21.
    “Reparation, American Style,”
    New York Times
    , June 19, 1977.
    

22. 22.
    Emphasis added. University of California Regents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 No. 76-811 (1978). Argued: October 12, 1977. Decided: June 28, 1979.
    

23. 23.
    Terry H. Anderson,
    The Pursuit of Fairness
    , 158.
    

24. 24.
    City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 No. 87-988 (1989). Argued October 5, 1988. Decided January 23, 1989.
    

25. 25.
    Ibid.
    

26. 26.
    Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 Et. Al., 426 F. 3d 1162. No. 05-908. Argued December 4, 2006. Decided June 28, 2007.
    

27. 27.
    Bakke, ibid.
    

28. 28.
    Haeyoun Park, Josh Keller, and Josh Williams, “The Faces of American Power, Nearly as White as the Oscar Nominees,”
    New York Times,
    February 26, 2016,
    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/26/us/race-of-american-power.html
    .
    

29. 29.
    Esther Wang has written: “The writer Eula Biss posits that guilt is the dominant emotion of whiteness in the U.S., but I suspect that it’s actually something else, and its core is something very different from guilt. Guilt implies a recognition of responsibility, culpability—knowing that you’ve violated some sort of unspoken social contract. The only social contract that exists in this country is this: You’re supposed to know when it’s OK to be racist, and when you have to hide it.” Diversity fatigue is the weariness of having to hide it. On the other hand, what Wang calls “race fatigue” is the weariness people of color feel at having to negotiate double consciousness.
    

    Esther Wang, “Watching And Reading About White People Having Sex Is My Escape,”
    BuzzFeed,
    March 4, 2016,
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/estherwang/why-i-love-watching-and-reading-about-white-people-having-30#.uvjyawAkV
    .
    

30. 30.
    Anna Holmes, “Has ‘Diversity’ Lost Its Meaning?”
    New York Times Magazine
    , October 27, 2015.
    

31. 31.
    Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko, “The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12139 (March 2006). Hannah Rosin,
    The End of Men and the Rise of Women
    (New York: Riverhead, 2012): 4.
    

32. 32.
    Sean McElwee and Jesse Rhodes, “Young whites view race with rose-tinted glasses,”
    Al-Jazeera America,
    January 18, 2016,
    http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/affirmative-action-remains-deeply-divisive.html
    .
    

33. 33.
    Emphasis added. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “Academy Takes Historic Action To Increase Diversity,” January 22, 2016,
    http://www.oscars.org/news/academy-takes-historic-action-increase-diversity
    .