Read White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Online
Authors: Tim Wise
Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race
White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (19 page)
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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This was among the first examples of how whiteness was privileged in the educational environment of my school, but despite thinking that Harry Lee was a real asshole, especially when he went on
The Today Show
and tried to justify his racist policies to the nation, I did nothing to protest those policies, even as they privileged me, by signaling that I (and persons like me) would be allowed to come and go as we pleased, in and out of any part of the metropolitan area we felt like visiting. I failed to recognize how personal this system of privilege was, no matter how hip I fashioned myself.
The Today Show
and tried to justify his racist policies to the nation, I did nothing to protest those policies, even as they privileged me, by signaling that I (and persons like me) would be allowed to come and go as we pleased, in and out of any part of the metropolitan area we felt like visiting. I failed to recognize how personal this system of privilege was, no matter how hip I fashioned myself.
Who was I kidding? My very presence at Tulane had been related to whiteness. During my time there I would come to learn that the same school that ultimately traveled 540 miles to pluck me out of Nashville had not been recruiting for several years at Fortier High, the basically all-black high school located about five hundred yards from the entrance to campus on Freret Street. There was a presumption that Fortier students, as well as those from several other New Orleans–area schools, were incapable of being successful at Tulane, so the attempt to recruit them simply wasn’t made. Meanwhile, there I was, with an SAT score roughly 200 points below the median then (and 300 or more below it now), being admitted without hesitation and given financial aid. Better to spend money and resources on hard-drinking white co-eds from Long Island, Boston, Miami, the North Shore of Chicago, or Manhattan than to spend some of the same on local blacks, whose parents were good enough for cooking Tulane food, and cleaning Tulane toilets, and picking up Tulane garbage, but not for raising Tulane graduates.
Whiteness, as I was coming to learn, is about never being really out of place, of having the sense that wherever you are, you belong, and won’t encounter much resistance to your presence. Despite my lousy test scores and mediocre grades, no one ever thought to suggest that I had somehow gotten into Tulane because of “preferential treatment,” or as a result of standards being lowered. Students of color, though, with even better grades and scores, had to regularly contend with this sort of thing, since they were presumed to be the less-qualified beneficiaries of affirmative action. But what kind of affirmative action had
I
enjoyed? What preference had I received? Of course it wasn’t race directly. It’s not as if Tulane had admitted me
because
I was white. Clearly, my admission was related to having been on one of the top debate teams in the nation, but that wasn’t even a talent that I’d be putting to use in college, so why had it mattered? And my academic credentials
had
been overlooked. Standards had been lowered for me, but no one cared.
I
enjoyed? What preference had I received? Of course it wasn’t race directly. It’s not as if Tulane had admitted me
because
I was white. Clearly, my admission was related to having been on one of the top debate teams in the nation, but that wasn’t even a talent that I’d be putting to use in college, so why had it mattered? And my academic credentials
had
been overlooked. Standards had been lowered for me, but no one cared.
Nowadays, I lecture around the country in defense of affirmative action and meet plenty of whites who resent the so-called lowering of standards for students of color but swallow without comment the lowering of standards for the children of alumni. Each year, there are thousands of white students who get “bumped,” in effect, from the school of their choice, to make way for other whites whose daddies are better connected than theirs. Studies indicate there are twice as many whites who fail to meet normal admission standards but who are admitted anyway thanks to “connection preferences” as there are persons of color who receive any consideration from affirmative action. Yet rarely do the critics of affirmative action seem to mind this form of preferential treatment.
Most everyone I met at Tulane who was truly stupid was white and rich, like the guy who thought he was supposed to start every research paper with a thesis statement, the way he’d been taught to do it in seventh grade, or the young woman on my hall during sophomore year, who was stunned when she received an overdraft notice from her bank—after all, there were still checks in her checkbook. I never heard anyone lament the overrepresentation of the cerebrally challenged white elite at Tulane, and I doubt anyone is challenging the latest round of similarly mediocre members of the ruling class now. That’s what it means to be privileged: Wherever you are, it’s taken for granted that you must deserve to be there. You never spoil the décor, or trigger suspicions of any kind.
IN FACT, EVEN
when you should trigger suspicions, or at least a sideways glance or two, whiteness can protect you.
when you should trigger suspicions, or at least a sideways glance or two, whiteness can protect you.
My freshman year was not a good one, academically speaking. In part, my struggles were in keeping with a longstanding tradition, whereby I always started slowly at each new school I attended. Whenever there had been a physical transition from one institution to the next—Burton to Stokes, Stokes to Moore, or Moore to Hillsboro—I had had a lousy first year in the new place. This time there were other distractions. Although I avoided many of the traps into which my fellow first-year students fell—I simply didn’t have the money to go out and drink as much as they did, nor did I make friends easily enough to smooth the way for heavy partying that first year—I had other distractions that kept my mind off of schoolwork. First and foremost was Monica, who started that year at LSU but would transfer in the second semester to the University of Southwestern Louisiana, in Lafayette, to be closer to her family.
Between traveling to Lafayette two to three weekends per month by bus, going out the little bit that I did, and becoming involved in a number of campus political activities, I found little time to devote to my studies. Though I desperately needed to keep up my grades so as to maintain the meager scholarship I’d managed to wrangle, and hopefully to get the amount of the award significantly increased, I did quite the opposite. In my first semester, thanks to a particularly awful grade in French class—I had taken six years of French, but as I learned once I arrived at Tulane, couldn’t speak a word of it—and a few mediocre marks in other classes, I pulled a 2.1 GPA.
My barely average performance in class was punctuated by two monumental screw-ups, which turned out alright, but could have been catastrophic. First, I overslept for an Environmental Science exam, showing up an hour late into a three-hour test, and then I missed a Political Philosophy final altogether, showing up in the afternoon for a test that had been given at 10 AM In the first instance, I was allowed to enter the testing room, even though students weren’t supposed to come in after the test had begun; in the second case, despite the fact that missing the exam had been my fault, I begged the teacher to let me make it up and he did, in his office, right then and there.
I didn’t give it much thought at the time, except to conclude that I had been lucky, and that I needed to make sure nothing like that would happen again. I certainly didn’t think at the time about either of these fortunate breaks having to do with my being white. But in retrospect I do wonder how things may have been different had I been a person of color, and especially black. Might either or both of the professors have taken a more skeptical view of my seriousness as a student? The first might well have looked at me as irresponsible and not allowed me to enter the room. That
was
the policy after all. And the second professor could have viewed me as just not having what it took to be a successful Tulane student—a commonly held stereotype about black students there, even when they did well. So I can’t know for sure, but I also can’t doubt that in a situation like either of those, I’d rather have been white than anything else.
was
the policy after all. And the second professor could have viewed me as just not having what it took to be a successful Tulane student—a commonly held stereotype about black students there, even when they did well. So I can’t know for sure, but I also can’t doubt that in a situation like either of those, I’d rather have been white than anything else.
Perhaps this is the most important point though: No matter what my professors might have thought about my miscues, about oversleeping or missing an exam, one thing I would never have been forced to consider was that they might take either of those things as evidence of some racial flaw on my part. In other words, I would not have to worry about being viewed through the lens of a racial stereotype, of having one or both of them say, if only to themselves, “Well, you know how
those
kinds of students are,” where “those students” meant white students. I could rest assured that my failures would be my own and would never be attributed to racial incompetence. For people of color, the same experience would have been different. They would not have been able to assume that their race would be irrelevant to the evaluation given them by a white professor, just as students of color must always wonder if whites will view them through the lens of a group defect if and when they answer a question incorrectly in class—something else I never had to sweat. Black or brown students in that situation would not only bear the pressure of having dropped the ball, they would further carry the burden of wondering whether they had dropped it, in the eyes of authority figures, on behalf of their entire group. If we understand nothing else, let us at least be clear that such a weight is not an inconsequential one to bear. By the same token, to be able to go through life without ever having to feel as though one were representing whites as a group, is not an inconsequential privilege, either.
those
kinds of students are,” where “those students” meant white students. I could rest assured that my failures would be my own and would never be attributed to racial incompetence. For people of color, the same experience would have been different. They would not have been able to assume that their race would be irrelevant to the evaluation given them by a white professor, just as students of color must always wonder if whites will view them through the lens of a group defect if and when they answer a question incorrectly in class—something else I never had to sweat. Black or brown students in that situation would not only bear the pressure of having dropped the ball, they would further carry the burden of wondering whether they had dropped it, in the eyes of authority figures, on behalf of their entire group. If we understand nothing else, let us at least be clear that such a weight is not an inconsequential one to bear. By the same token, to be able to go through life without ever having to feel as though one were representing whites as a group, is not an inconsequential privilege, either.
ALTHOUGH I DIDN’T
have the dough to go out drinking much, even at the ridiculously cheap places around campus like The Boot or the Metro (where they had one dollar draft nights pretty regularly), I still did my share, using the fake ID I’d made myself, or when that one fell apart, a replacement that another student made for me, which looked a lot better than my own work. Frankly, the fake ID was barely necessary in New Orleans. Although the drinking age had been raised to twenty-one the year I got there, few places really carded. And because the laws in Louisiana didn’t hold bars responsible for the actions of their inebriated patrons, the way laws in many other states did and still do, there was little incentive for them to refuse service to anyone.
have the dough to go out drinking much, even at the ridiculously cheap places around campus like The Boot or the Metro (where they had one dollar draft nights pretty regularly), I still did my share, using the fake ID I’d made myself, or when that one fell apart, a replacement that another student made for me, which looked a lot better than my own work. Frankly, the fake ID was barely necessary in New Orleans. Although the drinking age had been raised to twenty-one the year I got there, few places really carded. And because the laws in Louisiana didn’t hold bars responsible for the actions of their inebriated patrons, the way laws in many other states did and still do, there was little incentive for them to refuse service to anyone.
Beyond drinking though, the real game at Tulane was weed. Although drugs were every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else—at least if you were black and poor—if you were lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which was (and is) a pretty white space contrasted with the city in which it’s located, you were—and I’d venture to say, still are—absolutely set.
My freshman year, I lived on the eighth floor of Monroe Hall, next door to the biggest dealer on campus (white and from Long Island), and by reputation one of the biggest in the city. He would drop quarter-ounce bags in the hallway and not miss them. And being a dealer who, unlike most, liked to smoke his own stash, he would just write it off to being high, and never get too mad about it. I should say that I very much liked living next door to him, for obvious reasons. I couldn’t afford his product myself, but between the misplaced freebies and the steady supply that others on the hall purchased from him, and were all too willing to share, I did alright.
There were two black guys on our hall, both on the football team. One of them smoked and the other didn’t, but even the one who did looked at us like we were nuts. The sheer volume of grass being consumed dwarfed anything he was used to, and the way we were smoking it—out of two-foot bongs with a gas mask attached, so as to provide that all-important
third foot
of chamber—he found bizarre. “Can’t y’all just roll a joint, man?” he would ask, not realizing that no, we couldn’t just roll a joint. Privileged people like to overindulge. It comes with the territory. We weren’t afraid of getting caught, as he was—since things would probably turn out differently if he were busted, on a lot of levels—so concealing our habits wasn’t foremost on our minds.
third foot
of chamber—he found bizarre. “Can’t y’all just roll a joint, man?” he would ask, not realizing that no, we couldn’t just roll a joint. Privileged people like to overindulge. It comes with the territory. We weren’t afraid of getting caught, as he was—since things would probably turn out differently if he were busted, on a lot of levels—so concealing our habits wasn’t foremost on our minds.
I saw far more drugs at Tulane on my dorm floor alone in any given week than I ever saw in public housing projects, where I would work as a community organizer many years later, and as with the drinking and drug use in high school, it was overwhelmingly a white person’s game, meaning either that whites have some genetic predisposition to substance abuse (for which there’s no evidence), or there’s something about being white that allows and encourages one to take a lot of risks, knowing that nine times out of ten everything will work out. You won’t get busted and go to jail, neither of which black or brown folks can take for granted in the least.
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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