Why Black Americans Still Don't Feel at Home

Excerpted from
Yet A Stranger; Why Black Americans Still Don't Feel at Home
By Deborah Mathis

The flagrantly racist acts and policies that stain much of American history provide a certain service in that they are unambiguous. "Whites only" signs require no interpretation or discernment. However ridiculous and offensive the old-fashioned tactics and systems of racism were, they were at least straightforward. They were at least-and it pains me to apply this term to such evil, but - honest. It was not difficult to size up the enemy in those days.

Rather than physical danger and harsh confrontation, the new common threat to the peace and prosperity of black Americans is a steady diet of indignities, disillusions, rejections, and suspicions that poison our hope, our patriotism, and our ambition. However, much of white America does not want to hear this complaint. Things are better, they declare-by every account, by any book, they have improved. They believe the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the proliferation of affirmative action policies, and expansive desegregation neutralized any grievances black America has about access and opportunity. Therefore, disparities that exist in income, educational attainment, and life expectancy are imaginary, greatly exaggerated, or our fault, so goes the standard spin. Believing they have ceded plenty for our sakes and in the name of equalization, doubters harbor a roiling resentment and fatigue, often encased in one famous question: What more do you people want?

The question is, of course, ludicrous and rhetorical, designed to make a statement and not solicit an answer. Those who ask it are stating, in effect, that we have overstepped our bounds, outstayed our welcome, exhausted geniality and accommodation, been overindulged and. in the process, proven ourselves to be an insatiable, greedy lot, expecting more than we have any right to ask. What more do you people want?

The virus of resentment and fatigue may be at large in the white community. Some of the people afflicted with it are troubled by how they've started thinking about black people and the entire equality question. Several have called me in my capacity as a newspaper columnist, seeking relief from the awful ideas that are beginning to swell in their heads. Invariably, these callers tell me that they are well educated, have enjoyed interracial friendships, have never considered themselves to be a bigot or a racist but fret that "I'm becoming one." Their reasons are usually presented with more civility and forethought than those of the occasional raging racist who writes or calls. But there is little difference in the essence of what they have to say. In either case, the argument comes down to this: Black people have as many opportunities as any other American to be healthy, safe, educated, employed, and prosperous. So, if we have babies out of wedlock, do poorly in school, end up in prison or too early in the grave, sell drugs, use crack, have dead-end jobs, and otherwise exist on life's dingy, risky, outer rim, why should white Americans have to be accountable for it, subsidize it, defer to it, apologize for it, or even worry about it? And what in the world does the long-gone institution of slavery have to do with present conditions and circumstances? After all of the loftily worded laws, the constitutional tinkering, the shared facilities, the ceded ground, the proliferation of interracial friendships and love affairs, an "Administration that looks like America"-after all this, they ask WHAT MORE DO YOU PEOPLE WANT?

More than their own exhaustion and frustration, the protestors betray a deep misunderstanding of black America and an underestimation of history's long-term effects. Except during outbreaks of vicious bigotry, it is difficult to persuade white America that the alienation of black America is actual and ongoing, afflicting each generation through policy, custom, quack science, and, if nothing else, the Look.

We learn to recognize the Look very early in life. It radiates from white strangers' faces. It's not the same look of benign curiosity that is cast upon the typical newcomer, but a distinct look of unease, confusion, dislike, disapproval, alarm, dread, even hatred. And it conveys myriad questions-What are you doing here? What do you want? What are you up to?-while making one unmistakable appeal: go away.

It is impossible to describe the Look to those outside its range. Sometimes, I'm sure, the transmitter is hardly aware he or she has dispatched it. But black people can feel it as sharply as the cutting wind and have learned to anticipate it, though the Look occasionally catches us off guard. If you are hit by it early in life or often enough, the Look can kill. Not your body, but your spirit. Kill your faith that you will ever belong. Kill your hopes that what you have to offer the world will ever be noticed, appreciated, nurtured, or rewarded. Kill your desire to participate, to go along, to get along. Snuff out your will to even try.

How frequently we encounter the Look depends, in part, on where we live and do business, the cast of our skin and how much or little we reflect white norms and customs in the way we walk, talk, and dress. Blacks in the upper economic strata, especially those who dress conservatively and are well established in the American mainstream, will get the Look less often than those who are poor and less well versed in Anglo-American standards. Males who are poor and black are likely to be snared by the Look so often and harshly that the Look leaves a stab wound.

Every self-aware black American knows the Look and its cruel implications. Even those who have attempted to shed all vestiges of their blackness experience it from time to time when they arrive on unfamiliar turf before their resumes or portfolios have been introduced and they are just another black stranger to be warily surveyed.

For the most part, we are spared this offense in our earliest years. As infants and toddlers, we either pass unnoticed by strangers or are treated benignly, being too young to rouse suspicion or fear. But by the time the natural rambunctiousness of youth takes hold and we begin to act and think independently, the Look begins to land on us, raising that sense of "otherness" that black people have been writing and talking about ever since Africa lost its treasure to these shores. Black educators and social workers have traced the onset of this phenomenon to about age nine. They call it "the fourth-grade hook" to mark the turning point from assumed innocent sprite to presumed developing menace. After that, the Look gradually becomes more frequent, harder and more corrosive, supplanting the presumption of innocence with the anticipation of criminality, depravity, and incompetence. It yokes the child with self-doubt, intimidation, and a definite sense of unwelcomeness, a sense of strangeness, even in his own home country. In response, the black child may become more careful and self-conscious, more cunning, or more reckless and rebellious. Whatever the response, it is a strain against the psychic chains that would bind his sense of self-worth, liberty, belonging, and happiness.

The Look is a draining thing, but there are countermeasures. One is to ignore it, to starve it of feedback. Another is to meet it with a defiant stare and rigid stance, daring the Look to turn into words or action. A third approach is to defuse the Look with broad smiles, humor, an ostentatious display of etiquette and articulation, an overdone geniality, even self-effacement-the Anti-Menace routine. We learn to command these strategies early and can conjure them reflexively. What a pitiful state of affairs it is that any American should need such a repertoire. Consider this example:

Three black teenage boys stand at a convenience store checkout counter. They are wearing the uniform of their generation: baggy pants, long T-shirts, sloppy unlaced sneakers, and, on one, a baseball cap turned backward. The clerk, a middle-aged white woman, is scowling, cutting her eyes at the teens as she serves an elderly man at the counter. When the man leaves, the first teen steps up, places a bag of chips, a soft drink, and two candy bars on the counter. He digs into his pockets for cash. The clerk snarls, "Would you wait a minute?" then mumbles something laced with disdain.

Immediately, the play unfolds. The boy widens his eyes, relaxes his jaw, and says nervously, "Oh, sorry." He scoops his goods from the counter. Behind him, his friend drops his head and gazes at the floor. The last one stares into the distance, his mouth taut, his gleamless eyes fixed and unblinking. He seems tired-sick and tired, no doubt-of a look he has seen too many times. He can't be more than sixteen years old.

Imagine that kind of reception day in, day out. In school. On the streets. At the mall. What are you doing here? What are you up to? Imagine being sized up and discarded on the basis of the way you walk or talk or dress or joke around. Imagine how it eats away at your joy and may eventually chew on your own goodness. Stab wounds.

At its worst, the Look threatens greater offenses-oppressive, discriminatory, and presumptuous acts, policies, practices, and laws based on assumptions. It assumes black Americans have not only a unique American experience and perspective but a distinct essence. A lesser essence. Those who don't know us believe we possess a different temperament and different natural urges, and that we lack intellectual or moral altitude, that we are by nature needy and dependent. Hence, our successes are often measured in dollars and degrees and are met with celebration and wonder as to what miracle-or what savior-intervened to lift us from our sorry original state. For many, we are still a curiosity. Even in our own country. Even at home.

White confusion over the constancy of black agitation and protest is understandable when one recognizes their unfamiliarity with the day-to-day dynamics of black life. What they see is that the first and most brazen constructs of institutional racism-slavery and segregation-have been dismantled. What even the most sensitive and sympathetic whites cannot see or know is the extent and depth of our exposure to attitudinal racism or the stubbornness of its grip or the profundity of its effects on us. The racial divide is real. It is measurable by statistical disparities in poverty, crime, scholastic achievement, health, and longevity. But it is there in the abstract too-in the lost faith and security of those who have been repeatedly scalded by the Look.