White Like Me. Tim Wise

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СКАЧАТЬ The ball would once again reverberated as it hit my hands and was pulled in for another interception.

      “My nigger Tim!”

      I would toss it back, and we would repeat the dance, Bobby moving left, Vince right, me following their steps and taking cues from their body language as to where the ball would be going next.

      Pop! Another catch.

      “My nigger Tim!”

      After the first dozen times they said this, each time with more emphasis and a bit of a chuckle, I began to sense that something was going on, the meaning of which I didn’t quite understand. A strange feeling began to creep over me, punctuated by a voice in the back of my head saying something about being suckered. Not to mention, I instinctively felt odd about being called a “nigger” (and note, it was indeed that derivation of the term, and not the more relaxed, even amiable “nigga” which was being deployed), because it was a word I would never use, and which I knew to be a slur of the most vile nature, and also, let’s face it, because I was white, and had never been called that before.

      Though I remained uncomfortable with the exchange for several minutes after it ended, I quickly put it behind me as the bell rang, recess ended, and we headed back to class, laughing and talking about something unrelated to the psychodrama that had been played out on the ball field. If I ever thought of the event in the days afterward, I likely contented myself with the thought that although their word choice seemed odd, they were only signifying that I was one of the club so to speak and had proven myself to them. Well, I was right about one thing: they were definitely “signifying”—a term for the cultural practice of well-crafted verbal put-downs that have long been a form of street poetry in the black communities of this nation.

      As it turns out, it would be almost twenty years before I finally understood the meaning of this day’s events, and that understanding would come while watching television. It was there that I saw a black comedian doing a bit about making some white guy “his nigger,” and getting him to do whatever he, the black comic, wanted: to jump when he said jump, to come running when he was told to come running, to step ’n fetch’ it, so to speak. So there it was. On that afternoon so many years before, Bobby and Vince had been able to flip the script on the racial dynamic that would, every other day, serve as the background noise for their lives. On that day they were able to make me not only a nigger, but their nigger. The irony couldn’t have been more perfect, nor the satisfaction, I suppose, in having exacted a small measure of payback, not of me, per se, since at that age I had surely done little to deserve it, but of my people, writ large. It was harmless, and for them it had been fun: a cat and mouse routine with the white boy who doesn’t realize he’s being used, and not just used, but used in the way some folks had long been used, and were still being used every day. Today Tim, you the nigger. Today, you will be the one who gets to jump and run, and huff and puff. Today we laugh, and not with you, but at you. We like you and all that, but today, you belong to us.

      As I thought about it, however, I was overcome with a profound sadness, and not because I had been tricked or played for a fool; that’s happened lots of times, usually at the hands of other white folks. I was saddened by what I realized in that moment, which was very simply this: even at the age of nine, Bobby and Vince had known what it meant to be someone’s nigger. They knew more than how to say the word, they knew how to use it, when to use it, how to contextualize it, and fashion it into a weapon. And the only way they could have known any of this is because they had either been told of its history and meaning, had been called it before, or had seen or heard a loved one called it before, none of which options were a lot better than the others.

      Even as the school system we shared was every day treating Bobby and Vince as that thing they now called me—disciplining them more harshly or placing them in remedial level groups no matter their abilities—on the playground they could turn it around and claim for themselves the power to define reality, my reality, and thereby gain a brief respite from what was happening in class. Yet the joke was on them in the end. Because once recess was over, and the ball was back in the hands of the teachers, there were none prepared to make me the nigger.

      It had been white privilege and black oppression that had made the joke funny in the first place, or even decipherable; and it would likewise be white privilege and black oppression that would make it irrelevant and even a bit pathetic. But folks take their victories where they can find them. And some of us find them more often than others.

      I WAS NEVER a very good student. No matter my reading level or general ability, I had a hard time applying myself to subject matter that I didn’t find interesting. In effect, I treated school like a set of noisecanceling headphones, letting in the sounds I was interested in hearing while shutting out the rest. By middle school I was struggling academically, finding myself bored and looking desperately for something else to occupy my time. Given the home in which I lived, it was hardly surprising that I would settle on theatre. Growing up in a home where my father was always on stage, even when he wasn’t, had provided me with a keen sense of timing, of delivery, of what was funny and what wasn’t, of how to move onstage, of how to “do nothing well,” as Lorelle Reeves, my theatre teacher in high school, would put it.

      I grew up memorizing lines to plays I would never perform, simply because my dad had saved all the scripts from shows he had done in the past. They were crammed into a small, brown-lacquered paperback book cabinet that hung in the living room of our apartment—one after another, with tattered and dog-eared pages, compliments of Samuel French, the company that owned distribution rights for most of the stage play scripts in the United States. I would pick them up and read them out loud in my room, creating different voices for different characters. The plays dealt with adult themes, many of which I didn’t understand, but which I pretended to, just in case anyone ever needed a ten-year-old to play the part of Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park.

      At Stokes School, in fifth grade, I would finally have the chance to take a theatre class as an elective. The teacher, Susan Moore, was among the most eccentric persons I’ve ever met. Had I been older, I may well have appreciated her eccentricity; but at the age of ten, eccentric is just another word for weird, and weird is how we students viewed her. All we knew was that she was an odd, fat lady (we weren’t too sensitive on issues of body type, as I’m sure won’t surprise you) with a dozen cats, whose clothes always smelled like cat litter and whose car smelled worse. One of my friends, Bobby Bell, who was not in the drama club but once got a ride from Ms. Moore, dubbed her wheels the “douche ’n’ push,” which we all thought was hilarious, even though I doubt any of us really knew what a douche was. In fact, once I learned the meaning of the word, calling her car a douche ’n’ push seemed less funny than gross.

      We didn’t study much in terms of theatre technique. For good or bad, Susan thought it best to just throw us into the process of doing theatre, learning as we went. So she would pick a play and we would work on it for the better part of a year: reading it, learning it, and then finally producing and performing it. The good thing about this process was that it led to fairly sophisticated outcomes, at least for fifth and sixth graders. When you have ten- and eleven-year-olds pulling off Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and never dropping a line, you know you’re doing something special. As the male lead in that production, I can attest to feeling significantly older and wiser than my years for having done it, for having successfully taken on a Shakespearian farce at such an age.

      On the downside, unless you got one of the coveted roles in the play chosen for that year by Ms. Moore, your participation in the theatre group would be circumscribed. Occasionally, she would create a few characters and script a few lines for them, so that as many kids as possible could get a chance to be onstage, but this hardly flattened the hierarchy of the club. There СКАЧАТЬ