White Like Me. Tim Wise

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СКАЧАТЬ nine. By my fifth grade year, 1979, I was playing for what was undoubtedly the most feared team of eleven-year-olds in the city. Comprised of twelve guys, nine of them black, we had the advantage of racist stereotypes working in our favor. Most of the teams we would play were made up of private school white boys who had barely even seen a black person, let alone played ball against one. Psychologically we had won before we even stepped on the court in most cases. The only times we lost were because the white boys’ coaches were smart enough to encourage their players to foul and force us to the line. Sadly, most of our guys could hit twenty-five-foot jumpers with no problem, but free throws from fifteen feet? Not so much.

      Still, the racial lessons imparted by my basketball experience were profound. We would walk in the gym, part of the YMCA youth basketball program, in our black uniforms and our mostly black skin, and watch a bunch of pasty white boys damn near piss themselves. We’d win by scores of 40–8, 34–6, 52–9, and other absurd point spreads; and it wasn’t because we were that much better. Fact is, our field goal percentage wasn’t very high, but we’d always get multiple shots during each offensive possession because the other team was too afraid to fight for rebounds. It was as if they thought our guys might knife them if they even tried.

      Because our opponents were so psyched out by the black players, they assumed they had little to fear from the few of us who were white. So whenever the other team got to the foul line, we would line up four black guys around the paint to rebound if they missed, and I would stand at the extreme other end of the court, literally on the opponent’s foul line, completely unguarded, because they weren’t afraid of the short white guy. Their players would miss their free throws, our guys would rebound, and throw the ball down court to me for an easy layup each time.

      On the one hand, the stereotypes of black athleticism worked in our favor on the court, triggering in our opponents what psychologists like Claude Steele call “stereotype threat” on the part of the white players. According to this theory, which has been amply demonstrated in lab experiments and real world settings, when a person is part of a stigmatized group (thought to be less intelligent or less athletic, for instance), the fear of confirming the negative stereotype when forced to perform in a domain where that stereotype might be seen as relevant to performance, can drive down performance relative to ability. In other words, the anxiety spawned by fear of proving the negative stigma true can actually cause a person’s skills to suffer, whether on a basketball court or a standardized test.

      In most situations, stereotype threat affects socially marginalized groups, since they typically face more stigmatizing stereotypes than dominant groups. So black students do worse in academic settings than their abilities might otherwise indicate because of the anxiety generated as they try not to confirm racist stereotypes about black intelligence; women and girls do worse on math exams because they fear validating common stereotypes about female math ability or the lack thereof; and the elderly do less well when told they’re taking a test of memory because of a fear that they may confirm negative beliefs about their abilities in that arena. But because of the widespread and anti-scientific belief that blacks are “natural athletes,” superior to whites especially at basketball, in this particular case the stereotype vulnerability fell on our white opponents. For a brief thirty-two minutes on the court, the script was flipped.

      But thirty-two minutes does not a day make, let alone a lifetime—a point worth remembering, lest we assume a parity of disadvantage between whites and blacks, simply because in one arena like sports (and even then, just a few particular sports), blacks occasionally get the benefit of the doubt and are thought to be superior.

      A few years ago, I received an e-mail from a very thoughtful private school mom in Minnesota, who had been asked to read the first edition of this book, along with other parents at the school her child attended. Much of it she liked, but she felt compelled to tell me of at least one instance of “black privilege” in the school, and how it was, to her mind, negatively impacting her white son. Her son, she explained, was an excellent football player—a running back as I recall—and faster than several of the black guys on the team. Nonetheless, the coach (who was white) gave him less playing time than her son’s black teammates. She attributed this to the coach’s inability to believe that a white guy could be as good a running back as a black guy. In other words, because of the black athlete stereotype, inferior black players were getting more opportunity than her son.

      Now on the one hand, I’m a parent, so I know something about the way parents tend to view our children. To put it mildly, we are not always the most objective judges of our own kids’ talents: we tend to think their preschool scribbling is a sure sign of artistic genius, their first sentence evidence of pending literary fame, their ability to play a tune on the piano proof of their status as prodigies, and their successful completion of a pirouette sufficient confirmation that they’ll be dancing in the Joffrey in no time. So I take parental bragging about children with a grain of salt. I would hope others would do the same when I get to talking about mine; they’re great, mind you, but they’re just kids.

      On the other hand, I was willing to indulge this mom’s accolades for her son. After all, she could be right—he really could be faster than the black guys—and if she was (in other words, if the coach really was making a racist decision in favor of the black players and against her white son), there was an interesting lesson to be learned; but it wasn’t the one she imagined.

      Let’s assume the coaches on her son’s team really did misperceive the relative abilities of their players because of some pro-black stereotype when it came to speed or agility. Where would that thought have come from? How did it originate, and for what purpose? Well, of course, the racist stereotypes of black physicality and athletic prowess have long been constructed as the opposite of certain other abilities they are presumed to lack, namely, intellectual abilities. Interestingly then, whites, having been considered intellectually superior to blacks, which works to our benefit in the job market and schools, end up being seen as less athletic, because we have long viewed the two skill sets (sports and academics) as incompatible. Ironically, what this means is that the racist construction of an anti-black stereotype when it comes to intellect—which includes as a corollary the idea that blacks are better athletes, since brain power is believed to be inversely related to athleticism—can have a negative consequence for those whites who play sports. They end up the collateral damage of racism—not racism aimed at them, but a larger mindset of racism long aimed at the black and brown.

      Which is to say that if we’d like to see white football players or basketball players given a fair shot to prove themselves, free from the inferiorizing assumptions that can attach to them because of a larger system of racist thought, we have to attack that larger structure. We can’t merely deal with one of its symptoms. In other words, young men like the son in this story will be viewed as equally capable running backs at precisely that moment his black teammates are likely to be seen as equally capable doctors or engineers, and not one second earlier.

      BY MIDDLE SCHOOL, my closeness to my black friends had translated into a remarkable ability to code-switch, meaning an ability to shift between so-called “standard” English, and what some call “Black English,” and to do it naturally, fluidly, and without pretense. Although my parents never minded this, even when I would forget to switch back, thereby remaining in black cadence and dialect around the house, there were others who found it mightily disturbing. Teachers were none too happy with the way they would hear me speaking in the halls to my friends. It was one thing for an actual black person to speak that way, but for a white child to do so was one step over the racial line, and one about which they were hardly pleased.

      Adding to the general unease that some white folks seemed to feel because of my growing proximity to blackness, there was my musical taste, which included a growing affinity for funk and hip-hop, the latter of which was just then beginning to emerge on the national scene. I had long had strangely eclectic musical tastes, so although I was СКАЧАТЬ