I’m a Racist: Part II

by Ed Kinane / July 6th, 2010

My Name Is Ed. I’m a Racist

Friday 05 March 2010

by: Ed Kinane, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: thivierr; Edited: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

Alcoholics Anonymous knows that recovery requires acknowledging one’s illness; denial cripples recovery. What follows isn’t about drinking, but about a more cunning disease. Before I say more, I want to introduce myself: “My name is Ed. I’m a racist.”

No, I’m not flaunting my bigotry, nor succumbing to guilt. I’m acknowledging that I’ve been deeply conditioned by a society permeated with racism. For a white person raised in the US, racism recovery demands persistent mindfulness. It’s the task of a lifetime.

Admitting you’re an alcoholic is hard; likewise admitting to racism. Conveniently, our standard notion of racism features behavior we avoid. We “know” we’re not racist because we shun ethnic slurs; we wince at the N-word.

The flipside of this (necessary but insufficient) standard is our widely held, but rarely examined, notion of anti-racism. Again, we “know” we’re anti-racist because, in my case for example, back in the eighties we organized against South African apartheid. Or because recently we contributed to Haitian earthquake relief.

But such notions of racism/anti-racism don’t go deep enough. It takes work to fathom racism’s breadth and subtlety and to perceive the social and economic forces fostering the de facto segregation that warps our social fabric.

Equally essential, we must recognize and resist the racism pervading US foreign policy. The Pentagon’s current military adventures – whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia – were foreshadowed, in the 19th century, by relentless Indian wars and by US invasions of Mexico and the Philippines.

This generations-old war machine has never had much use for the lives of peoples of color. It’s no accident that its numerous invasions and interventions invariably target nonwhite people.

______________________

In my first 14 years of school, I had only two black classmates; despite over 18 years of schooling I never had a black teacher. I was 19 before I had a personal conversation with a black person. My early college days were spent in a lovely ivy enclave set off by walls and rent-a-cops from the black and brown ghetto at its gate.

Demoralized by the irrelevance of my courses, I dropped out. Thanks not only to family connections, but also to the sixties building boom in my hometown, I could work construction. In Syracuse’s 15th Ward, “urban renewal” drove thousands of blacks out of what was becoming prime real estate. The forced relocation demolished a vibrant black ghetto.

Despite that boom, few blacks could break into the construction trades; there wasn’t a single black in our union local. None of us challenged the arrangement. Forty-five years later, not much has changed here: few black contractors can bid on even modest building jobs.

It’s no wonder that in the early eighties, when I hitchhiked through South Africa, it seemed like home. And last spring when I spent a month in Israel and the Occupied Territories, that European colony also felt like home. [See my July '09 Peace Newsletter article, "Life in the Bubble: At Home in the Israeli Settler State."]

Basic to these segregated societies and to our militarism is what poet Adrienne Rich calls solipsism. In philosophy, solipsism is the theory that the self is the only reality: you exist only as a figment of my imagination.

Rich speaks, in particular, of white solipsism: a cultural egoism, which assumes – quite unconsciously – that only white history or discovery or suffering or interests have merit and standing. Most white folks – whether in South Africa or Israel or here – grow up in white neighborhoods going to white schools and consuming white-controlled media. This is how we internalize white “reality.”

For many of us, the solipsism that denies or demeans or destroys did not originate with racism. It began, historically and personally, before we were exposed to ethnic diversity. While being molded for roles defined by gender, boys acquire the parallel male solipsism of a patriarchal culture. Sexism precedes racism, grinding the lens that makes our racist outlook second nature. Sexist behavior provides an ongoing rehearsal for our racist performance.

When we were young, we had little control over our enculturation and so weren’t to blame for such tunnel vision. But now that we’re grown, we are responsible for the kinds of callousness and exclusivity we choose to honor. Many of us eagerly – or obliviously – float along the mainstream that invalidates the lives of people of color. Their labor and their living conditions, their needs and their pain, their gifts and their rights, are systematically negated, rendered invisible, rendered mute.

______________________

White solipsism helps explain the foreign policy double standard which regards only political violence aimed at whites as “terrorism.” Since World War II, few whites have been victims of aerial warfare: no wonder few here see such warfare as the cowardly terrorism it is.

Although the pundits glibly link “terrorism” to Islam, they never call Congress or Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama terrorists when they squander billions invading Islamic oil lands or when (say) US drone aircraft assassinate those resisting the invasion and occupation. Or when those unmanned drones kill civilians willy-nilly.

In the moral calculus of white America, the tens – maybe hundreds – of thousands of slain Iraqis or Afghans barely exist. Even we who actively oppose US militarism in West Asia and the Mid East often ignore the racism at its heart.

To overcome our “isms,” we could curb our overconsumption and our overeager embrace of privilege. We could shed our patterns of exclusivity, bursting the bubble of self-reinforced segregation.

Through cross-cultural study and solidarity work, we could better understand the human condition – especially that of the huge majority of our species who aren’t white, who aren’t affluent, who don’t blackmail the globe with aerial warfare and nuclear terror.

White Privilege Shapes The U.S.

by Robert Jensen

Here’s what white privilege sounds like:

I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.

The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege–unearned white privilege–how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask.

He paused for a moment and said, “That really doesn’t matter.”

That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means.

That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one’s identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn’t live near a reservation, I didn’t even have exposure to the state’s only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I “fix” myself, one thing never changes–I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don’t look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me–they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I’m white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don’t know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it’s possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn’t meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them.

I am not a genius–as I like to say, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I’ve published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that I’m a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my paycheck, I don’t feel guilty.

But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve my job, or that if I weren’t white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one non-white tenured professor.

There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives.

Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that “merit,” as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life from certain hardships.

At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture’s mythology that I couldn’t see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn’t really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn’t heroic or rugged, that I wasn’t special.

I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn’t special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate–that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose–then we will live with that fear. Yes, we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Frankly, I don’t think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn’t mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a choice about what we do with our success.

Jensen is a professor in the Department of Journalism in the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu

copyright Robert William Jensen 1998
first appeared in the Baltimore Sun, July 19, 1998

But what makes it progressive in Chehade’s case . . .is the fact that an Arab American has come forth to address the sick condition . . . of racism and thought-patterns of those immigrants and people of color who adopt the same attitudes of Whiteness.

Ugly Truths:  An Essay on Carol Chehade’s Big Little White Lies

By Dennis Leroy Moore

“Truth is what is – not what should be. Truth is what is.” — Lenny Bruce

During the heavy Spring of 2001 in NYC, I was deep in the midst of editing my first feature film called As an Act of Protest, an odyssey of a young Black actor in NY (America) who struggles to become sane, whole, and healthy as the effects and acts of racism and colonization spin their web around the barn of his mind; making it hard for the young artist to concentrate on his art and throw off that mortal coil called Racism. As all enlightened souls know, the artist’s job is not only to express and explore his own personal pains, demons, and joys, but unravel and hold a mirror up to the nature of his society – exposing and exorcising, to some degree, the ills of his society.

Racism is the greatest ill of our society and has been for some time. The problem, when either discussing it, or expressing its caustic effects in a work of art or analysis is that it often eludes us, pushes buttons, and lets those responsible for it off the hook. As the poet throughout centuries has attempted to express and define and capture that mystery called Love, so have many visionary and progressive artists and activists done the same in their attempts at tracking down and capturing the facets of racism, “racial-thinking,” and that bizarre, odd, and highly impenetrable existence most people of color refer to as “Whiteness” or quite simply, “being white.”

Now, unfortunately, most of us never see or have an opportunity to confront the opposite side of the coin in regards to racism and oppression. Meaning, we usually see the effects of the disease on its victim – in this case, obviously, Black people. But what about the carriers of this disease – White people? When do they come to the table ready to deal with their whiteness and their psychosis?

Big Little White Lies is the first recent major attempt at getting White people and all those non-black people of color to examine themselves and all their spoiled vegetables that lurk in the freezer of their souls. This stunning book — part psycho-social analysis, history lesson, and manifesto for a new age – forces white people to confront themselves and the legacy of their racism. It is one of the most important works on racism to have been written in this new century, and more importantly, an overwhelmingly honest portrait of the skewered logic and actual functioning of racism in contemporary America. All the more stunning because it was written by an Arab-American who openly admits to the racism of her own people, thereby being able to identify – quite painfully – with the foundation of White racist attitudes and thinking.

I first read Lies about a year ago. At first I was extremely suspicious, since the age we live in pumps out more and more pop-psychology books on racism as if to imply that books will solve the problem that we all live with. Most books about racism or anything having to do with the treatment of Black people are poorly written and are regurgitated clichés honed and created from writers, scholars, and activists who are now dead. Literally and symbolically. No new confessions or understandings or questions are coming about. No one is bringing anything new to this tired and boring assembly. Carol Chehade’s Big Little Whites Lies was a perfect antidote to all of this.

Thirty-two years of age and a native of Detroit, Carol Chehade writes straight from the gut, in a detached, simple, and matter-of-fact way. This doesn’t imply that she is clinical or passionless in any way. No, not all, in fact the body of the text itself is quite personal and suspended in the air with a spiritual kick; a fervent, loving and dynamic force that forces the reader constantly to ask and question his or her own racism. She writes almost pragmatically without any corny airs of sentimentality.

Chehade wants us to love and demands the reader look into himself and see his portrait, see his Whiteness for what it really is.  Chehade breaks the monotony from time to time, as writers seldom do, by admitting her own weaknesses, faults, and hang ups as a person of color who clearly has seen the world through a white man’s lens. By her doing so, and after reading her book, I hope others – particularly – white people will do the same.

The book starts off abruptly with an introduction titled “ABCRacismXYZ,” in which Chehade directly implies that racism is taught as simply and innocently as a child learns the alphabet.  The ritual of being initiated into a racist is comparable to the small child who wakes up every Saturday morning to immerse himself in his personal ritual of watching morning cartoons. It is that simple, and that frightening. The white child who is instantly indoctrinated into a racial reality that has more grounding in a television show than it does in real life. His or her perceived superiority over Black people will for the rest of his life give him a false sense of entitlement, righteousness, and preferential treatment.

Chehade states chillingly that “a racial reality is ironically unreal because it is based on counterfeit myths.” Her point, which she eloquently goes off to explain, is that we live in a world that is mired in deep lies enforced and created by Whites who refuse to admit their sins of the past and the present, and who easily turn a blind eye to the truths of the current state of race relations – despite the fact that slavery in America has been abolished a long time ago, which is what Whites always use as a defense not to confront the latent racism in their hearts and the aftermath of the past, as we speed on into a new 21^st century…

Lies is broken down into eight chapters, lasts barely two hundred pages, and moves with the speed and urgency of a runaway horse — a staple of Chehade’s writing style. Chehade constantly invokes the surreal and schizophrenic aspects of “Whiteness,” white superiority and racism. As provocative of a subject matter as it is, the book is richly constructed into an almost poetic-menagerie of dense psychological journeys regarding the ambiguity of Whiteness and the various definitions and reasoning of racist attitudes towards Black people. While this may sound like a bit of a mouthful, the book is not as convoluted as it may seem.

In the very succinct opening chapter “Jim Crow’s Gene,” Chehade states: “Every single non-black person is a racist.” Ouch. And from this opening sentence, the rest of the book spills out like a neurotic explosion – espousing man’s sins in a dark confessional in the church of our world.  Chehade’s essays break down racist thinking and Whiteness to a science. The most interesting aspect of the launching chapter is what Chehade refers to as the “seven deadly forms of racism.”

She tells us of the different types of racists that exist and assures white people and non-black people of color that they are surely part of at least one of these deadly-groups of racists – ranging from your typical Democratic Liberal type to the White Militants who aggressively oppose anything black or not-white. Chehade deftly paints us a vivid picture of White people who are in denial and suffering from their own delusions and lies of grandeur.

Hitler once said “Tell a lie enough and people will believe it.” This is obviously the case with White people – who intrinsically do believe that they are superior to blacks and to tell them any different would be to disrupt their entire system. The sickness and psychosis of racism that Chehade writes about reminds me of James Baldwin’s entire perception of racism and Whiteness in America. In Baldwin’s classic Blues for Mister Charlie - he sets the nearly four hour epic play in the heart of America in a place called “Plaguetown.” The plague is obviously racism and Baldwin tried to approach the problems and attitudes birthed out of racism as diseases that need to be dealt with.

To her credit and tight observation, Chehade has strewn throughout the book – phrases and newly-coined terms that suggest the mental illness and disease-faceted aspect of racism: “racial rehabilitation,”  “therapeutic artillery,” “mentally shackled,” “poisonous,” “contagious air of racism,” “sickness,” “psychologically stay live,” “condition,” and so on and so forth. It is this aspect of her analysis – whether in discussing sexual attitudes towards Black people or how non-Black people of color & immigrants align themselves with the White power structure – that lends it a fertile seed of revolutionary thought.

Of course DuBois, Fanon – and thinkers of that ilk – brought this to our attention decades ago. In DuBois’s situation – an entire century ago. But what makes it progressive in Chehade’s case – and in the times we are living in – is the fact that an Arab American has come forth to address the sick condition we are living in and admits the double-edged sword of racism and thought-patterns of those immigrants and people of color who adopt the same attitudes of Whiteness.

With war in Iraq reaching a peak, the inner racial war in America still drives strong, although nearly un-acknowledged or dealt with. All people of color have an internal war in this country and nearly all of them end up defending the honor, legacy, and sick pride of the White man. They want to be as “spiritually bankrupt” (Chehade’s term) as he is…

Chehade believes that white people need to be made aware of who they are and confront their racism – Baldwin believed in the same thing. It is not a matter of White people saving Black people or civilizing the natives, it is a matter of civilizing one’s self, saving one’s own soul. White people must understand this. Because until the carriers of the disease get better, no one else will…

Lies is packed with information, anecdotes, personal memories and analysis, and a strong determined voyage into trying to understand and define Whiteness. Chehade makes it clear that Whiteness is a state of mind, as Malcolm X once said, and that being white has less to do with skin color and more to do with how one thinks about and acts towards Black people. It is much too complicated and thick to get into here – all the more reason why people should actually read the book as opposed to my response on it.

But I could not help thinking how troubled most people will be are when they confront the fact that Whiteness is an existential state, an inferno of the mind – devoid of logic, heart, or true passion. Sartre even admitted this when he became more and more familiar with Fanon and his writings. White people and non-black people of color owe it to themselves to plumb their depths and grow up. One cannot appreciate their strengths and value, if they cannot express and digest their weaknesses, ills, and demons.

Thus, when Chehade writes, “Whiteness is a very powerful and addictive hallucinogenic that negatively alters our racial reality,” she must be prepared to be attacked and accused of being racist towards whites, etc. Chehade, I’m sure, embraces the jeers of alienation and contempt from nearly every corner for example, because it only proves her point about how deeply Whiteness is embedded in our train of thought…

In an intimate panel discussion at NYC’s Brecht Forum, a so-called Marxist school, I moderated a discourse on Big Little White Lies to a room of middle-aged Marxists who refused to accept the fact that Whiteness or racism could even be discussed without bringing up Capitalism. That is the best defense Whites use to shield away from personal responsibility. The “system” (Capitalism) is not some abstract beast – no, it is a very real thing – created by real people. More specifically, it was adapted and built upon by White people who re-invigorated and took it to new heights. The denial of Whiteness and how it functions and the fact that it does exist is exactly what Chehade would refer to as the Third and Seventh type of racists: Whites who feel they have no accountability for racism because they don’t think that they actively contribute to racism and Whites who confuse not thinking of race as an indicator of not being racist.

Lies brings up a great deal of questions and problems that must be explored and dealt with. Her chapter “The Colorless Immigrant,” for instance, is an essay that every single non-black person of color should read. In it, the neurosis, fears, and anxieties of non-black people of color are expressed and their desire to be included in that sought-after category of Whiteness is astounding. Other chapters dig into the influence and perception of Black men, like the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan who are feared by Whites, meditations on beauty and Blackness, the psychosis and neurosis of interracial sex and desire, and even a discourse on the minstrelization of Black American culture and creativity.

Although I appreciated this chapter “From Hymn to Hip Hop to…,” I found it severely underwritten and not as anarchic or challenging as the rest of Chehade’s earlier analysis. In a way, it seemed that she had run out of steam by this point in the book. Although she makes up for it in her conclusion (“Un-Conclusion,” as she describes it), I only wished that she had written more about the even more damaging attitudes and patronization by whites towards Black fine arts and the entire gulf that lingers between the two understandings of the well-worn European ideals of art and culture and Classical Africa’s.

I also wished that Chehade made it clearer that Black American culture is American culture, and that that fact only is part of White people’s contempt and reason for self-hatred. She makes this clear, however, in a different way – by telling us of the overwhelming amount of love Black people have given to themselves, their country, their spirits, and yes, even to the White man. It does not take a brain scientist to recognize the fact that White people need Black people in order to learn how to love…

Racism is an open-ended conundrum. It lingers long after it has been physically seen or perceived. It operates on the level of some strange cancer from another world. Carol Chehade does not provide any solutions or quick answers and that is not what’s wrong about her book, but what is gracious, powerful, and striking about it. She writes:

“Racism has not been miraculously resolved with the last chapter of this book; therefore, until we resolve racism, the issue remains unconcluded. If the greatest Black and White revolutionaries couldn’t end racism, then I certainly can’t by myself.” She goes on to write, quite eloquently:

Amiri Baraka said that the people must support the artist. It is the artist who brings us prophecies and visions. If he is not supported, then we will have no prophecies and shall see no visions. It is no surprise that poets were once referred to as seers. Whether singer or religious prophet, radical or ballet dancer, activist or actor – the artist/activists job, in order to fulfill his duty as a revolutionary, must always tell the truth. Free us from lies and cliches, stereotypes, and wicked forged realities imposed upon us by the very people who seek to destroy us.

Michael Moore, the brilliant documentary filmmaker, said – upon receiving his Oscar award – that we are living in fictitious times. It is imperative that the new wave of artists and the emerging generation of revolutionaries seek to strip us of all that’s phony and deadly. Tell the truth and tell it how you see it. I commend Carol Chehade for risking something and taking a chance. This new generation needs poets of Truth such as Chehade and we need to support and love each other, because Lord knows no one else will.

Chehade has done something unpopular and dangerous in this age of false acceptance and “blurred” racial existences. She has taken us back to the roots of Modern Man’s psychosis. She has chosen to take a stab at something most people want to run from – including those in the so-called Arab community who tried to keep Chehade and her essays at arms length, refusing to accept responsibility of their own White-adopted attitudes and inherent racism towards Black people, which they carried over from the sand of the Middle East. She has plumbed her depths and encourages us all to do the same.

We will always prefer distorted truths, History rather than The-story. A man’s view over a woman’s. A White lie over a Black truth. And as long as we sideline and sit on the fence of what’s real regarding the truths of Racism and Whiteness, we will continue to perish and allow our souls to die a little each day. We’re all going to die, why help it? Why don’t people want to be free and healthy and liberated? Because we need the formulas and lies in order to satisfy our prejudices.

The truth about how people really feel and act towards Black people is always challenging. The truth behind anything always scares us. Chehade sites the book of Genesis, where God commands: “And let there be light.” She interprets this to mean truth, not actual rays of sunlight. We must wake up and see the light behind it all – the truths that fester in the dark. And in order to see the light, we must dive into all that is dark, abysmal. However, this of course is the problem. A movie about racism? God no! A ballet on Slavery? No way! A book that exposes our attempt to White-out America? For heaven’s sake – NO!

We are all afraid of the dark. Which is the primary reason why we cannot appreciate the light or see the truth and accept it when it is given to us. It is like the man who dropped his keys on one side of the street, but looked for them on the other side. Why? Because the light was better over there. It was safer.

Lies is not only a wake up call, but a warning to our world. The problem is, of course, most people do not want to rise from their sweet slumbers…

D.H.Lawrence said it best, perhaps – when he said that we go through life with parasols over our heads, with a painted sky on the underside of them. Once in while we look up and admire the pretty view. When an artist sneaks up on us and cuts a hole in our parasol so that we can see the real world – we collapse and are traumatized because we are not used to the real world, the ugly truths that surround us. As soon as the hole is made, we instantly sew it back up and continue looking at the painted sky, instead of the real one. Anything real and truthful is going to be met with resistance.  So is the case with Carol Chehade’s soulful and penetrating book.

Chehade wrote: “Pain is felt by all. It’s usually deep; often inexpressible, but always soul defining.”

Trial Begins for Ex-Chicago Police Lt. Accused of Torturing More than 100 African American Men – Democracy Now

click image for video

A former police commander accused of overseeing the torture of more than 100 African American men goes on trial today in Chicago. Former Lieutenant Jon Burge is accused of lying when he denied in a civil lawsuit that he and other detectives had tortured anyone. He faces a maximum of forty-five years in prison if convicted of all charges. The accusations of torture date back forty years, but Burge has avoided prosecution until now. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1971, Burge was at the epicenter of what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of black men to coerce confessions. In total, more than 100 people in Chicago say they were subjected to abuse, including having guns forced into their mouths, suffocation with bags placed over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. We speak to attorney Flint Taylor and torture victim Darrell Cannon. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Flint Taylor, attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor’s investigation.

Darrell Cannon, one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police. Darrell says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than twenty years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. He was released three years later.

AMY GOODMAN: A former police commander accused of overseeing the torture of more than 100 African American men goes on trial today in Chicago. Former Lieutenant Jon Burge is accused of lying when he denied in a civil lawsuit that he and other detectives had tortured anyone. He faces a maximum of forty-five years in prison if convicted of all charges.

The accusations of torture date back forty years, but Burge has avoided prosecution until now. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1971, Burge was at the epicenter of what’s been described as the systematic torture of dozens of black men to coerce confessions. In total, more than a hundred people in Chicago say they were subjected to abuse, including having guns forced into their mouths, suffocation with bags placed over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted on their genitals.

The police department fired Burge in 1993 for mistreatment of a suspect, but did not press charges. A decade later, then-Illinois-governor George Ryan released four men on death row he said Burge had extracted confessions from using torture. Public outcry eventually led Cook County to appoint two special prosecutors to look into the allegations. In 2006, prosecutors found there was evidence to show beyond a reasonable doubt that torture had occurred, but the statute of limitations had expired.

Two years ago, federal prosecutors finally brought charges against Burge, though not for torture. They say he lied in a civil suit about the torture, and they’ve charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice. The trial is expected to last six weeks.

We go now to Chicago, where we’re joined by two guests. Darrell Cannon, one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police—Darrell says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than twenty years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. Now he’s suing Chicago for wrongful conviction. We’re also joined by Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor’s investigation.

Flint Taylor, let’s begin with you. Just lay out the scope of what is about to happen today in a Chicago courtroom.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, it’s very significant what’s finally happening, decades after it should have. This trial, although it will not deal with allegations of torture itself, will deal with obstruction of justice and perjury. The reason that it won’t deal with the crime of torture itself is because the mayor of the city of Chicago, who at that time was the chief prosecutor, Richard Daley, back in 1982, when evidence was presented to him that definitively showed that there was police torture under Burge and by Burge, he chose not to prosecute Burge and not to move to have him released from the police department, but rather continued to prosecute men for many years after that who had been falsely accused of torture.

Darrell Cannon here, my client, was tortured in 1983. If Daley had moved in 1982 with the evidence he had to remove Burge from the police force and prosecute him for torture, we would not have Darrell Cannon spending twenty, twenty-five years behind bars and not having him tortured by electric shock. So, the real crime here started many years ago with the cover-up, a cover-up that was engineered by the mayor himself and his first assistant at that time, who went on to be the chief prosecutor, Richard Devine. That really is the background to why we are having this prosecution now only for obstruction of justice and perjury, rather than for the crime against humanity which is torture.

AMY GOODMAN: Go back to 1971. Can you reconstruct what began then, Flint Taylor?

FLINT TAYLOR: Certainly. Burge was at a POW camp in Vietnam in the late ’60s. Of course, in Vietnam, we now know, there was electric shock used on people in POW camps of Vietnamese prisoners. At that time, it appears that Burge learned the techniques that he brought back to Chicago. In 1972, he became a detective at a South Side police station, where they interrogated suspects, almost predominantly African American suspects. In 1973, we first hear of the first victim of torture. That man was tortured with electric shock with a bag over his head, beaten into a false confession. From that point forward, the cases started to stack up through the ’70s, ’80s and all the way to 1991.

At the same time, Burge had moved from detective to sergeant to lieutenant in charge of the violent crimes unit to a commander of an entire police area. And so, as the cases of torture increased, he continued to be promoted. And more and more people, not just detectives, but supervisors and subsequently, as I mentioned, prosecutors, the chief prosecutor, the superintendent of the police, successive superintendants, they all came to know what was going on, and their response to it was rather than to stop the scandal, stop the systematic torture, was to promote Burge.

And only when the evidence mounted too high—there were two public trials—and the community became so outraged and demanded that Burge be fired, that anything was done. But to this day, and until a two years ago, there were no charges. And, in fact, the special prosecutor that you mentioned in your piece actually issued a whitewash report and in fact said the statute of limitations barred prosecution, when, of course, the US attorney found otherwise.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, torture is an extremely serious charge. As you said, it violates national and international law. But I’m surprised that just for obstruction of justice and for perjury, he faces forty-five years in prison.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, that’s the statute of limitations problem and one of the many unaddressed issues in Chicago. We are very pleased that Burge is being prosecuted, but there is much left to do, and that includes dealing with federal and state statutes, legislation that would make torture a specific crime. And since it’s a crime against humanity, there would be no statute of limitations, like there is no statute of limitations for genocide or murder. And in that instance, in the future, if there were another Burge or other torture—another torture ring and it were covered up successfully for many years, then he could still or they could still be prosecuted for torture.

And that is a major issue that’s still being dealt with by the activists here in the city of Chicago, along with the fact that twenty or twenty-five men are not as “fortunate”—and I put quotes around “fortunate”—as Darrell has been to be out now. And those men are still behind bars so many decades later, because of tortured confessions. And we’re fighting those cases one by one. But, in fact, all those men should be given new trials, and they should be new trials without the tortured evidence, obviously.

And the other aspect that we feel very strongly about, the men, the henchmen that worked under Burge, and that includes the two right-hand men of Burge, self-admittedly, who tortured Darrell at the remote torture site, those men have yet to be charged. Now, there’s an ongoing investigation into their perjury and obstruction of justice, but to this point, they haven’t been indicted for the scores of cases where men have said that they tortured them. So there’s much unfinished business, as well as there’s many, many victims and survivors of police torture here in the city of Chicago who have received no compensation because of a similar statute of limitations in civil cases. So—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go back—

FLINT TAYLOR: —we feel that—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this discussion in a minute, Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, has represented a number of men who say they were tortured by Jon Burge, the police commander who’s going on trial today. We’ll also hear from Darrell Cannon, who is one of those victims. He served twenty years in prison.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to one of the people who says he was tortured. We’re joined by Darrell Cannon. He says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than two decades in prison. But after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. Now he’s suing the city of Chicago for wrongful conviction.

We’re also joined by Flint Taylor, an attorney who represents a number of the torture victims. But let’s go to Darrell Cannon.

Darrell, tell us what happened to you. Talk about how you were picked up and what you admitted to and what happened to you in Burge’s custody.

DARRELL CANNON: It was on November the 2nd, 1983, between the hours of 6:30, 7:00 in the morning. A group of all-white detectives invaded my apartment, where I stayed with my common-law wife and my son. They kicked open the door, and they cursed her out. They searched for me. They finally found me. They gave me my clothes. They ransacked the entire apartment, found nothing. They took me downstairs, placed me on my knees in front of the vestibule, until the rest of the detectives had searched other apartments. Then they came down, put me in a car. They drove around looking for another guy that they say was complicit in this particular crime. After they didn’t find him, they took me to the police station. I stayed there for a short period of time.

They took me out of the police station. They took me to a restaurant that caters to truckers and police officers. They left me double-handcuffed in the back seat of a defective car while they went in and had breakfast. They came out from breakfast. They took me to a remote area, where they drove through a pipe, came out on the opposite end of an isolated area where there was nothing but water and railroad tracks around. They got me out the backseat of the car, and they proceeded to ask me some more questions about a homicide that had took place. I told them I had no knowledge about the homicide.

They then did a mock hanging, where I’m cuffed behind my back and one of the detectives would get on the bumper of the detective car, the other two detectives would lift me up to him, and he would grab my handcuffs from behind. They would let me go. That will cause my arms to go up backwards, almost wrenching the inside my shoulders. That method went on for—I don’t know how long. But eventually, it wasn’t successful, because of the fact that there was a fine-mist rain out that morning, and John Byrne, which is the tallest detective, he kept slipping off the back of the bumper.

They did switch to a second torture treatment, which was the shotgun, where they got their shotgun, pump shotgun, out the back—out the trunk of the car, and Peter Dignan, which is another one of the detectives, the most vicious one out of all of them, he proceeded to ask me some more questions about the murder and to tell me what they knew had already occurred and wanted me to fill in the gaps. I refused to do so. He took a shotgun shell, showed it to me, and his exact words were, “Listen, nigger”—and that’s when he turned his back to me. I heard a clicking sound, which seemed like it was the shell being placed in the chamber. He turned back around to face me, I no longer seeing a shotgun shell. So they continued to ask me questions. I refused to answer. One of them said, “Go ahead, blow that nigger’s head off.” And that’s when Peter Dignan forced the shotgun in my mouth. And he said, “You’re not going to tell me what I want to hear? You’re not going to tell me?” I said, “No.” And that’s when he pulled the trigger. They did a mock execution three times. The third time they did it, when I heard the trigger pull, in my mind, I thought he was blowing the back of my head off, because the hair on the back of my head stood straight up when I heard that click.

By them not being successful in getting what they wanted out of me, they then did a third treatment, which was they put me in the backseat of a detective car. They unhandcuffed my cuffs from behind, put them in front. John Byrne had a gun to my head and told me, “Don’t move,” when they redid the handcuffs. They put me sideways in the backseat of a detective car and made me lay down across the seat. They pulled my pants and my shorts down, and that’s when Byrne took an electric cattle prod, turned it on, and proceeded to shock me on my testicles. They did this what seems like forever with me, but it wasn’t that long. At one point, I was able to kick the cattle prod out of the detective’s hands, and that knocked the batteries out. He got the batteries, put them back in. One of them tried to take his feet and put it on top of one of my feet, the other one did the same thing, to stop me from kicking. Then this is when they started using the electric cattle prod on me again, while telling me that they knew that I wasn’t the one they wanted, but I had information that could lead them to the other person that they wanted. They continued to do this until finally I agreed to tell them anything they wanted to hear. Anything. It didn’t matter to me. You know, if they said, “Did your mother do it?” “Yes, yes, yes.” Because the diabolical treatment that I received was such that I had never in my life experienced anything like this. I didn’t even know anything like this here existed in the United States.

You know, it wasn’t until years later that I heard about torture in Chile and other places. This was after I was in the penitentiary. And it was amazing to me that these things had previously happened to me here in the United States, and the more we screamed about it, the less people cared to do anything about it. You know, and to this day, it is still amazing to me that there is a statute of limitation in the United States on torture, but there is not a statute dealing with arson and other things of this nature here. So, they should not be able to hide behind any kind of alleged statute. Wrong is wrong. Right is right. What these despicable detectives did could never be justified in the United States under any shape, form or fashion.

AMY GOODMAN: Darrell Cannon, what happened after they took you to this isolated area and tortured you in these various ways? Where did they then bring you?

DARRELL CANNON: What? The torture site?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Where did they—

DARRELL CANNON: Is that—OK, the—

AMY GOODMAN: You were held in this car. They tortured you in various ways. Then what happened?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. From there, they took me back to the police station. Before we went to the police station, they drove around again, looking for another guy that they said participated in this. To me, it seemed like they wanted to keep me away from the police station all day. Keep in mind, they arrested me at a quarter to 7:00 in the morning. Their shift was over with at 7:00 a.m., but yet and still, they didn’t leave my presence until probably well after 3:00 that afternoon.

Why was that necessary? I was already in custody. They had other detectives involved in the case, anyway. It was just a thing where they had fun. They had fun torturing me, and they lost track of what time it was, as a process of this. And like I said, to keep me away from the police station was did intentionally, because I’m pretty sure that they knew that my common-law wife had called an attorney. An attorney probably had came down to the police station looking for me. But until they were finished doing what they wanted to do with me, they didn’t want any interference.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, did you tell your attorney what had happened then?

DARRELL CANNON: I agreed to everything they said. You know, in fact, they had already told me that they didn’t deem me as a perpetrator, but they felt that I knew who the perpetrator was. And I kept telling them I didn’t. As a result from having been tortured in the manner in which I was and them feeding me various information, it got to the point where I started speaking back to them what they had already spoke to me. And as a result of that, that evening, a state’s attorney came in, along with the detectives that was involved in my torture, and spoke to me about the alleged crime. And afterwards, I repeated to that particular state’s attorney everything that the detectives had been told and everything that I had repeated back to the detectives.

AMY GOODMAN: But did you tell your—

DARRELL CANNON: As a result from that, I was charged with murder.

AMY GOODMAN: And did you tell your lawyer what the police, what the detectives, what Burge had done to you? Had you told your lawyer about the torture?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. I wasn’t allowed to see my lawyer until the following day, on November 3rd. I went to court, and before I came out before the judge, my attorney came back to the bullpen. And at that time, I told him what had happened to me the day before. He instructed me not to talk about it or say anything else, that he would deal with it in court at a later date. Then he went on to tell me that the hearing that we was getting ready to go before the judge was just a preliminary hearing to read off the charges and to ask me how I pled. And I pled not guilty.

AMY GOODMAN: You were convicted, though, of murder?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am.

AMY GOODMAN: And how long did you serve in prison?

DARRELL CANNON: I ended up doing twenty-three-and-a-half years in prison, with the last nine of those twenty-three-and-a-half years did in solitary confinement in an institution called Tamms Supermax.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you end up there?

DARRELL CANNON: The system felt like it was better to put me in a place to keep me quiet, because throughout the last twenty-some years, I’ve continuously raised the issue about having been tortured. I was having hearings. So Tamms was designed for, quote, “the worst of the worst” in the Illinois prison system, even though my record does not indicate that I am the worst of the worst. I’ve never harmed the staff or inmates, anything else. But that was the justification for putting me in Tamms. And in Tamms, reporters are not allowed to come and visit you. You weren’t allowed to have phone calls. So that was a way of probably trying to hush me up.

AMY GOODMAN: You got out in 2004, because prosecutors—

DARRELL CANNON: No, ma’am. No, ma’am. 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: But in 2004, the prosecutors dismissed the case based on these allegations of torture?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. But the parole board refused to release me. The parole board took the banner up and decided that I must have been complicity in some type of way in the alleged crime, so they considered me to be a parole violation, even though there was no evidence of such. So it took me additional few years fighting the parole board in federal court before I finally won. And that’s how I got out in 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: Flint Taylor, can you put this in the context of the four men that were on death row that eventually led to what we’re seeing today and the moratorium on the death penalty that was eventually imposed in Illinois by the former governor, George Ryan?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, there was a very significant victory for the convergence of two movements here in the city of Chicago—the human rights movement, the movement against torture, and the movement against the death penalty. And what happened was that Ryan became convinced not only that men should not be given the death penalty and should not be on death row, but that there were innocent men among those on death row and that they were innocent partially because they had been tortured into giving false confessions. And that’s why he pardoned the four men that he pardoned, at the same time that he cleared death row and gave—commuted the sentences of 164 men and women that were on death row at that time to life without parole. There have been many significant victories here, not the least of which is the indictment of Jon Burge and the fact that he’s actually going to trial.

But, Amy, it’s important to understand this case in the context, as Darrell mentioned, not only internationally, but nationally. We sit here in Chicago actually prosecuting a torturer. That hasn’t happened nationally. The administration hasn’t seen fit to even give serious investigation to people like Cheney and Rove and those who tortured across this world in our name. And in the same way that the conscience of this country cannot be cleansed without proper prosecutions of those who approved and participated in torture in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and places like that, the conscience of the city of Chicago cannot be cleansed until there’s a complete dealing with all of the issues of torture, starting with the mayor, on all the way down, and starting with the men behind bars and starting with all the men that need to be prosecuted. So there has to be an understanding that what we’re dealing with here is a microcosm of what’s going on and isn’t going on nationally, in terms of prosecutions, in terms of restorative justice, in terms of dealing with the victims and the survivors of torture, and compelling the court system and the powers that be to deal responsibly and thoroughly and in a just manner with the whole scope of torture as an issue, both nationally and locally.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Michael McDermott, explain who he is, one of the chief prosecution witnesses.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, all these years, the first time that anyone who worked with Burge came forward in any form was in 1989. And they—a detective anonymously wrote me and my partners, while we were on trial in a civil torture case, and told us about other victims of torture and told us that other men, including those who tortured Darrell, were participants in this ring of torture. That started our investigation, and it started us to unpeel the 110 victims of torture that we know about today. But no one—that man or woman didn’t come forward publicly. It was an anonymous contact. It was anonymous letters. And we never knew who that person was.

It wasn’t until 2004, after the men were pardoned and we had lawsuits for them, that we were able to go out and talk to retired detectives who were black, and they told us, now that they had retired, that they knew certain things. They had seen the torture box. They knew it was an open secret. They heard screaming. But Burge kept them out of the loop, because he knew—because they were African American, he didn’t trust them with the secret of the torture.

However, when the government investigated the case recently, with the power of immunity, the grant of immunity, they were able to get this white detective, who had been involved in several cases of where torture was alleged, including one that—of a victim who was going to testify for the government, and they gave him immunity, and apparently, although we haven’t seen the transcript, he reluctantly told what he knew about this incident of torture and perhaps others. Now, he is not a voluntary witness. He is not a happy witness. He is very scared. But we’re have hopeful that his testimony will be significant in terms of finally revealing at least one instance of torture from the inside and breaking the code of silence in that way. And if it is, and that’s what his testimony is, then it’s going to be obviously a significant crack in the conspiracy or code of silence.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. We will certainly follow this trial. It begins today, the trial of Jon Burge, not for torture, but for perjury and obstruction of justice. Flint Taylor, thanks for being us, attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, and Darrell Cannon, who was one of the torture victims of Jon Burge’s whole group. Darrell Cannon served more than two decades in prison.

Black Like Me 1994 is an experiment done by a University of Maryland student based on the one done in by John Howard Griffin published in his book in 1961. Read about how this young mans experience went as he became “black” temporarily and the stark difference in his treatment.

Black Like Me ’94

by Joshua Solomon

What I noticed at the start of it, my first few days living as a black man, were the small things, the differences in the way people treated me. The doorman at my brother’s apartment, a man I’d walked past every day for a month, stopped me, asked my name and where I was staying. A white woman on an airport shuttle looked away when I smiled at her. The hostess at a restaurant told me there would be a long wait, even though there were several empty tables.

I’d thought about the idea of living as a black person ever since I read John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” in high school. In 1959, Griffin, a white journalist, disguised himself as a black man and traveled through the rural South. In the 1970s, a white woman named Grace Halsell followed in Griffin’s footsteps, writing three books in three years about living as a black woman, an Hispanic woman and a Native American.

I picked up Griffin’s book by chance one morning at the Springbrook High School library; I sat there all day reading it, oblivious to everything else, to the end of the school day. Then and there I decided that sometime soon I too,would become black. It’s as simple as this-I wanted to know what it was like.

So it was that, in February of this year, I talked with Aaron B. Lerner, a physician who heads the department of dermatology at Yale University. I told him that I, a white, 20-year-old University of Maryland sophomore, had dropped out of school for a semester to live as a black man. And I wanted his help.

Lerner was surprisingly nonchalant. Unlike others I’d told, he didn’t dismiss me. Instead he explained that Griffin had used a derivative of the drug Psorlen to change his skin from white to brown. He also explained that it was suspected that Griffin’s early death in 1980 was partially due to liver damage caused by the medication. I told the doctor that I’d had a heart condition since birth, that I was used to the dangers of potent medication and to life-and-death choices. “Why,” Lerner asked. “Why are you doing this?”

I had prepared a neat answer. Now I stammered and forgot what I’d planned to say.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “It’s just, growing up in Silver Spring, I’ve always had a lot of black friends. Whenever something went down, they always said it was racism. Education, jobs, crime, poverty, social misunderstandings-they blamed everything on color. ‘It’s a white man’s world,’ they would say.”

That’s what I told Lerner. But there was something else-I’d sympathized with my friends, and I wanted to support them, but secretly, inside, I’d always felt that many black people used racism as a crutch, an excuse. Couldn’t they just shrug off the rantings of ignorant people?

In February I left my parents’ house to move in with my brother in Baltimore, not wanting to have to explain my change of complexion to the neighbors. I began taking six Psorlen pills a day. After four sessions at a tanning salon, my face was badly swollen and my body ached. A week or so later, my brother, Jon, and I drove home to Silver Spring for dinner. The change in my skin color must have been dramatic. My 9-year-old sister screwed her face into a horrible grimace the first time she saw me. “You’re ugly!” she cried. I wanted to smack her but realized she was not really talking about me.

Or was she?

It was about a month after I had started the process of transforming myself into a black man that the doorman at my brother’s apartment stopped me. Normally, he was polite and deferential. Now he did not bother to hide his rudeness as he asked my name, where I was staying and lots of other questions.

“I’ve walked past you every day for the past month,” I said. “I’m Josh. I’m staying with my brother Jon in 708.”

He looked me up and down, sputtered and stammered. “Just trying to keep it safe,” he said. The Psorlen was obviously working.

In early April I decided my complexion had changed enough for me to pass. Over two months the color of my skin had changed from olive to reddish-brown. Someone said that, with my straight nose and full lips, I looked Haitian. It was time to go. On the steps outside our house, my brother shaved my head. I’d had my hair cut pretty short already, and my scalp was tan. Still, just for good measure, Jon rubbed some theatrical skin stain over my head to even the color.

When he’d finished I looked in the mirror. It was scary. I wasn’t me anymore. I was black.

I was going to make Atlanta my first stop. Waiting at Dulles for my flight, I noticed for the first time how few of the travelers in the airport were black. Most of the black people were working behind metal detectors or pushbrooms. When we boarded the shuttle to go to the plane, I took the first available seat. It was next to a white woman. I smiled at her, the way I usually do. She cut her eyes to the ground. A white man placed a bag on the vacant seat next to me and continued to stand. I wondered why he didn’t sit. And then I asked myself if I was looking for things that weren’t really there.

Nonetheless, during that short ride, I couldn’t help noticing something-the moment I met a white person’s eyes, that person immediately turned away. Once I landed in Atlanta’s bustling airport I went to the information desk, where a kindly gray-haired gentleman behind the counter was answering questions. When my turn came, his manner changed. “What, you don’t have reservations?” he asked in a stern, hard voice. I was well-dressed, in khaki pants and polo shirt, the same clothes I often wore to classes as a white guy at the University of Maryland. I had $1,500 in my pocket.

“We have conventions in town, most hotels are full,” he said.

I found myself trying to be polite to an extent that was foreign to me. I gained new insight into why a black person would act like a so-called Uncle Tom-I was desperate for a little respect. Finally he suggested I take the subway downtown to the Peachtree station and look for the Comfort Inn, a place he described as “pretty inexpensive, at least for the city.”

I checked into the room, took a nap. When I woke up at 10 p.m. the city was dark and I was hungry. On International Avenue, I walked into a fancy restaurant. The maitre d’ haughtily told me, “Sorry, reservations required.” I asked him for an alternative selection. He told me to try across the street.

It was an old, greasy diner. Several black men loitered around the entrance drinking out of paper bags. One offered me “some good weed.” I kept moving. A little farther along I found a Mexican place. “Long wait,” said the woman at the door, “very long.” I peered over her shoulder. Inside were well dressed white people and several empty tables. Discouraged, tired, I went back to my room. I fell asleep thinking about eggs.

The next morning when I went to a nearby drugstore, a white employee followed me around the store. At the drink refrigerator, I turned suddenly and stared right at her, letting her know that I knew what she was doing-shadowing me as if I were a potential thief. I’d hoped to embarrass her, but she didn’t flinch. She stared right back, hands on her hips.

“Are you gonna buy something or not?” she asked.

I grabbed some orange juice.

“That’ll be $1.94,” said the woman behind the counter.

“Pretty expensive O.J.” I said. “Then don’t buy it,” she countered.

I checked out of my room, went to the bus station. My destination was Gainsville, Ga., the closest bus station to Forsyth County, which I had chosen because no blacks live there. Following the rape of a young white girl in 1912, two black men were convicted. Several lynchings were recorded following the verdict; the accused were eventually hanged. Using force and intimidation, the white community drove all black residents from the county. The 1990 census statistics on Forsyth County today show “N/A” under all categories for black people.

A light-skinned black man called me “brother” and asked where I was going.

“Man!” he said, shocked. “You don’t want to go to Forsyth. They got old ways down there, the lynching mentality. You should stay in the city.”

“I’m sure it isn’t so bad,” I said, “Things have changed a lot, don’t you think?”

“Okay, okay, man, it’s your hide,” he said, backing away from me. “Be safe, brother, be safe.”

In Gainsville I climbed off the bus. Man, I felt alone.

After checking into the Ramada Inn, I went out to explore. From what I could see, walking through the north side of the city, it was like a movie set for an old Southern town, complete with a statue of a Confederate soldier in the square. Three churches within two blocks, some store fronts, few people in evidence. Continuing up Green Avenue, the residential area began, a beautiful neighborhood, the sidewalks shaded with majestic boxwoods. On one porch, two ladies chatted. As I passed, their conversation stopped. I kept walking. When I looked back, they were still watching me.

I circled back to my room, called everyone I could think of, needing somebody to talk to. Finally I got through to Earnest Sharpe, a reporter who had written the most recent article on John Howard Griffin. He’d been supportive when I’d called him before. I was confused and angry about the intense emotions that petty indignities stirred in me. I’d hardly started on my journey, but I was already furious, almost to the point of paralysis.

I began to cry as I recounted the events of the last two days, the drip-drop of indifference and fear from the white people I had encountered. Their lack of patience, their downright contempt. He gave me the number of some of his friends in Atlanta. He told me that if things got bad, I could go there. I asked if they were white. I would stay with white people if they knew I wasn’t really black. When I looked through the window the next morning, the clouds were gray and the asphalt was wet. The outside looked like I felt inside. I took a shower and then rubbed more stain into my head and face.

I headed for a diner I had seen the day before. All of the tables were occupied by white customers. There was one black patron at the counter, and I took a seat next to him.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Around D.C.” I told him.

“Stay there.” he said. “Why you want to come down here?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look, you’re here cause you heard about the New South, right? You’ve heard we’ve come a long way and you want to find a new place to start. Well, let me tell you. Atlanta might be the New South, but here in Gainsville, in all these little towns, this is still the Old South,” he said. “What do you think happened to all those fellows who used to tell me and your daddy to sit in the back of the bus or to go around back to find the black bathroom? You think all those people died when they killed Mister Crow?”

We walked together out of the diner, to the town square, said our goodbyes. I continued down the street, heading south this time. There was an abrupt change in the landscape. Pool halls, liquor stores, all the buildings run down. The black side of town. A young, black teenager, bald like me, was hanging outside a pool hall. He had a fierce expression on his face.

I smiled.

“Whazz up?” he said.

A few blocks farther a police car passed, made a U-turn, stopped directly in my path. The cop waved me over. I walked to the car, put my hand on the roof of his cruiser.

“Get your hands off my cruiser,” he said. I put them in my pockets.

“You don’t want to do that either.”

I folded my fingers in front of my chest like a choirboy. He regarded me a moment.

“You’re new in town, aren’t you?” he asked. His breath stank. “Well, we’ve had plenty of trouble down here. I hope you don’t have any more in mind.”

“No way. No, sir,” I assured him. I prayed that he wouldn’t ask for my ID. How would I explain this white man’s driver’s license in my pocket? Visions of Rodney King flashed through my head.

“Okay,” he said, “Stay out of trouble now, you hear?”

I went back to my room and wrote everything down. When I was done I headed toward the square, where there was a poultry festival going on; it consisted of tents and steel drum barbecues and picnic tables in a parking lot, scored with the live music of a twangy country band. The first thing I noticed was the lack of black folks. There was only one family, eating at a picnic table.

The aroma of chicken filled my nose and stirred my stomach. I anted up, took a seat at a table not too far from the black family, near an obese white woman, hoping to spark some sort of conversation.

“Hell-o,” she sang, real friendly in a sweet Southern strain. “Are you enjoying the festival?” she asked.

I told her the barbecue chicken was great and that I was from Washington, D.C.

She asked where I was going next.

“Forsyth County?” she repeated, a look of disbelief crossing her face. “Why would you go there? You looking for trouble?”

“Of course not,” I said. I told her that I was sure it couldn’t be as bad as people said. On top of that, I said, “I’m an American citizen. I can live anywhere I want to.”

She snorted. “Well, not there,” she said. “They’d make you leave.”

“How could they do that?”

“They’d make your life miserable. Nobody would give you a job. They could change your mind, trust me.” The tone of her voice, her argumentative posture, was frightening.

“Well I think I’ll just go and check it out for myself,” I said.

Her face turned even redder. “You people never get it,” she chided me. “Some folks just don’t like living with you people. Look what you do to your neighborhoods. You make everyone leave. You ruin everything. You think . . . ”

Across the street someone began calling: “Ma, Ma! Are you all right?”

She looked over at a young, overweight boy, waved her hand, raised herself off the bench.

“Well, goodbye,” she said. “Don’t be stupid now, you hear?”

I felt tired and sick. I went back to my room and slept the rest of the day and night. The next morning I took refuge in a church. I entered the stately blue doors only to find a room empty, save for a homeless guy, blond-haired, blue-eyed. I asked him about the church’s shelter in detail, leading him to believe I was homeless too. His name was Chris. He’d been living on the streets for five years.

I asked Chris if he had ever lived in Forsyth.

“You don’t want to go down there,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re black. Simple as that.”

When I got to the room, it hit me. I was sick of being black. I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to throw up.

Enough is enough, I thought. I didn’t need to be hit over the head with a baseball bat to understand what was going on here. Usually, I’d made friends pretty easily. I was nice to them and they were nice to me. Now people acted like they hated me. Nothing had changed but the color of my skin. I went to the closet, pulled out my suitcase. After all of two days, the experiment was over. Maybe I was weak, maybe I couldn’t hack it. I didn’t care. This anger was making me sick and the only antidote I knew was a dose of white skin.

I called my mother and told her I was finished with my journey. All the hurt, all the anger, all the inhumanity. I started to cry.

On the way to the bus station I saw Chris across the street. I called and waved. He motioned me over to the sub shop where he was standing.

“I was trying to get a cup of water, but they can’t help me. Do me a favor and ask for one, they might help you because they don’t know you.”

I went in and got him a cup of water. I asked him if he wanted anything else.

“How about a steak and cheese, and make that a lemonade instead.”

I paid with a $20 bill. Chris’s eyes bugged out. I told him I was leaving town and, wanting company, asked him to walk me to the bus station. He resisted, saying he was tired and didn’t know his way around that part of town well. I reminded him that I had just bought him lunch.

We walked down Butler Avenue. This time I noticed the pawnshops, cheap food and liquor outlets, the standard ghetto businesses, all of the town’s vices packed into this small black community. An old wrinkled black man, his mouth full of gold, sipping on a bottle of Mr. Boston’s Gin. We walked on, past black children at play, women hanging wet clothes on makeshift lines, bass music thumping from an open window.

“Lazy niggers,” Chris spat.

My body quivered, my spine tingled. A shadow must have come over my face, for suddenly Chris became apologetic. I guess he thought I was ready to kick his butt.

“Oh not you, I didn’t mean you, you’re different,” said this guy who carried all his possessions in a tattered green duffle bag, who wore every article of clothing he owned on his back.

“Of course,” I said, “I just bought you lunch.”

We walked in silence after that. When we got to the bus station Chris asked if I would walk him back to his part of town. “See you later,” I said. I thought: Sink or swim, white boy. The bus came into Gainsville at about 3 p.m. The quiet ride ended in Atlanta at about 4:30. I took the subway back to the airport. A young black woman leaned against the seat next to me. She dozed off occasionally. In her arms she cradled a sack of books. Around her neck hung a stethoscope. Why hadn’t she given up? I could return home to my comfortable world. I could wait for my skin to turn white again. She would have to endure.

Joshua Solomon is University of Maryland student.