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For African Americans, one legacy of being the descendants of enslaved people is unreasonable expectations, of ourselves and our children. Any task placed in front of us must be accomplished lest we feel — or think that we appear —“lazy.” This, I know intellectually, comes from having been made to work from “can’t see to can’t see:” pulling tree stumps from the ground with our bare hands and backs, cutting sugar cane beneath the searing sun, giving birth in the field, finishing the day picking, all under the lash, and surviving, somehow, anyway. Suffering has woven itself into the fabric of our culture.

When I share this with my classes on structural racism, White students retort. They bring up difficult aspects of their personal lives, or painful episodes in the lives of their ancestors. And I think of Sojourner Truth’s famous, “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, delivered to an assembly of professed allies in the struggle for liberation, from which we learn that “we” — Black folk and White folk — are in this together until you must suffer to be in it with us. Not “40 lashes for backtalk” suffering, but “listening with humility rather than competing over who is more oppressed” suffering. Or “risking not getting the vote for White women because you dare to profess publicly that Black women are women who deserve freedom and the vote, too” suffering. Uncomfortable.

Confounded cries about how U.S. political culture still makes so much room for the overt racism that our nation thought we had left behind, or why a vigorous defense of gun rights continues in the face of devastating losses of school children, or why our courts and state governments are regressing to decades-old controls of women’s bodies are all clarified by the Sojourner Truth Conundrum, by what those champions of women’s rights at Seneca Falls forgot despite their intellectual prowess, dignity, and humanity: Suffering is avoided only through the oppression of others.

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Liberal White people know that they are not Proud Boys. They know Black Lives Matter, and they know white fragility is a problem. They do not know that suffering — not “lynch mob” suffering, but “I don’t know how to clap on beat and I feel embarrassed, but I can’t always pick the songs we sing in my integrated church to make myself feel comfortable” suffering — is an unavoidable aspect of the road to recovery. Being uncomfortable is not optional.

Color vs. Culture: A Friendly White Neighbor Story

My new neighbor introduced herself to my 4-year-old son with her first name, and I cringed. She then told her 4-year-old son that my name was Breai, and he proceeded to say hello without the African-American marker of respect and propriety, “Ms.” I said nothing. This new generation wears jeans to church and calls everybody by their first name. No big deal. Right? Later in the playdate, he hit his mother. She said, “Calm down, Bud.” I said nothing, but we went home.

At subsequent playdates, he refused to share with my son, threw fits, and hit his mother some more. Each of her responses to him typified the White, Liberal, Church-Jeans movement. She asked if he was tired, offered snacks, let him know that it was not okay to hit her, and never raised her voice. She was the picture of patience. The archetype of civility. All of the thoughts I had about what a Black mother would do to resolve his issues felt so crass. This mom was, indeed, a model to be emulated.

Then her son started poking me. He poked me with a stick. I asked him to stop. He did not stop. He poked me with his fingers. I told him no; he continued. His mother said that they would go home if he would not stop. He did not stop, they did not go home. I kept my peace. 

Then he stood over my son and called him stupid, and I said something.

First, I addressed my son, who had said nothing. I told him that no one should talk to him like that and that I expected him to speak up and tell anyone who mistreats him in that way that they need to stop. Then Church-Jeans corrected me. She contextualized her son’s inappropriate behavior, explaining that the boys were having a disagreement, as if that was an acceptable explanation. She was visibly agitated, defensive, and unapologetic.

The Petey Problem Or, The Tragic Unpreparedness of
Black Kids With Nice White Teachers

Petey is a character from Remember the Titans. A White coach thought that the Black head coach was being too hard on him, so he undermined the head coach’s leadership, lowering standards to pacify Petey. When challenged, he admitted that he would have had no problem holding a White player to the higher standard, but he’d felt sorry for Petey and was trying to protect him.

I once had a group of students who were horrendously underprepared, academically and emotionally. The educators I was working with at the time were committed to honoring student voice, which frequently expressed fatigue or petulance per the general vibe of teenagers. This meant a lot of pushback.

The tragic combination of the kids’ determination to do nothing and the White desperation to keep anyone from feeling uncomfortable resulted in little to no work accomplished, benchmarks unmet, and curriculum unlearned. Care had been confused with neglect. Niceness was the pinnacle of morality in its unwillingness to abide any suffering, even appropriate and necessary expressions of it like building stamina and age-appropriate literacy.  

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Spaces that accept black people but not Black culture are not actually integrated spaces. By professing to accept Black people as equals, Black culture can be criticized or rejected, fair and square. The Black cultural value of accountability, most pointedly, is framed as cruel and inappropriate, “punitive” or “problematic,” reprising the age-old, colonial usurpation of our right to manage our communities, families, and institutions as we see fit. White Liberalism lines up with whatever frames this accountability as clinically damaging while protecting destructive levels of tolerance as kind and healthy.