Invisible Black People

When I was a teenager, my mom told me on many occasions that my white friends would eventually pretend not to know me in public. She would often talk about how it would happen to her. For the longest time, the town I grew up in only had 2 grocery stores, so anybody in town who went grocery shopping had a 50/50 chance of going to the store you were shopping in. My mom would say her white coworkers who were so warm and friendly in the workplace would completely ignore her if they saw her at the grocery store or any other business around town. She was nonexistent as far as they were concerned. It also only happened with white coworkers. Her black coworkers would stop for a chat, or at least make eye contact and smile.

Flash forward a few decades and I can definitely confirm the wisdom imparted by my mother from my own observations. I'll be the first to admit that I'm terrible at remembering names, but I have a mind like a steel trap when it comes to remembering faces. If I've seen you before, I know I've seen you before. On many occasions, I have encountered white coworkers and former coworkers in public spaces and they have utterly ignored me. One incident I will always remember happened at the movie theater. For a little backstory, I had worked with one particular coworker on a special project for about 6 weeks. We worked together, in the same room, just a couple of feet from each other, every day for 8-10 hours for 6 weeks. We talked, as people who are in such close proximity will do. So, to make a long story short, she had no reason to not recognize me when she saw me in line at the movie theater about 18 months later. Yet, there we stood, mere feet from each other, and she pretended not to know me. I tried to make eye contact with her so I could at least offer a smile. Nope. I was the invisible black guy. Another instance happened with a high school classmate. I ran into her in the aisle at the grocery store in my hometown. Her mom was friends with my mom and her dad was friends with my dad. I recognized her immediately since we had just seen each other at our class reunion a year earlier. At the grocery store, however, I was just some black stranger to be ignored.

After seeing this situation play out in my life in many instances, it's my hypothesis that, at least in public, we become invisible black people. It's not that we're being consciously ignored, because that would require recognition that we are actually there. Instead, it's that we don't even register as being there. In being not white, we become a part of the background. I think part of the white person's brain says black people are an unknown, making eye contact might trigger them, acting friendly might trigger them, so the best thing is to not see them and certainly not interact with them. That same black person they see every day at work becomes background noise at the store.

I know some will say race has nothing to do with it. I might buy that, but I've seen white people recognize each other in public spaces all the time, even in cases where it's been decades since they've seen each other. One person might make eye contact with the other and then step over to say, "Hey, I don't mean to disturb you, but are you so-and-so from such-a-place?" I saw one recently where someone in her 20s recognized someone who used to babysit her. So you can't convince me these things don't happen.

Trust me, the black people who are being ignored know they're being ignored.

Revisiting "Good Hair"

So one of my acquaintances, who I'll certainly admit is something of a colorist, used the phrase "good hair" in talking about her daughter and it made me visibly cringe. I had posted about "good hair" previously so if you've been following me on my blog or on Google+ you know how I feel about it. It's simply one of the most self-loathing phrases a black person can use and if you use it in my presence only the standards of polite social interaction will keep me from going off on you. She said her daughter has "good hair" unlike some of the other "nappy-headed" girls at her daycare. Frankly, it was a WTF moment for me and only the fact that we were in a public place kept me from expressing my true feelings. By implication the other little girls at the daycare were genetically inferior and their mothers had questionable parenting for not slathering their "nappy" hair with the appropriate straightening chemicals. I fear that as black people we will never get over these distinctions that derive from our slave pasts as well as from European colonialism. Good hair indeed.

"Good Hair" and Internalized Racism

One phrase that always sets me on edge is the term "good hair." For those outside the African-American community I'll just explain that "good hair" in reference to a black person generally translates into hair with Caucasian characteristics. "Good hair" is straight or wavy on its own, without the application of chemicals or heat to straighten it. This is in contrast to most African-American hair which is tightly curled or "nappy" by virtue of its oval cross-section. The typical comparison is between having "good hair" or "nappy hair" with the implication being that those without "good hair" are deficient. It goes into an internalized racism in which those with "good hair" are superior in some way to those without.

I hear the phrase "good hair" most often among African-Americans of my parents' generation and older but I've also heard it used sometimes by those closer to my own age and younger. It's usually stated as a description such as "he's that fellow with the good hair" or "she doesn't have to do anything to her hair, she's got that good hair." The phrase establishes white characteristics as being the ideal. If your genetics didn't provide those characteristics for your hair, you're just out of luck. It's this self-loathing in the phrase that really ticks me off. You're not a prized catch if you don't have that "good hair." As a consequence there are those who straighten their hair, either with chemicals or heat, and those who choose to wear a natural hairstyle. That discussion will have to come later. In the meantime, can we please drop the phrase "good hair" from the vernacular. Thanks!

Kudos to Isaac Kuo from Google+ for the link to this Sesame Street video!

Revisiting the "Southern Strategy"

The "southern strategy" is alive and well.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." - GOP strategist Lee Atwater

I think I could likely safely wager that most people today are ignorant of what was known as the "Southern Strategy" when it began in the 1960s. Simply put, it was the strategy used by the Republican Party to appeal to the southern states through their racist attitudes toward African-Americans. It was probably best summed up by GOP strategist Lee Atwater in the quote I used to begin this piece. The initial approach was direct, in the language that southerners could easily understand. As Atwater put it, "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.'" Eventually they couldn't get away with that. When African-Americans were no longer the silent oppressed minority you couldn't get away with using that kind of language. Blacks were put off by it and a growing number of Whites were put off by it as well. The message had to change.

The message did change and went to talking about supporting states' rights and being opposed to forced busing for racial integration of schools. These were things you could talk about without seeming overtly racist by doing so. Who wouldn't support states' rights against an oppressive federal government? Who wouldn't be opposed to busing kids out of their own neighborhoods to schools halfway across town just for racial integration? Forced busing was disruptive. It cost taxpayers money. It just wasn't right. Or so the story went.

The message eventually turned even more abstract and went to terms of cutting taxes and advocating "smaller, less intrusive government." It all sounded nice and friendly. The terms were so generic that even those who weren't racists themselves could support those ideas. As Lee Atwater put it, the net effect is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. The original racist goal is being achieved but in terms so carefully crafted that people aren't aware of what's going on. This is the language of "code speak," saying in kinder, gentler terms those ideas that would be distasteful if plainly spoken. It's happening right now. Laws are being proposed and enacted using coded language meant to spread a racist agenda to hurt African-Americans at the expense of a few Whites who might get caught in the crossfire. The old guard refuses to walk away quietly and they're training fresh acolytes to take up their fight, many of whom aren't aware of the roots of their cause.