White Like Me. Tim Wise
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building, followed by the sound of his heavy drunken footsteps moving closer to our unit, and I could know that at least for that night he wasn’t going to kill himself while driving. I could go to sleep.
Things got so bad at one point that I began to keep track with hash marks on a page the number of days in a row that he had been drunk: twenty-one on the day I stopped counting. Though I longed for a closer relationship with my dad, I also breathed more easily whenever he was in a play out of town. By then I had learned that quiet loneliness is always preferable to amplified togetherness when the cacophony to which you’re being exposed reverberates with the blaring notes of marital discord.
Only by escaping into the world of acting (a strangely ironic choice, I realize) was I able to make it through those grades at all. It was my refuge. I could lock myself in my room with a play script, avoid my father, escape the smell of Canadian whiskey or bad vodka on his breath, and avoid the verbal battles that were the hallmark of his relationship with my mother. The only times I would come out of my room were in those moments when I honestly felt that if I didn’t he might kill her. Although my home was not one characterized by physical abuse—thankfully, my dad only struck my mom once (which of course was one time too many) by pushing her into a wall outside my room—when you’re ten and eleven your mind has a hard time processing the distinction between verbal and physical violence, and knowing where that line is, and just how much it might take for the abuser to cross the metaphorical Rubicon. During this period, although I never had friends over—mostly because I didn’t want them to see my father drunk—I also refused to go to their homes, at least not past dinner, feeling that I needed to be in the house as a way to deter my father from the inevitable leap to assault or even murder.
No matter the infrequency of physical abuse, in my mind the threat always seemed to hang like a thunder cloud over our home. At one point, I was so sure he would kill her that I began planning an escape route. If I could intervene and save her I would, but if it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to do much good, I knew how to get my bedroom window open fast, and exactly where I would run to get help, or to borrow the weapon with which I would end my father’s life.
That my dad was not going to kill my mother was hardly the point. When you hear him say that he’s going to—like the one time he said it with a steak knife held three inches from her face, while I watched from perhaps seven feet away—and you’re a child, you are in no position to deconstruct the context of his words. All you can do is spend precious moments of your youth trying to figure out ways to save your mom’s life, or at least your own, on that day when your father has one drink too many and burns dinner because he wasn’t paying close enough attention, or can’t find his keys and flies into a rage, and reaches into the utensil drawer—and not for a spoon or salad fork.
So when I say that theatre was a life raft, I am not engaging in idle hyperbole. I mean it literally. Without it, I would have had no escape. While my physical existence may have continued—after all, my father never killed anyone in the end, and had he meant to, it’s doubtful I could have dissuaded him with a sonnet—my already fragile emotional well-being would have likely taken a nosedive, with dire consequence in years to come. Theatre was how I released my frustrations; it was how I avoided falling into clinical depression; it was how I got my mind off other things, like killing my father before he could harm my mom, which I did contemplate in my more panicked moments.
Without theatre, which I could only access the way I did because I was white, it is a very open question how my life would have gone. If all the other variables had been the same, but I had been anything other than white, and thereby bereft of the diversion offered by acting, I feel confident that things would have gone differently than they did. As for my father, he should be grateful that we were white, and that I had an outlet.
NEXT TO THEATRE, my other obsession as a kid was sports. When I wasn’t working on lines for whatever play we were soon to be performing at school, I was likely to be practicing either basketball or baseball.
As for basketball, I had begun playing competitively at the age of nine. By my fifth grade year, 1979, I was playing for what was undoubtedly the most feared team of eleven-year-olds in the city. Comprised of twelve guys, nine of them black, we had the advantage of racist stereotypes working in our favor. Most of the teams we would play were made up of private school white boys who had barely even seen a black person, let alone played ball against one. Psychologically we had won before we even stepped on the court in most cases. The only times we lost were because the white boys’ coaches were smart enough to encourage their players to foul and force us to the line. Sadly, most of our guys could hit twenty-five-foot jumpers with no problem, but free throws from fifteen feet? Not so much.
Still, the racial lessons imparted by my basketball experience were profound. We would walk in the gym, part of the YMCA youth basketball program, in our black uniforms and our mostly black skin, and watch a bunch of pasty white boys damn near piss themselves. We’d win by scores of 40–8, 34–6, 52–9, and other absurd point spreads; and it wasn’t because we were that much better. Fact is, our field goal percentage wasn’t very high, but we’d always get multiple shots during each offensive possession because the other team was too afraid to fight for rebounds. It was as if they thought our guys might knife them if they even tried.
Because our opponents were so psyched out by the black players, they assumed they had little to fear from the few of us who were white. So whenever the other team got to the foul line, we would line up four black guys around the paint to rebound if they missed, and I would stand at the extreme other end of the court, literally on the opponent’s foul line, completely unguarded, because they weren’t afraid of the short white guy. Their players would miss their free throws, our guys would rebound, and throw the ball down court to me for an easy layup each time.
On the one hand, the stereotypes of black athleticism worked in our favor on the court, triggering in our opponents what psychologists like Claude Steele call “stereotype threat” on the part of the white players. According to this theory, which has been amply demonstrated in lab experiments and real world settings, when a person is part of a stigmatized group (thought to be less intelligent or less athletic, for instance), the fear of confirming the negative stereotype when forced to perform in a domain where that stereotype might be seen as relevant to performance, can drive down performance relative to ability. In other words, the anxiety spawned by fear of proving the negative stigma true can actually cause a person’s skills to suffer, whether on a basketball court or a standardized test.
In most situations, stereotype threat affects socially marginalized groups, since they typically face more stigmatizing stereotypes than dominant groups. So black students do worse in academic settings than their abilities might otherwise indicate because of the anxiety generated as they try not to confirm racist stereotypes about black intelligence; women and girls do worse on math exams because they fear validating common stereotypes about female math ability or the lack thereof; and the elderly do less well when told they’re taking a test of memory because of a fear that they may confirm negative beliefs about their abilities in that arena. But because of the widespread and anti-scientific belief that blacks are “natural athletes,” superior to whites especially at basketball, in this particular case the stereotype vulnerability fell on our white opponents. For a brief thirty-two minutes on the court, the script was flipped.
But thirty-two minutes does not a day make, let alone a lifetime—a point worth remembering, lest we assume a parity of disadvantage between whites and blacks, simply because in one arena like sports (and even then, just a few particular sports), blacks occasionally get the benefit of the doubt and are thought to be superior.
A few years ago, I received an e-mail from a very thoughtful private school mom in Minnesota, who had been asked to read the first edition of this book, along with other parents at the school her child attended. Much of it she liked, but she felt compelled to tell me of at least one instance of “black privilege” in the school, and how it was, to her mind, negatively impacting her white son. Her son, she explained, was an excellent football player—a running back as I recall—and faster than several of the black guys on the team. Nonetheless,