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things take away from the work ethic that was a defining feature of his character, but they do suggest that a work ethic is rarely enough on its own to make the difference. After all, by the time he arrived in America there had been millions of black folks with work ethics at least as good as his, and by the time he passed at the age of ninety-three, there would have been millions of peoples of color who had lived and toiled in this land, every bit as long as he had. Yet with few exceptions, they could not say that within a mere decade they had become successful shop owners, or that one of their sons had gone on to graduate from one of the nation’s finest colleges. Even as a religious minority in the buckle of the Bible belt, Jacob was able to find opportunity off-limits to anyone of color. He may have been a Jew, but his skin was the right shade, and he was from Europe, so all suspicions and religious and cultural biases aside, he had only to wait and keep his nose clean a while, and then eventually he and his family would become white. Assimilation was not merely a national project; for Jacob Wise, and for millions of other Jews, Italians, and Irish, it was an implicitly racial one as well.
Even before assimilation, Jacob had been able to gain access to opportunities that were off limits to African Americans. His very arrival in the United States—as tortuous and circuitous as was the route that he had been forced to take in order to achieve it—was made possible by immigration policies that at that moment (and for most of our nation’s history) have favored those from Europe over those from anywhere else. The Naturalization Act of 1790, which was the very first law passed by the U.S. Congress after the ratification of the Constitution, made clear that all free white persons (and only free white persons) were to be considered citizens, and that this naturalization would be obtained, for most all whites, virtually as soon as we arrived. Yet, during the period of both of Jacob’s journeys—the one that had been cut short and the one that had finally delivered him to his new home—there had been draconian limits, for example, on Asian immigration. These restrictions would remain in place until 1965, the year his grandson, my father, would graduate from high school. If that’s not white privilege—if that’s not affirmative action of a most profound and lasting kind—then neither concept has much meaning any longer; and if that isn’t relevant to my own racialization, since it is the history into which I was born, then the notion of inheritance has lost all meaning as well.
And there is more of interest here too, as regards the Wise’s role in the nation’s racial drama. Though whites who came to America after the abolition of slavery can rightly claim they had played no part in the evil that was that particular institution, it is simply wrong to suggest that they are not implicated in the broader system of racial oppression that has long marked the nation. In addition to the receipt of privileges, which stem from the racial classification into which they were able, over time, to matriculate, there are occasionally even more active ways in which whites, such as the Wises, participated in the marginalization of black and brown peoples.
It was only a few years ago, during a workshop that I was attending (not as a facilitator but rather as a participant), that I really came to appreciate this fact. During the session, we had all been discussing our family histories, and at one point I mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that my comfort in and around communities of color likely stemmed from the fact that my paternal grandfather had owned and operated a business in the heart of Nashville’s black community for many years—an establishment I had visited dozens of times, from when I had been only a small child until I was a teenager.
Prepared to move on to another subject and wrap up my time to share, I was interrupted by a black man, older than myself, whose ears and eyes had quite visibly perked up when I had mentioned my grandfather and his business in North Nashville.
“I’m originally from North Nashville,” he noted. “What kind of business
did he have?”
“A liquor store,” I responded. “My family owned liquor stores all over town and my grandfather’s was on Jefferson Street.”
“Your grandfather was Leo Wise?” he replied, appearing to have known him well.
“Yes, yes he was,” I answered, still not certain where all this was headed.
“He was a good man,” the stranger shot back, “a very good man. But let me ask you something: Have you ever thought about what it means that such a good man was, more or less, a drug dealer in the ghetto?”
Time stood still for a second as I sought to recover from what felt like a serious punch to the gut. I could feel myself getting defensive, and the look in my eyes no doubt betrayed my hurt and even anger at the question. After all, this was not how I had viewed my grandfather—as a drug dealer. He had been a businessman, I thought to myself. But even as I fumbled around for a reply, for a way to defend my grandfather’s honor and good name, I began to realize that the man’s statement had not been a condemnation of Leo Wise’s humanity. It was not a curse upon the memory of the man to whom I had lovingly referred as Paw Paw all of my life. Anyway, he was right.
The fact is, my grandfather, who had spent several of his formative years living with his family on Jefferson Street, indeed made his living owning and operating a liquor store in the black community. Though the drug he sold was a legal one, it was a drug nonetheless, and to deny that fact or ignore its implications—that my grandfather put food on his family’s table (and mine quite often) thanks to the addictions, or at least bad habits, of some of the city’s most marginalized black folks—is to shirk the responsibility that we all have to actually own our collaboration. His collaboration hadn’t made him a bad person, mind you, just as the black drug dealer in the same community is not necessarily a bad person. It simply meant that he had been complex, like all of us.
The discussion led to the discovery and articulation of some difficult truths, which demonstrated how messy the business of racism can be, and how easy it is to both fight the monster, and yet still, on occasion, collaborate with it. On the one hand, my grandfather trafficked in a substance that could indeed bring death—a slow, often agonizing death that could destroy families long before it claimed the physical health or life of its abuser. On the other hand, he, unlike most white business owners who operate in the inner-city, left a lot of money behind in the community, refusing to simply abscond with it all to the white suburban home he had purchased in 1957, and in which he would live until his death.
Even the man who had raised the issue of my grandfather’s career as a legal drug dealer was quick to point out the other side: how he had seen and heard of Leo paying people’s light bills and phone bills, hundreds of times, paying folks’ rent hundreds more; how he paid to get people’s cars fixed, or brought families food when they didn’t have any; how he paid people under the table for hauling boxes away, moving liquor around, or delivering it somewhere, even when he could have done it himself or gotten another store employee to do it. The man in the workshop remembered how my grandfather would slip twenty dollar bills to people for no reason at all, just because he could. By all accounts, he noted, Leo had continued to feel an obligation and a love for the people of the Jefferson Street corridor, even after he had moved away. But what he had likely never noticed, and what I had never seen until that day, was that he and his commercial activity were among the forces that kept people trapped, too. Not the same way as institutional racism perhaps, but trapped nonetheless.
He had not been a bad person, but he had been more complicated than I had ever imagined. He had been a man who could count among his closest friends several black folks, a man who had supported in every respect the civil rights movement, a man whose proximity to the black community had probably done much for me, in terms of making me comfortable in nonwhite settings. But at the same time, he had been a man whose wealth—what there was of it—had been accumulated on the backs, or at least the livers of black people. Neither his personal friendships nor his political commitments had changed any of that.
That structural dynamic had provided him privilege, and it had been my own privilege that had rendered me, for so long, unable to see it.
LOOKING BACKWARDS IN time then, it becomes possible to see whiteness playing out all along the history of my family, dating back hundreds of