Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America

Introduction

1 In 1959 Bo Diddley experienced what he later recalled as the most humiliating moment of his life. When he and his band were playing in Las Vegas at the Showboat Casino, one afternoon they jumped into the hotel’s swimming pool. Immediately all the white people climbed out, and an attendant put up a sign saying “Contaminated Water.”1 Fifty years later, Barack Obama became the forty-fourth president of the United States. Grudgingly or enthusiastically, most white people seemed to accept an African American as their nation’s leader.Yet anger at his “intrusive” agenda erupted soon after he took office. There’s some evidence that Obama’s presidency sparked such contempt not only because he has defined himself as black but also because many people think he’s a Muslim.2 The alien religion augments the alarm so frequently associated with the familiar race. Many of those who want to “take our country back” or “restore honor” have said that Obama is African, not American. Except for the most bigoted of the protesters, overt racism no longer seems acceptable. Nevertheless, a black man is in the White House, and fears of a contaminated country helped to swell a roar of Just Say No. Such fears seemed normal to white people in 1959. Now they animate only an impassioned fringe, or the fringe of a fringe. In the last fifty years, most white Americans’ fears of racial contamination have clearly declined. A young black man can hold hands with a white woman or take her to the prom, even in southern towns, and not  Introduction 2 honor bound get lynched. In 2007, when Don Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” he lost his radio show, though only temporarily. Yet in housing, in schooling, in jails and prisons, in access to money and privilege, barriers to black people remain entrenched. Extraordinary progress toward equal rights, equal educational opportunities, and workplace integration has obscured the continuities. Obama has made it to the top, but over a third of all African American males have been in trouble with the law. In some inner-city neighborhoods, 70 percent of young black men have been labeled felons, usually for drug offenses. Racial branding still has a fearful intensity when it targets poor black people, especially poor black men.3 As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” This book explores the past and presence of that divide. My focus on fear, honor, and shaming offers some new perspectives on an old, shared problem. I argue that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor. “White skin” and “black skin” are fictions of honor and shame. Americans have lived these fictions for over 400 years. The history of relations between white and black Americans has been a story of progress and recoil. The Civil War brought the most dramatic progress, and the recoil lasted almost a century. The civil rights movement brought major progress in schools and at work. The recoil has lasted forty years, especially in suburban segregation and backlash politics, thinly masked as charges of “socialism,” or giving “our” money to “them.” Obama’s election was a third instance of real and symbolic progress. Then came the Tea Party recoil. The reaction time may be getting shorter, and explicitly racial attacks now can be countered. But white fears of contamination have a long half-life. Many African Americans as well as many light-skinned Americans still presume that white means honor and black means shame. My subtitle could have been “The Uses, Causes, and Consequences of Racial Shaming by Americans Who Think They’re White.” I use “Race and Shame” partly to give it more zing and partly to imply an intimate bond between the two words. As noun and verb, shame introduction 3 gives race its negative meanings, because light-skinned people use shaming and humiliation to make race feel like shame. The two states of self-perception become equivalent, except for those who can claim whiteness, which confers honor as well as dominance. Such shaming carries its own shame, since it springs not from prowess or goodness but from white people’s fears of losing superiority. These fears aren’t usually acknowledged. On the receiving...