Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America

2. How Does it Feel to be a Problem?

30 A year after Bo Diddley jumped into the Las Vegas swimming pool and faced a sign declaring “Contaminated Water” and days after the 1960 presidential election, John Lewis and two black companions went into a Nashville fast-food restaurant to order ten-cent hamburgers. As Taylor Branch recounts,“A visibly distressed waitress poured cleansing powder down their backs and water over their food, while the three Negroes steadfastly ate what they could of their meal.” When Lewis and James Bevel returned to complain, the manager said that the place was closed for “emergency fumigation.” He then locked the front door, turned on the fumigating machine, and exited at the back, leaving Lewis and Bevel trapped inside. Only after a preacher, a news photographer , firemen, and a crowd gathered outside did the manager return to let them out. The crowd may have gathered because amid the fumes, Rev. Bevel was preaching an impromptu sermon “about the deliverance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.”1 In 1972 or 1973, when Barack Obama was in an elite Hawaiian school, he was pointing to names on a tennis tournament list. Long afterward, a white friend recalled what happened.“Tom M. came over and told him not to touch the draw sheet because he would get it dirty. . . . The message was that his darker skin would somehow soil the draw. Those of us standing there were agape, horrified, disbelieving.” Eleven or twelve years old, Obama simply looked at him and said, “‘What do you mean by that?’” After some floundering, the student chapter 2  How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? how does it feel to be a problem? 31 said he was joking. “But we all knew it had been no joke, and it wasn’t even remotely funny. Some of our innocence was gone.”2 By the early 1970s, then, some elite white students in Hawaii felt the shame of such shaming. In Nevada and Tennessee only a decade earlier, similar incidents seemed normal, even mandated, at least to the white people involved. Why? And why do such stories now seem bizarre? For Branch, the Nashville fumigation incident showed the manager ’s “association of Negroes with insects and other vermin.” That association seems too tame to explain such instantaneous white fear and disgust, except as a rationalization. If a dog instead of Bo Diddley had jumped into that Las Vegas swimming pool, the white swimmers probably would have laughed. More was at stake here than a fear of bugs and dirt, even in the last of the decades when many white middle-class Americans still wrongly associated polio with dirt and the alien poor.3 The presence of Diddley’s band in shared waters, or the attempt of three black men to eat a hamburger, contaminated a racial group’s sense of its boundaries and its superiority. After 1920, when many city and town swimming pools began to let men and women swim together, American whites wouldn’t allow black people to swim with them in pools or on beaches. Whether in the Chicago race riot of 1919 or the Mississippi riots about beach integration in the 1950s, white fears of proximity to partially clothed black bodies often prompted lethal violence as well as humiliations. White fears of other kinds of bodily race mixing have also been well documented. At least through the 1940s, Red Cross blood supplies were segregated. On a Savannah minor league baseball team during the late 1950s, when Curt Flood threw his dirty uniform in with his white teammates’ dirty uniforms, the trainer removed it with a stick.4 Racial shaming characterizes all societies that enforce race-based exclusions. In 1993 a white American novelist, Jill Ciment, stepped into a Japanese public bath, and all the Japanese women climbed out. In 1901, fearing competition from Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Australia passed a “White Australia” policy that restricted the immigration of “nonwhites”; it lasted until the 1970s. Racism legitimates an ethnic group’s dominance, and racism intensifies when that group feels entitled but threatened. Racial shaming is at the gentle end of the weapons available to remove the threat. 32 honor bound How White Shaming Worked Consider again how strange that posting of the “Contaminated Water” sign seems now, and how natural it seemed then, even in 1959 in Las Vegas, far from the South. Was it meant literally...