When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Race, Rage, and the Ace of Spades

© Dr. Julianne Malveaux 101 Race, Rage, and the Ace of Spades Julianne Malveaux I’m sitting on a panel, trying to get a word in edgewise. Four white men are stepping all over my lines, courteously (if gruffly) yielding to each other, but treating me as if I am invisible. My attempts at interruption are unheard, my throat clearing, hand raising have no effect. “Can’t a black woman get a word in edgewise?” I finally shout out. “Don’t play the race card with me,” sneers the white boy of the moment. Ordinarily we are told to “play the hand we are dealt” in life. The twenty-first century message, though, is that if life deals us the race card, we aren’t supposed to play it. Simply hold it, suppress it, swallow it. If we believe the myth of the level playing field, the race card should have no more influence, and no less, than any other card. My life experience suggests, instead, that almost any card, in almost any circumstance , can trump the race card. And so I find the level-playingfield crowd deliberately myopic. They’ve stacked the deck and then told black folks that we can’t play the cards we have. 102 J u l i a n n e M a lv e a u x I don’t know exactly when white folks started telling black folks, with all undue derision, “Don’t play the race card.” Perhaps the term “race card” was introduced at the moment when affirmative-action critics started whining “reverse discrimination,” even though there is overwhelming numerical evidence that whites still hold more than their share of elite jobs, contract opportunities, and seats in university classrooms . The same folks who don’t want to hear about a race card used the race card to their advantage when they excluded African Americans from a set of opportunities. Indeed, the race card was rendered powerless against any other card in 1857 when the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black folks had no rights that whites were bound to respect. The signs don’t say white or colored any more. Dred Scott may now be Congressman or State Assemblyman Dred Scott, and be nearly forty times more likely to be investigated than his or her white counterparts. Runaway slave Dred may now be called Amadou Diallo, a twentiethcentury black man who learned that he had no rights—not even the right to carry a wallet—that reckless white police officers were bound to respect. Because the signs don’t say white or colored, and because so many don’t want to “play the race card,” the killing of Amadou Diallo turned out to be a procedurally correct killing, not an awful and irrational show of force, a modern-day lynching. Whenever I hear the phrase “playing the race card,” though, I have a vision of a bunch of raucous folks sitting around a table, playing bid whist. At the beginning, the play is always a bit subdued as people try to size up the hands of both their partners and opponents. As the books pile up and the odds become clearer, big-time trash talking is as much a contest as whist. Eventually, as the number of cards in a hand dwindles , the trash talking crescendos. I’ve sat at whist tables where players’ necks have nearly swiveled 360 degrees, they’ve talked so much trash. I’ve seen people stand up and throw cards on the table, spit on them, and paste them to their heads. This is especially true if a team can take all the books in hand, called a “Boston.” It is a feat that can only be achieved by a combination of the luck of the deal and the skill of manipulation and counting. Trash talk tends to get wild. Some people choo-choo like a train to indicate that the train is coming to Boston. “Hartford!” near-winners R a c e , R a g e , a n d t h e A c e o f S pa d e s 103 shout, as they pick up the next to last trick. “Providence!” others holler, indicating that Boston is just around the bend. Trash-talking players don’t simply place cards on the table. They throw them, snap them, or sometimes coyly draw them across the table before...