By Nicholas Powers
Every day, we snort, inject, inhale, pop, mainline, spray, smoke, drink up, eye-drop and dose on whiteness. We march to work, warming up our white voice. We turn it on at school or office, hospital, Starbucks, Bank of America or the Duane Reade counter and say, “Hi. Hello. Welcome. How can I assist you? May I be of service?”
In between customers, when we’re not feeding our tongue into the machine, we talk shit, clown, play the dozens and gossip. Too soon, another face rushes at us. The white voice comes back. We switch between dialects in one breath.
We’re a bilingual people. We speak whitenese. We speak FUBU. Two warring languages in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being an authentic consciousness. We hold the two lexicons in a tense embrace. Black experience translated into white talk until our mind is far away from our bodies.
Artists and runaway slaves warned us that whiteness can be camouflage and whiteness can be a drug. Use it to survive. Fine. Just don’t be used by it. We see in Frederick Douglass’ 1845 autobiography and the late stage capitalism, 2018 film, Sorry to Bother You. The former shows a slave who freed himself and the latter, a free man who enslaved himself. Both texts involve double-consciousness, a concept W.E.B. Du Bois wrote on in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk: “This sense of looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity.”
Seeing “oneself through the eyes of others” was a survival tactic. In the 1848 slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, enslaved couple Ellen and William Craft used whiteness to pull an Ocean’s Eleven, except the Faberge Egg was their freedom. She was mad light-skinned, so light she looked museum white. He was mahogany brown. She got dressed as a slave owner, top hot, vest and obey me nigger, mannerisms. He scraped and bowed and pretended to be her slave. They rode first class in the best trains all the way North.
They used whiteness to hide from whiteness. They mapped out the ideology and hid in its blind-spot. Generations of Black activists and artists have worked that blind-spot. Walter Francis White, a light skinned NAACP reporter, passed for redneck to report on lynching in the South. In art, we see the Wayan brothers in 2004’s White Chicks wearing “whiteface” to make America laugh at itself and take home millions in ticket sales.
Here’s the danger. The second stage of double consciousness is not when we look at ourselves through “the eyes of others,” but when we “look at others through the eyes of others.” We see it in Neo-slave narratives like that of revolutionary Assata Shakur, who wrote in her autobiography, Assata, that as a child she was disgusted by Blackness. She threw shade on a classmate’s full lips, dark skin and nappy hair. Later, Assata regretted how she looked at him through eyes of whiteness.
Decades after, we see it again in Sorry to Bother You, as the protagonist, Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield), used his white voice to make money at a call company until, addicted by the money, it uses him. He judges his former life, former friends and co-workers from his new “white” position. Here is whiteness internalized. It becomes the position from which you see others.
Whiteness as drug. The skin lightening creams sold in Harlem, Africa, India and the Caribbean. The “creamy crack” of hair straightening. The moving to white zip codes and getting white trophy lovers and reciting white reformist politics. It’s a drug. Whiteness dopamines the brain as the small privileges that come from putting white people at ease become addictive. So how strung out are you? Does the white voice make you feel safe? Do you take out one, five, ten, twenty dollar bills and imagine the dead presidents saying, “You’re free.”
When I come back from work, I sometimes forget to turn it off. The white voice is a knot in my nose. It’s a loud, honking horn. My neighbors hear it, blink and back up until my larynx eases and my voice drops from my nose to chest then navel. The natural body, breath vibrates all the way up. Shakes the mouth loose. My music returns.
The white voice is killing us. It’s really hard to feel history in it. Which I think is why so many of us never stop using it. We don’t want to feel our real voice, our home voice, our ancestral river that carries our beginning. We’re scared of our history.
The upwardly mobile descendants of slaves are scared of the Black voice. Its rhythms carry yesterday’s pain, today’s pain and tomorrow’s pain. When I’m in it, I feel it as I chop it up with folks. I hear the agony. I hear it in the angry whine of a brother whose been stopped and frisked by cops, or how his friends take their male insecurity out on sisters by cat-calling them. I hear it in the Section 8 parents, shouting at kids as if sandblasting their small souls. I hear it in the old men joking about failed lives, laughing so hard they spill their beer. I feel their rage, blindly lashing out.
It tells me that even here in the Black voice whiteness is a faraway deadly star that bathes the Black body in a disfiguring light. We don’t have to sound “white” to see ourselves and each other in it. Whiteness is a position from which we see ourselves as ratchet, ghetto, trash, tip drills, jump offs, niggas, parasites and as the shadows in Plato’s Cave.
You gotta dive deep, deep, deep to where the poison light doesn’t reach to find a Black revolutionary voice. You gotta go to where touch is a plasma torch, welding the broken parts into one whole being. You gotta go to where the oldest currents in the voice travel through the rotting hull of a slave ship. Where Black souls shiver in withdrawal from whiteness. They cough it up. They spit it out. They beg for more but are denied. Say they’ll suck your dick for it. But are denied. They scream and scream and scream.
When the last of it is out, our chains melt into our nervous system, binding us. A racial telepathy begins. Our marching feet create poly-rhythms that shake the earth. It’s the Black revolutionary voice that ignites dreams and creates prophecy from the slums.
We speak and cops fall back. We say our names and America vanishes. We praise the ancestors and the dead presidents on our money, vanish. We sing our bodies and the KKK hoods made out of the American flag, twist on racists heads and choke them to death. They gasp for air and say, “I can’t breathe.” We laugh and step over them.
Our Black revolutionary voice is the murder song of the West. And you don’t have to be sorry for bothering them.
Suggested Readings
Erasure by Percival Everett (2011)
LSD Psychotherapy by W V Caldwell (1968)
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (2008)
Nicholas Powers is a poet and a journalist. His book “The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street” was published by Upset Press. His writings appear in Truth Out, Huff Post, Raw Story and The Indypendent. All thoughts expressed are Nicholas’s alone.
