White Power

May I “channel” some painful thoughts from my inner whiteness that I believe I had about my whiteness in an attempt to understand what exactly it was I was feeling when I first heard the phrases “Black Power” and then subsequently “White Power”?

Because, make no mistake, I was born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Virginia in 1993 and I certainly heard Black Power first. If my parents listened to rap at the time, or ever, I might’ve been lucky enough to hear Tupac Shakur on the radio on my way home while he was still with us, because I was lucky enough to be born into his era of Black culture and Black People. Tupac Shakur was, as we say, A Real One: a self-possessed, self-conscious, self-aware individual. Not only was he all these things, but he used these gifts to make art instead of pain, though his art was full of righteous pain. He did the hard work of turning anger into poetry and giving people who had no comfort some sense that they were not alone. I was one of those people, long before I knew it.

He did the hard work of standing and saying, “Let me say something to these White People hurting My Black People” and for that I’m indebted and humbled. I now feel a sacred duty to do the relatively easy work of listening to his life.

Here’s what I’ve heard so far from my mind about Tupac Shakur:

He was the embodiment of Black Power. To use another biblical phrase that may convey my love for him and Afeni Shakur, his imperfect and powerful mother who raised him as best she could with the resources she had, and to express my love for the community that made him, Tupac Shakur was A True King. Not in the sense of pedestals and idols and pomp. He was a leader. A man that felt deeply. So deeply, he felt compelled to sing and dance and be who he was for Them, his People, and for us, the People he hoped would realize are also His.

If you doubt me, listen to his music. Dance to it so your white ears forget the uncomfortable vitality of gangster ran. Learn him as best you can, because he was taken too soon as so many Black Humans are in America. Here’s a song of his I like to dance to because it reminds me of my Momma, who is also imperfect just like Afeni Shakur was, but whom I love all the same. Tupac Shakur taught me, a white boy turned white man, how to love my mother. No one else could because he experienced a motherhood plagued by addiction, just like me, though he experienced so much else. Tupac taught me that love is a choice, and I had to hear the right words to choose to love her. I had to hear the right words in order to choose to love myself. Contemplate that.

I have yet to find the bottom of the tragedy that is the loss of a leader like Tupac Shakur, though I often contemplate it. In 2020, Tupac Shakur’s loss feels even more immediate, and when I listen back to his music, all I can hear is the love that he had for his friends and neighbors. A love he must have held close to his chest to keep him warm as he waded into The Great White Fog, which is a vision exercise I think is useful for envisioning how many White People, myself included, experience their true history, heritage, and inheritance.

It is a mass of white fog. I would say it was “smoke” but smoke implies that there is a fire somewhere. A fire. There are many fires within the Great White Fog. And the further you go into it, the more the fog smells of charred skin and husked homes. 

For many White Americans, The Great White Fog is an obscure natural event they are unaware of from which things simply materialize. It’s not immediately apparent to many White people that the discomforts and pains they are experiencing right now made a 400-year (arguably even longer) march through that Great White Fog to get to them because most of us avoid doing the hard work of going into that scary fog ourselves and making its secrets known by looking upon them with our own eyes

Okay, back to Power. This is a meditation on White Power, after all. But, my dear reader, you can start to see the difficulty I’m having in contemplating these issues. They are all intertwined and interdependent. There is no singular “cause” for what’s going on in America right now. The only singular “cause” I can seem to find on my own (and we must not do this alone) is simply this: White People came here to escape religious persecution and many of our laws are based on Christian principles, whether we like it or not. Long before then, White people had been killing and enslaving in the name of God. All people have done so and still do so. It is not a uniquely White trait. It turns out, there’s no such thing as a “uniquely white trait” or a “uniquely black trait.” But I’m getting ahead of myself and the birds are waking up outside my window and telling me to get on with this.

The following is a personal thought exercise to try and clear some of that Great White Fog from my own eyes, and by extension My White People’s eyes. I’m trying to meet those who are still awake to our collective humanity enough for their bodies to know something is wrong but whose minds are trapped by the Great White Fog that Tupac Shakur walked in to for our sake, Black and White alike.

Let it be said that this is also an exercise in catharsis for those who would like to engage with me and start helping the rest of us clear away The Great White Fog.

Okay, enough warm up. Let’s do this painful thought exercise. Pretend for a moment you are me. A young white boy in Hanover, Virginia (remember how I said I was born and raised in Richmond? What I really should say was, “My family had the means to move to the suburbs shortly after I was born because they felt the public schools in Richmond were insufficiently funded and poorly run so they did what any parent who is able would naturally do only now I know it as a symptom of the system we are all a part of. More on White Flight later). Again, this is just supposed to be a meditation on White Power.

Okay, like I said, picture you’re me. Take my body and inhabit it for a moment. It is yours. You are a white boy living in the idyllic suburbs of Hanover, Virginia. Your neighborhood is called Kings Charter. You yourself live on Kings Charter Drive. Your best friend lives in a beautiful historic home across the street with a magnolia tree and a roundabout and a golden retriever named Bogey. It is your best friend’s home around which the entire neighborhood was built, a bit like a nucleus. And the history of this nucleus? Allegedly, according to the sleepover whisperings of my best friend, the house was a civil war hospital and was haunted by a boy who died in the basement after succumbing to some disease. The ghost was the reason none of us boys were allowed out of the bedroom after dark. Can you feel the joy? The excitement of sleeping in a haunted house next to your best friend? That’s what it was to grow up as a white boy and if that kind of experience is new to you, know my mission in life is to tell more ghost stories next to more best friends. You can be my best friend, and I will lay beside you all night and help you feel the gratitude I have for my childhood and my friend. More on him later.

Also, I doubt there was a ghost, but I do wonder now what was in that basement. Probably nothing serious. Some old planks and a dresser that didn’t quite fit any room. Eventually, I did open the basement door a few times and peek in, but I can’t remember what I saw so it must not have made much of an impression. My best friend throughout my childhood was, after all, not White but Lebanese. And what a pleasure and joy that was to not open that door and find a table covered in viscera and torn clothing.

But enough about the people I love and miss and the ghosts that live in my basement. This is about White Power and I must stop loving for a moment to do a hard thing and channel a sliver of my old hatred. Okay. Here we go. Remember, you’re a white boy who lives in a dreamland of prosperity built on basements full of ghosts. Obviously, I had this eloquent vocabulary my entire life. I walked from the womb writing essays. So imagine you possess this vocabulary as well (because, in reality, you do since this is a nation obsessed with religious thinking and ideology whether they know it or not).

“What’s all this? Black Power? That feels wrong. It feels eerie. Why are black people talking about powers? Don’t they see we’re all God’s People and we all have His power? I bet I could walk on water if I believed in God enough. Wasn’t that kind of the whole point of Jesus Christ? The white* embodiment of God if I might remind them? And besides, don’t They see that we are all God’s Children? Don’t They see Their hypocrisy? Oh, but isn’t that just the way of The Devil? Whisper to us and tell us we are uniquely powerful when, in reality, we are all powerful.

Maybe I have White powers. Mmm. Yummy. White Power. So inspiring. I just love saying that. It seems to say I have inherited “powers” that are somehow simply a natural result of my skin color.”

What’s happening here isn’t a miscommunication on the Black Community’s part, but a child’s inability to make sense of the world and a family unwilling to address the issues of race directly (for now).

Okay, now pretend it’s the next morning and you’ve woken up next to your best friend. Let’s call him Jobin. It’s Sunday and Jobin’s woke up before you and he’s already pulling on his church shirt and looking for his clip-on tie. They’ve offered to bring you along, but church is so boring and terrible and the crackers suck so you make an excuse and run out the front door, back across the street, and back to your White Home to play Dragon Ball Z Budokai on your Playstation 2.

Now, imagine you’re a few years older, and maybe you hear someone mention Black Power. Maybe you just watched your favorite VHS: Forrest Gump and you’re really wondering what those angry Black People were yelling at Forrest about. Black Power? Was that it? So you begin to think again, because you are a Homo Sapien, a wise human. That is your true inheritance. Only, you don’t know that yet. You aren’t quite deserving of the name yet. Right now, you’re more or less Homo Ignoramus: a white teenage boy who still believes in guns and Amurica and unironically said once, to an auditorium full of his High School peers (AND OH MY GOD I JUST REMEMBERED MY HIGH SCHOOL CRUSH PROBABLY HEARD ME SAY THIS), that he wanted to be the American Flag when he grew up. 

Again, the following is just a little dramatization of a little touch of thought crime, so to speak. There’s no such thing as a thought crime, I should say. There’s nothing wrong with thinking things. I think all kinds of psycho coo-coo crazy shit. I once honestly considered trying to apply to Hogwarts and spent an afternoon Googling “Hogwarts Applications.” I’m capable of believing fiction is reality. That’s what it is to be human. However, it’s when we act on it which is the problem.**

By moving through the world with this thought in my mind, I willingly or unwillingly hurt many people. This is a recreation of a thought process that, while I wasn’t able to put words to it at the time, affected me and others nonetheless. By now, you have fallen out with your childhood best friend. He is lost to you, because he possesses a genuine warmth and kindness that you now, in your hormonal ignorance, understand as foolishness. I was the fool. I’ve always been a fool. So, let me do the fool thing and put on a big of a monologue to help you get to where I was back then:

“Want to know what I think about Black Power? Too bad, I’m telling you because I’m a Boy Scout and I went to leadership camp last summer and it was hard because I had to chop wood and do things by myself for the first time and now I know I’m going to do big things but first I have a few things to say. I think saying Black Power is the wrong way to go about it. I wish Black People would be quiet long enough for me to tell them how wrong they are, but they would never listen to me because that’s just how Black People are, in my experience. Which is to say, my non-experience, because I am fifteen years old and have one Black friend in all of Hanover county and I think he could agree with me that I have powers. Only, we don’t hang out all that often and really can I say I have a black friend or is it that I’m just on familiar terms with a black boy that sits next to me in home room? I bet if I talked to him about this, he would naturally agree with me. Because I’m right, so what’s the point of talking about this? Let’s just be past it already. You know what would be cheeky and might save Black People from embarrassing themselves? The next time I hear them say Black Power, I’ll yell back White Power. Yeah. That’ll learn ‘em good. Maybe I should Google White Power and see what comes up. Other people must have thought this first. What’s that? Oh! People have already been trying to remind Black People about White Powers? Awesome where do I sign--oh no.”

The more I think about it, the only True White Power is our ability to deceive ourselves. However, I believe we can hijack our misguided self-deceptions by replacing them with True Things that at first will feel very much like “self-deceptions” because if you’ve been lying your whole life, you forget the flavor of Truth on your lips.

*I really am ashamed that I have to do this but I did not always know Jesus was not white. It took me a long while to learn the image I had in my mind of Jesus was put there by White Men for Their Reasons. I won’t say A Reason. I will say Their Reasons. Because theirs was not A Reason to begin with and it certainly is not My Reason though I still unknowingly carry pieces of their painful fictions within me that influence me to this day. And honestly, the more I think about it, caring at all whether Jesus was white or black is entirely unreasonable.

** If your ignorance is this kind, childlike sort, I see no problem with not knowing what you don’t know, as long as you’re willing to say you’re wrong after you’ve clicked through six different “Wizarding School” applications and finally realize no one knows (yet) how to make a broom fly much less bear the weight of a 120 pound teenager.