procure land once here, and the ability to own other human beings while knowing that you would never be owned yourself, all depended on European ancestry.
Nonetheless, one might deny that this legacy has anything to do with those of us in the modern day. Unless we have been the direct inheritors of that land and property, then of what use has that privilege been to us? For persons like myself, growing up not on farmland passed down by my family, but rather, in a modest apartment, what did this past have to do with me? And what does your family’s past have to do with you?
In my case, race and privilege were every bit as implicated in the time and place of my birth as they had been for my forbears. I was born in a nation that had only recently thrown off the formal trappings of legal apartheid. I was born in a city that had, just eight years earlier, been the scene of some of the most pitched desegregation battles in the South, replete with sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and the predictable white backlash to all three. Nashville, long known as a city too polite and erudite for the kinds of overt violence that marked the deep South of Alabama or Mississippi, nonetheless had seen its share of ugliness when it came to race.
When future Congressman John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and others led the downtown sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in February 1960 (two weeks after the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s was similarly targeted by students from North Carolina A&T), the modern youth-led component of the civil rights struggle was officially born, much to the chagrin of local thugs who attacked the protesters daily. Someone had apparently forgotten to tell them, as they put out cigarettes on the necks of these brave students, that Nashville was different.
Of course, why would they think it was? Violence had marked resistance to the civil rights struggle in Nashville, as it had elsewhere. In 1957, racists placed a bomb in the basement of one of the city’s soonto-be integrated schools, and a year later did the same at the Jewish Community Center because of the role Dan May—a local Jewish leader and head of the school board—had played in supporting a gradual (and actually quite weak) desegregation plan. Although the bombers in those instances galvanized opposition to outright terrorist tactics, ongoing resistance to integration delayed any truly meaningful movement in that direction until 1971, when busing was finally ordered at the highschool level. It would be 1974, the year I began first grade, before busing would filter down to the elementary level. This means that the class of 1986, my graduating class, was the first that had been truly desegregated throughout its entire educational experience; this, more than thirty years after the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was illegal, and that southern schools must desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” There had been nothing deliberate or speedy about it.
But when it comes to understanding the centrality of race and racism in the society of my birth, perhaps this is the most important point of all: I was born just a few hours and half a state away from Memphis, where six months earlier, to the day, Dr. King had been murdered. My mom, thirteen weeks pregnant at the time, had been working that evening (not early morning, as mistakenly claimed by Bono in the famous U2 song), when King stepped onto the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, only to be felled a few seconds later by an assassin’s bullet. Upon hearing the news, the managers of the department store where she was employed decided to close up shop. Fear that black folks might come over to Green Hills, the mostly white and relatively affluent area where the Cain-Sloan store was located, so as to take out vicarious revenge on whitey (or at least whitey’s shoe department), had sent them into a panic. No doubt this fear was intensified by the fact that the downtown branch of the store had been the first target for sit-ins in the city, back in December 1959, when students had attempted to desegregate the store’s lunch counters.
A minor riot had occurred in Nashville the year before the King assassination, sparked by the overreaction of the Nashville police to a visit by activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), from the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee, who would soon become “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party. Although the violence had been limited to a small part of the mostly black North Nashville community around Fisk University—and even then had been unrelated to Carmichael’s speeches in town, contrary to the claims of then-Mayor Beverly Briley and the local media—by the time King was killed, white folks were on high alert for the first signs of trouble.
That I experienced my mother’s bodily reaction to King’s murder, as well as the killing of Bobby Kennedy two months later, may or may not mean anything. Whether or not cell memory and the experiences of one’s parent can be passed to the child as a result of trauma, thereby influencing the person that child is to become, is something that will likely never be proven one way or the other. Even the possibility of such a thing is purely speculative and more than a bit romantic, but it makes for a good story; and I’ve never much believed in coincidences.
But even discounting cell memory, and even if we disregard the possibility that a mother may somehow transmit knowledge to a child during gestation, my experience with race predated my birth, if simply because being born to a white family meant certain things about the experiences I was likely to have once born: where I would live, what jobs and education my family was likely to have had, and where I would go to school.
On my third day of life I most certainly experienced race, however oblivious I was to it at the time, when my parents and I moved into an apartment complex in the above-mentioned Green Hills community. It was a complex that, four years after completion, had still never had a tenant of color, very much not by accident. But in we went, because it was affordable and a step up from the smaller apartment my folks had been living in prior to that time. More than that, in we went because we could, just as we could have gone into any apartment complex anywhere in Nashville, subject only to our ability to put down a security deposit, which as it turns out was paid by my father’s father anyway. So at least as early as Monday, October 7, 1968—before the last remnants of my umbilical cord had fallen off—I was officially experiencing what it meant to be white.
I say this not to suggest any guilt on my part for having inherited this legacy. It is surely not my fault that I was born, as with so many others, into a social status over which I had little control. But this is hardly the point, and regardless of our own direct culpability for the system, or lack thereof, the simple and incontestable fact is that we all have to deal with the residue of past actions. We clean up the effects of past pollution. We remove asbestos from old buildings for the sake of public health, even when we didn’t put the material there ourselves. We pay off government debts, even though much of the spending that created them happened long ago. And of course, we have no problem reaping the benefits of past actions for which we weren’t responsible. Few people refuse to accept money or property from others who bequeath such things to them upon death, out of a concern that they wouldn’t want to accept something they hadn’t earned. We love to accept things we didn’t earn, such as inheritance, but we have a problem taking responsibility for the things that have benefited us while harming others. Just as a house or farm left to you upon the death of a parent is an asset that you get to use, so too is racial privilege; and if you get to use an asset, you have to pay the debt accumulated, which allowed the asset to exist in the first place.
If you think this to be unreasonable, try a little thought experiment: Imagine you were to become the Chief Executive Officer of a multibillion dollar company. And imagine that on your first day you were to sit down in your corner-office chair and begin to plan how you would lead the firm to even greater heights. In order to do your job effectively, you would obviously need to know the financial picture of the company: what are your assets, your liabilities, and your revenue stream? So you call a meeting with your Chief Financial Officer so that you can be clear about the firm’s financial health and future. The CFO comes to the meeting, armed with spreadsheets and a Power Point presentation, all of which show everything you’d ever want to know about the company’s fiscal health. The company has billions in assets, hundreds of millions in revenues, and a healthy profit margin. You’re excited. Now imagine that as your CFO gathers up her things to leave, you look at her and say, “Oh, by the way, thanks for all the information, but next time, don’t bother with the figures on our outstanding debts. See, I wasn’t here when you borrowed all that money and took on all that debt, so I don’t see why I should have to deal with that. I intend to put the assets to work immediately,