talk about awkward.

Today I saw a woman on Oprah at the gym saying that she had never heard the n word, and a black man shook his head. There was also a black woman on the treadmill near him. I laughed along with him and was on my way out. He turned to me and shook his head and said, You can’t tell me she has never heard this word. I shook my head and said, She’s not listening. He kept shaking his head and talking about it and I said, on my way out the door, you know, just be honest. And bolted. Like a scared chicken, not that I know what a scared chicken is like. I could have had a conversation with him! But I literally ran from it. Shudder.

But I had two thoughts about it: she may actually have never heard anyone say it, most likely because she wasn’t listening, but it depends a lot. I’m not making excuses, I’m saying, white people don’t talk about their own racism with one another, unless they are in a community that values racism. But nice white middle-class liberals who think of themselves as patriotic moderates, which seemed like what this woman was, would never cop to their own racism—especially among other women, where niceness is the law of the land. It’s part of what makes racism disgusting and ugly: it is under the table, it is a contract of denial. She really may have never heard it because, most often, anyone who would use it would direct it at a black or brown person, not say it casually in a room full of white people.

Part of what makes racism so disgusting and awful is precisely this secrecy around it: white people don’t talk about racism, people don’t use the term, they don’t cop to it, and they certainly don’t use or discuss it in confrontational or controversial terms. That’s one of the reasons why, at public forums on race, you hear the most insanely racist bullshit—people don’t know where else to bring their stupid ignorant bullshit questions, because we are in denial among one another, as racialized subjects, about what we are trained to think and how we’re raised to deal with our experiences.

It may also be quite different in the South, where racism is more open.

And I could have had this conversation today, but I was scared to. I wasn’t sure I could take it. My inner liberal rose up and I became afraid I would say or do the wrong thing, not showing my solidarity. So I scattered and skedaddled quickly. I’m ashamed of that. It was a shitty thing to do. It is part of the exact same structure. It is the same thing, under variation, as that woman saying with embarrassment, "I live in a nice neighborhood in the suburbs and I've never heard anyone say the word". It is the white liberal version of that kind of denial. I have to work to be willing to have these conversations when they come up, because that's the true stuff. And I dashed.