On my way to retrieve my coat I’m paused in the hallway in
someone else’s home when a man approaches to tell me he thinks
his greatest privilege is his height. There’s a politics around who is
tallest, and right now he’s passively blocking passage, so yes. But
greatest, no. Predictably, I say, I think your whiteness is your
greatest privilege. To this, he pivots and reports that, unlike other
whites who have confessed to him they are scared of blacks, he is
comfortable around black people because he played basketball. He
doesn’t say with black men because that’s implied. For no good
reason, except perhaps inside the inane logic of if you like
something so much, you might as well marry it, I ask him, are you
married to a black woman? What? He says, no, she’s Jewish. After a
pause, he adds, she’s white. I don’t ask him about his closest friends,
his colleagues, his neighbors, his wife’s friends, his institutions, our
institutions, structural racism, weaponized racism, ignorant racism,
internalized racism, unconscious bias—I just decide, since nothing
keeps happening, no new social interaction, no new utterances from
me or him, both of us in default fantasies, I just decide to stop tilting
my head to look up. I have again reached the end of waiting. What
is it the theorist Saidiya Hartman said? “Educating white people
about racism has failed.” Or, was it that “hallways are liminal zones
where we shouldn’t fail to see what’s possible.” Either way, and still,
all the way home, the tall man’s image stands before me,
ineluctable. And then the Hartman quote I am searching for arrives:
“One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about
the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is
the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and
the future, are not discrete and cut o from one another, but rather
that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost
common sense for black folk. How does one narrate that?” Her
question is the hoop that encircles.