Do you know what white racists call black PhD’s? . . . ‘Nigger!’ — Malcolm X
Just exactly what in the hell is enough? — Gil Scott-Heron
The most significant thing about Malcolm’s quote, to me, is that no matter how far I get in life I will always be reminded of it; that I will not be allowed to forget it, as long as racism remains acceptable, permissible, and excusable by whites themselves, is the significant depth of Malcolm’s question.
Today I had a dentist appointment to get my teeth cleaned, for the second time since I have been here at a Research 1, small-town university in the Inland Pacific Northwest. I have been to this dentist before—a practice that is run by a father and son combo-and the son was cool in his own way. The thing I appreciate about some white folks with no consciousness about race and ethnicity issues, is that they are not constantly trying to relate to non-white folks on the level of race and ethnicity. I appreciated that about the son.
Today I returned to this dental practice for a cleaning that I had put off long enough, and was greeted with a sense of familiarity, as I proceeded to check in. The walls were a bone color. The floor was composed of gray tile, so as to reflect an absence of color. The officiates wore white jackets, in command of their space.
After filling out some paper work (on a clipboard the size and shape of a big white tooth) to update my personal information, I waited about 10 minutes before I was seen (the place was not busy at all).
A technician, a young white woman who is probably in school for Dentistry, called my name and led me to the plastic-covered chair (in a small, enclosed space, with a view of the outdoors: to a person sitting in that chair, this view presented a possibility) where I would receive my teeth whitening.
We exchanged small talk and had some common knowledge about the workings of the music dept at this university and we both agreed that most of the people there are self absorbed and “snooty” as she stated. I didn’t feel an impulse towards anything more than cool chit-chat. Small talk.
She proceeded to ask me what I studied and I told her that I was a Jazz musician trying to obtain an Interdisciplinary PhD in Cultural Studies, which is the short and quick answer, as opposed to the long and explanatory answer about the three areas of study I am pulling from. At this point we were chillin’, she did her job and made the prelude to the cleaning pleasant.
About as pleasant as something like that can be for a Black Man who is under the total subjection of these white people, in their white office, wearing their white coats. After the technician had finished, the dentist appeared. I didn’t recognize him and frankly, did not know him. At the moment he had his first foot in the doorway, he proceeded by asking me
“How are the kids?”
I looked at him and thought, “who does he think I am?”, but before I could finish that thought, It hit me that I look like his other regular black dental patient.
I didn’t answer him. I knew I was in for a ride, and a ride we took—in his Dental office, and right now, hours later, my mouth is still sore from this ride—and, because I paid for it, I was his chauffeur.
And remember how that view of the outdoors presented a possibility: well it was now possible that I would be trapped in that small space—looking outside, sitting in a small chair-looking outside, and listening to him talk about me, to me, and outside of me—while I looked outside at a world that keeps me on the outside.
After his first dumb-ass statement, the good doctor went on insisting that he knew me; me steadily thinking no, you don’t. He approached the chair. They stood above me. The white male doctor on one side and his white female assistant on the other. I lay there. Stretched out, as if I were lying on a gurney, awaiting their examination and penetration of my apparently invisible body. The doctor prepared himself. He arrange the tray of instruments. The technician had prepped my teeth minutes before. The good doctor adjusted the chair with a touch of the button-like a conductor in front of an orchestra—and I was being lowered back in that big, plastic-covered chair.
See, the interesting thing about this first Etude baring the title “Counterpoint in F” is that the key of F Major on the piano contains one black note. This black note is commonly called B flat (Bb). It is the fourth note in the series of notes that comprise the F Major scale. In European music, generally speaking, the fourth note of a Major scale is considered a tension tone. A non-harmonic tone. Not in harmony with the
others. A black note sowing dissonance within the white-note consonance of an F Major triad. See, the good doctor’s positioning of his body and conducting the movement of the chair, was only the first couple of bars of what would become a fugal explosion of racist themes, sending counterpoint, conducting his contrapuntal bullshit my way.
The Doctor asked what I did at the university. I told him I teach Black Studies, and am a Jazz musician as well, that I’m trying to pursue a doctorate.
He said with an approving attitude—you know, that attitude when whites give you their unsolicited blessings to make it official—”you are a well versed young man.” He continued to discourse:
“You know what they say? If you speak three languages you are trilingual, if you speak two languages you are bilingual, and if you speak one you are American.”
On the way back, I raised my head slightly and responded to his sweeping generalization
“Well sir, I’m Black in America, so I must be bilingual.”
He lowered chair back until my head was almost upside down, and responded to my statement by saying, “No, that means you don’t speak a language”
At that moment, before I could come back at him, he put his hand in my mouth. I couldn’t say anything. I mean, he is just a dentist, right, with sharp tools, that can prohibit speech, right. Can he not remove organs from my mouth that that can prevent me from talking? I am just Black in America; according to him I don’t need talk, because I cannot speak any discernable language.
Thank God for The Bell Curve for his evaluation of my ‘(en)culturedness’ and inability to speak a language. His hand remained in my mouth. The doctor proceeded to clean my teeth, excuse me, to whiten my teeth.
After a few minutes of diligent cleaning, he stopped and said, “You know, Blacks are taking over everything: music, sports, entertainment, but you all are only left out of a couple of areas.”
I immediately felt this sickness to the gut of my being, right to the very core of who I was becoming less of in that chair. Stretched out, laid back, and powerless. Why is it that we are always perceived to be “taking things over?” I cannot help but think of how that a statement, like the one above, coming from a white person reveals more about their consciousness of their own invested power than anything else. I responded with as much firmness and coolness as I could manage to maintain:
“Well that is not true. I mean, blacks, people of color are increasingly becoming visible in areas, but it is only an illusion constructed to have the appearance of racial ‘progress’ in America, while the real issue is the ownership and exploitation of these blacks by white males, who are the owners of the corporations that allow blacks in those areas.”
The Dentist contested:
“Well it’s obvious that blacks are more talented than anybody else and they are better entertainers.”
He busied his hands again, cleaning/whitening my teeth. He subsumed my firmness, applying it to my mouth. My coolness became his coldness. More pressure. I tensed up. He applied more pressure. I assume that anybody else would have thought about the sharp-ass object in their mouth and might have resigned not to argue anymore.
But I am at a point where I am sick and damn tired of goddamn white people fucking with me and the rest of us about any little goddamn thing. Will I ever be allowed to be a man? A human being? More pressure. I think I feel a rope around my neck. The dentist stopped and said, “Everybody knows it, you all are better entertainers and athletes, but you all are left out of some arenas.”
I replied: “because you perceive that we are ‘left out’ of some arenas, points to the fact that history, in this country, has been written and constructed with the aim of making powerful white people appear rational, giving, kind, and courteous; now you can say that you all have done a lot for the Black race and I don’t buy that. What about the fact that there are at least 50 CEO’s in this country that earn up to 20 times more than the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of a 100 Third World countries? What about the starving people of color in this country? This country was built on domination, exploitation, and plain ole’ racism. And this country is continuously dominating, exploiting, and pimping Jamaica, Mexico, and other Third World countries in the world.”
This went on for a few seconds, even though writing it down lengthens it. The dentist cleaned some more. He dominated me. I thought about my ancestors who were lynched, raped, murdered. Who were as physically close to the hateful people who ended their lives as I was now to this white man who obviously had hatred for me in his heart. His increased the pressure on my teeth, as if he was tightening a noose around my neck. His white hand returned from the outside of me to the inside of my mouth. Would it take his loose hand, physically, inside my mouth to silence my resistance?
Again, he stopped and tried to agree with me, stating that he did not agree with the exploitation of anybody. Okay, a rich racist trying to sound less rich and racist. Yet he gave me this example from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article summarizing that “Ætna bought out our dental company for $5 billion and the CEO took $998,000,000 from the deal. And people are complaining that we charge $700 for a crown.”
His voice went quiet on that note-but the noose got tighter-because I was complaining earlier that paying $700 to have proper teeth was too much damn money. And what about the people who can’t even afford to set foot in a Dentist office? The entire time we were having this conversation I was looking at him with a gaze of death.
At one point I wished he would drop dead and cease his “worthless muthafuckin’ existence” as Gil Scott-Heron so eloquently put it. The white woman was by now standing back, with a sense that the doctor was wrong and his “behavior” was “out of line” and this, that, and the other. This doctor finished my teeth and ceased to argue with me anymore. I guess his hand had pulled all of the resistance out of me.
The doctor got up out of his high chair, finished with my teeth, and, finished with me, he took off his gloves—which he probably took to the outside trash dumpster himself and burned on site. He shot a parting glance in my direction, and then he turned away, saying,
“Gotta keep those teeth white, you are an entertainer.”
I said, “No, I ain’t no entertainer.”
He said, “Oh yes, you are a talented black man and you are an entertainer.”
I moved the technician’s hands off me—she was removing the white towel from around my neck, metaphorically placing her noose around my neck-and I looked at him and said
“I am not an entertainer, I told you what I do and I don’t shuffle.”
He said, “Oh yes you are.”
He walked out of the room. This jive-ass dentist was smiling as he took the last word and walked out the door. I could only smile with my head down to keep from crying.
The white female technician turned to me in an effort to excuse her boss’ racism, saying “I am sorry, he doesn’t think before he speaks sometimes.” I wonder, did the white women who attended public lynchings say, to the families of the lynched, “I am sorry, they cannot control themselves; excuse the boys, they get carried away with their ropes:” or “they don’t think before they hang’em.”
Probably not.
I turned to the white woman—who might even be taking a Women Studies course right now and identifying with Second Wave Feminisms—and said, “no, he doesn’t think at all and he shouldn’t speak ever.” I left the room. But can I really go outside now? The same outside that keeps me outside the outside? I just had a double noose placed around my neck!
###
[Can people of color] and white folks ever be subjects together if white folks remain unable to hear [our] rage, if it is the sound of that must always remain repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable[?] . . . White rage is acceptable, can be both expressed and condoned, but [our] rage has no place and everyone knows it. —bell hooks
When I leave my house, Nigger!
When I walk on that campus, Nigger!
Before I open my mouth, Nigger!
Therefore nothing I say to or around ignant (ignorant) white people can ever be of note.
Why? Because I am, to that white gaze, a Nigger!
That dentist did not see a human or a student, but an entertainer; more, he saw a Nigger, he saw a modern day ‘coon’ placed on this earth, apparently, in order to simply appease his white ass and everyone else like him-Play Nigger, Play! The fact that he saw me as “well versed” meant nothing more to him other than that being “well versed” made me an Uppity Nigger.
The Dentist was to be able to say anything he wanted to me, and I was supposed to smile, be thankful that he didn’t call me a Nigger, show my pearly whites, while looking up his nasty-ass nostrils, which resemble the allegorical caves of whiteness wherein he remains trapped, unable to see anything but his whiteness. That is to say, he sees nothing.
This Dentist has no idea of the pain I am left with after that exchange; he will never have any idea of the pain that people of color are left with, subjected to, and dealing with while just simply trying to exist every day.
No matter about class privilege (and I am certainly aware of my own, however; I am certainly not suggesting that we forget about it) because the prophetic trajectory of Malcolm’s question pushes through class and cuts to the heart of the white supremacist attitudes that prevail today, prevailed yesterday, and prevail this very fuckin’ hour!
My teeth are white, as is the ideology that this first of several Etudes are concerned with. Why is it that white people have to identify with people of color by declaring familiarity with some aspect of people of color’s cultures? Why is it that whatever people of color are engaged in, it has to be reduced to fun and games by white folks with the exigency being that of them seeking external pleasure? To entertain them? How can we continue any serious discussion surrounding racism? Wherein white folks will first, listen; second, listen; and third, shut up and listen?
What is it about white guilt that leads to the white psyche constructing laudatory racism as positive attributes that are supposed to received as uplifting the Other’s race? Laudatory like the good Doctor—good in the Anglo Saxon sense—reminding me of my inherent rhythm, or reminding me that my teeth should be white, or that we “are taking over.” I am surprised that he didn’t ask me about soul food recipes, or how to grow watermelon. But of course, the doctor might tell me that eating soul food might be bad for me and my pearly whites, since black people are prone to high blood pressure and don’t take care of their teeth.
How can we exist together—as hooks asks in the quote above—with white people, if they are not ready to hear the truth? The truth as it needs to be heard would have to consist of the cries, the laughter, the hollers, the screams, the moans, all of which constitute audible pain from racism that will phonically inscribe, upon the white psyche (_phonic inscriptions on the Black psyche having already taken place on the slave ships, on the plantations, in the ghettos, in the stores where we hear footsteps of those whites who follow us, the charges of Malcolm X, the sheets of sound emanating from Coltrane’s horn_), songs of rage, chants of rebellion: hollers cutting across the white “Nods that Silence” with in yo’ face lyrics:
I am tired of being yo’ NIGGER!
Works Cited
hooks, bell. “Militant Resistance.” Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Holt, 1995. 8-20.
Malcolm X. “Icarus.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. New York: Ballantine, 1964. 306-31.
Scott-Heron, Gil. “Enough.” Evolution and Flashback: The Very Best of Gil Scott-Heron. RCA, 1999.
Uttal, Lynet. “Nods That Silence.” Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 317-20. |
