Periracial

The final essay from Kim McLarin’s Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed, coming in November

When a White person says he or she is sick and tired of hearing or thinking or talking about race, I want to cackle and caw and roll on the floor shrieking with hysterical, life-altering laughter, and also to haul my aging bones to the nearest window, crank it open, climb to the sill while unfurling my homemade blue wings like a character in a Toni Morrison novel and just . . . leap. I want to do these things because the statement is just that funny and just that absurd and just that obscene and just that ridiculous and just that maddening. You’re sick and tired of hearing about race? You’re sick and tired of hearing and talking and thinking about race? Hahahahahahahahah!

How the fuck do you think we feel?

Imagine this. You live in a building, a big building, vast and imposing and somewhat grand if also a bit inelegant. Imagine you live on the bottom floor, where the pipes leak and the concrete chips and the garbage sometimes piles in the hall and sometimes you protest but for the most part you and your people live with it because it is what it is and anyway what choice do you have? The higher floors are nicer, you know that much; no rats running around up there. Maybe you’ll get up there some day, but, in the meantime you just live.

Imagine one day when you’re fourteen or fifteen you go into the basement and discover that the foundation is rotting, crumbling like a termite-infested stump. You’re not the only one who sees this; an old man from your floor tells you it’s been that way as long as he’s lived. An old woman says it’s been that way from the beginning, that from the start the foundation was bound to deteriorate because it was made of cardboard and cigarettes, of tobacco and sugar cane, of hair and teeth and blood and bones. You start trying to alert people to this problem. Many of the people on your floor know about the problem; many, but not all. Some shrug it off, some focus on moving higher, some have tried to do something or at least warn all those above. But the higher up you go in the building, the more people either ignore or deny the problem.

You spend the next forty-odd years of your life talking about the foundation, believing that if the people above knew what was happening, they’d surely do something, if not for the sake of the people on the bottom floors, at least for themselves. You talk and talk and talk, but every conversation is like starting all over again. What are you talking about? What foundation? What do you mean? Even people on the midlevel floor on which you now live get sick of hearing about the foundation eventually. Can’t you talk about anything else?

When you visit the top almost nobody wants to hear about the rotten foundation. They say you’re imagining it or flat-out lying, that you’re either bitter or scamming, or possibly insane. Not everything is about the foundation. They refuse to even go look at the problem, let alone try to fix it. They’re too busy adding on floors, using materials they’ve stolen from below. They’re too busy redecorating the living room.

It’s a weak metaphor but I can’t think of a better one. I’m too tired.

I was born in Memphis in 1964 (year of the landmark Civil Rights Act), and grew up in that bluesy, beaten, beautiful southern city during the 1970s. When I mention these facts to my students, most of whom have grown up in the Northeast or the Mid-Atlantic or on the West Coast, they brace themselves for stories of violent racism, of pot-bellied sheriffs and skin-ripping dogs. When I tell them that, contrary to their imaginations, the Memphis of my childhood was collaborative and calm, they don’t believe me. When I tell them Black kids and White kids mixed easily from my first day of kindergarten, that my elementary and middle schools were almost certainly more integrated than their own, their mouths fall open. When I tell these students that for the first fifteen or so years of my life race was a fact but not an issue, that I came of age with a sense of hopefulness and progress, that not only did I believe, as a child, that things were getting better, they actually were— they are shocked.

“What happened?” they ask.
“What always happens,” I say. “Backlash.”

Looking back over my sixty years of this American life, I see three cycles of progress and backlash. The first began before my birth and ended in 1980 with the election of You-KnowWho. Progress of a relative, truncated kind began again with Bill Clinton and ended with the backlash election of affable but-deadly George W. Bush. Progress—more than we had quite believed possible, less, in retrospect, than it seemed at the time— with the election of You-Definitely-Know-Who in 2008, ending in the backlash-to-end-all-backlashes in 2017.

So far anyway.

I cried when Ronald Reagan was elected president, knowing, as I did, what it meant for poor people and Black people (though not what it meant to democracy and the middle-class and the environment.) When Baby Bush was elected I cried, though not as hard, knowing what it meant for Black people and poor people (though not what it meant for one million Iraqis, American Muslims or the US economy.) When Trump was running and people said there was just no way a man like that could ever be elected president of the United States, I asked if they meant this United States. When he was elected I cursed and spat and deflated and cursed some more. I did not cry. To quote Baby Bush: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . you can’t get fooled again.

Peri. From Ancient Greek. As a prefix meaning around or surrounding, as in perimeter; near, as in perihelion; or during, as in perinatal. In Persian folklore, peri is a supernatural being descended from fallen angels and excluded from paradise until penance is accomplished. In Finnish the prefix peri means very, or to the core, making perikato mean utter ruin or destruction. Rasismin vie tämän maan perikatoon. Racism will be the undoing of this country / will lead this country into ruin.

Isn’t language fun?

Looking back I can see that I used to believe that writing and speaking and teaching and talking about all
this stuff would make a difference. Would wake people up from their slumber of White innocence and lead them to action. I used to believe that my voice could join the chorus of voices far, far greater than mine, stretching back to Walker and Jacobs and Douglass and Harper and upward through DuBois and Hurston and Wright and Wells and Baldwin and hooks and on and on and help move the needle forward, help tip the boulder over the edge. I used to believe America— stubborn, resistant, willfully innocent America—could grow up and be better than it had been before. I must have believed all that, though now it seems unlikely. Why else would I have bothered all these years?

Bitterness is a potential hazard of advancing years. So is nostalgia. So is delusion. So is sentimentality.

What does periracial mean? Who knows? It’s a word I made up while casting about for a way to capture both the chronic nature of structural injustice and inequity of America and my own weariness. A way to label life under that particular tooth in the zipper of interlocking systems of oppression bell hooks called “imperialist White supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” (What a lot to resist. No wonder we’re so tired!) To capture the endless cycle of progress and backlash which has shaped my one small life here in America during the end of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first. To counter the idea—now largely abandoned but innocently believed for most of my adult life by White Americans on both ends of the political spectrum—that America has ever been postracial.

To suggest that I suspect, at this sad rate, we never will be.