There’s a popular myth that Black kids don’t want to do well in school for fear of being accused of “acting White.” Black kids themselves have insisted that no! No, we don’t accuse good students of “acting White”! Doing well in school is good! The only kids we accuse of “acting White” are kids who are acting White! The myth persists, no doubt because it makes it easier for White people not to feel very bad about starving very segregated Black schools of resources, but there’s something else we might consider here, namely, that no one works harder at “acting White” than White people. The stereotypes of Whiteness we’re trained into from babyhood are more constricting than straitjackets, stifling to our spirits and cutting us off from our humanity: there’s a whole long list of purely human abilities we’re not supposed to have, or even go anywhere near thinking of having.
In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson quotes a Brahmin—a member of India’s highest caste—who had “ripped off my sacred thread,” the sign and symbol of his place at the top of the kyriarchy: “It was a poisonous snake around my neck, and its toxic venom was getting inside of me.” That’s a good way of putting it.
“Common disease is called normal health.” There was a time when, in some quarters, being drunk in the morning and drunk at night, and drunk in the afternoon, was looked upon as the epitome of mature sophistication. As alcoholism has come to be perceived as a disease, most people who drink a lot aren’t nearly as loud and proud about their alcohol consumption as they used to be. Similarly, we had a brief respite, superficial and spotty as it might have been, between the times when being openly, proudly racist was what White people were widely supposed to be—when if you were White and you wanted to be one of the cool kids you pretty much had to be racist—and now, when being openly, proudly racist has come roaring back, together with openly virulent antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, flat-out nastiness toward people who are differently abled or bodied, and a pile of other isms: these things all tend to go hand in hand. They were just hidden and denied (more or less) for a little while. And what can be more intoxicating than that sweet feeling of inherent superiority based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever?
Hate, as we have seen, is also intoxicating, both in the sense of making us drunk and the sense of the root meaning—“toxic.” Hate is poisonous, and it’s catching. We poison ourselves and others with it, and it can harden and shrink our hearts to the dimensions and consistency of a dried pea.
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