Jabari Asim - We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

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For Liana, for always

Your silence will not protect you.

Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

Who will speak these days,

if not I,

if not you?

Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness

In my childhood home, we were not allowed to call each other liars. It fueled my fathers indignation. Slung with the casual malice that only bickering siblings can summon, Liar! somehow set off a warning beacon, alerting my father wherever he was. A schoolteacher with a reputation for discipline, he wasnt remotely as stern as my friends imagined. But proper speech was an area he patrolled with diligence, and his radar was remarkably sensitive. Lazy enunciation, insults, and vulgarities were the blunders most likely to set him off. Once, in the middle of an argument, I told my brother to drop dead. My fathers admonishment was calmly but pointedly delivered, and even now my ears burn at the memory of it. His catalogue of deplorable lingo was expansive and, to our considerable confusion, unpredictable. Words that hardly raised other parents eyebrows could quickly draw his ire, words like butt , funk , and especiallyinexplicably liar .

No such codes existed beyond our front yard, and the streets presented delectable opportunities to mix it up with the neighborhood kids. We gave as well as we got, diving into the exchange of insults and threats like stragglers in the desert plunging into a sparkling oasis. If we caught someone making an assertion without evidence to back it up, we unleashed our vernacular and let the culprit have it. The local dialect turned youre a liar into you a lie , a contraction I found irresistible despite my fathers prohibitions. I appreciated the way it transformed a person into the very thing they were accused of.

Our lies and tall tales usually revolved around girls or athletic exploits and were only occasionally malicious. They were lighthearted fabrications inspired and shaped by the stories we heard at the feet of our fathers, in barbershops and on front porches, at barbecues and ball games. For black people in the 1960s, even less welcomed as full-fledged members of society than we are today, yarn-spinning presented a rare American ritual in which we could freely participate. Other venerable traditions, like burning our neighbors alive, casting a ballot, or taking communion alongside white Christians, had long been denied us. But lying, now that was an equal-opportunity activity. With roots in stories about Aunt Nancy, Brer Rabbit, and John Henry, our inventions were small-scale variations on the African American experience, more about outwitting the powerful than manipulating privilege at the expense of the weak. Our bluster was closer in style to Troy Maxson recalling his tussles with Death in Fences than, say, Thomas Jefferson arguing in Notes on the State of Virginia that orangutans find black women sexy. Those differences aside, what could be more American than pretending truths were self-evident when they seldom were? What could be more American than dressing up a lie in tailor-made language, like romanticizing treason as a Lost Cause or sugarcoating genocide by rebranding it as Manifest Destiny? As a bulwark against the realities of life in a racist republic, our fictions helped us believe we belonged.

In our world, the consequences of being caught in a lie were usually no harsher than school-yard ridicule or parental discipline. A person could get grounded or put on punishment, as neighborhood parlance would have it. Our falsehoods possessed little power to influence another persons circumstances or alter a destiny, and we understood that their relative impotence stemmed more from our blackness than our youth. Anyone could see that I blamed that broken window on Johnny and he got put on punishment was a far cry from I accused that nigger boy of whistling at me and he got strangled, chopped up, and tossed in the river.

Recently, listening to a white mans story on NPR got me thinking again about untruths and consequences. At age ninety-four, Joseph Linsk disclosed a lie hed enabled when he was eight years old. He stole two dollars to pay off a debt and said nothing when his mother blamed the theft on Pearl, the familys black cleaning lady. She lost her job and was unable to get another because of her tainted reputation. Linsk remained silent and grew up to become a prosperous physician. Years later, he called on NPR listeners to help him locate Pearls family so that he could try to make amends. Carrying the burden of guilt for so long, he admitted, had left him smitten with grief. Such a lovely, complicated phrase. Smitten as in struck down, or as in enamored with? And if Linsk considered himself unbearably tormented, one wonders how he would have assessed Pearls feelings. Im tempted to conclude that Linsk, like too many white Americans, was less concerned with restorative justice than with assuaging his own pain.

When I posted a link to his story on Facebook, friends responses eloquently lamented the long tradition of white lies leading to disastrous outcomes for black people. Yet my favorite comment was the most succinct: Hmph! That single syllable epitomized the tangled web encompassing whites misdeeds and the desire for absolution from the people theyve wronged. The ritual is often seen with representatives from the media thrusting their microphones at traumatized African Americans while their wounds are still gushing blood. Effectively serving as proxies for the white gaze, the reporters demand to know if the unlucky sufferers are ready to forgive their assailants, usually police officers or armed vigilantes tragically warped by delusions of supremacy (see Zimmerman, George). On the periphery, public officials hover uncertainly, trembling like Jefferson considering the prospect of a just God. To take the pressure off themselves, appointees and officeholders place it firmly on their bereaved black constituents by suggesting that healing cannot commence until they indicate their willingness to put the transgression behind them. It would be even more helpful if they could also express faith that justice will be done in court or, failing that, heaven. A forgiving victim who remembers to discourage street protests before pausing to pray for the killer will do more to restore trust than any indictment or conviction ever could. Reviewing footage of several of these predictable ceremonies made me think of an essay Id read by the British writer Hilary Mantel. Oppressors dont just want to do their deed, she wrote, they want to take a bow: they want their victims to sing their praises.

The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other.

JOHN ADAMS

Along with brutality, torture, and murder, a principal step in oppression, American style has long involved getting between the oppressed and their stories. Depending on the circumstances, intervention may involve disputing oppressed peoples versions of events, distorting them or seizing them outright, or renaming and repurposing them. Nurturing the lie at the heart of each method, a maneuver known in some locales as getting it twisted, helps oppressors sustain what Toni Morrison calls the master narrative. When individuals in some African American communities get things twisted, often beginning their tale with What happened was , a popular response is Who I look like? Boo Boo the fool? The question is quickly recognized as a way of announcing ones refusal to be bamboozled, hoodwinked, or misled. But street-level skepticism is one thing; collective willingness to accept the lie of American exceptionalism is quite another. Many descendants of enslaved Africans are no less intentionally gullible than their countrymen in wanting the American traditionand the white men who established itto be uniformly virtuous. For example, we know that more than a century before Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith started writing lies with lightning, the Framers were dipping them in ink and inscribing them on parchment. Despite the dishonesty inherent in their secular scriptures, the disheartening fractions and lies of omission, we want the nations founders to be flawless. We want to believe that one youthful misadventure with a cherry tree was all a typical Great White Father needed to set him on the right path. We want to believe that the original plutocrats were never vain or insecure, that they were never unfaithful lovers or abusive husbands, that they never kept black women in chains and raped them repeatedly, that they never suffered from tooth decay and body odor or knew the heartbreak of psoriasis and regrettable habits. In my old neighborhood this kind of navet was called falling for the okey-doke.