- count; computation; calculation
- an accounting, as for things received or done
- a settlement of accounts; a day of reckoning
- an itemized bill or a statement of an amount due
1.
count; computation; calculation
I used the word reckoning on the phone with Marlene in Brooklyn before I heard it bandied about on the news. She and I have been counting and recounting racial incidents since 1990 when she invited me to be godmother to her son Travis. We’ve talked about what Travis goes through as a young Black man in American: being racially profiled when he drives, harassment on the street and at school. We talk about the microaggressions Marlene experiences at work, her daughters’ distresses, the terrifying night her husband was beaten bloody by white Brooklyn policemen: her husband handcuffed on the ground in a dark parking lot in Flatbush, the thumps and thuds and grunts as the cops beat him with batons and flashlights, and Marlene, restrained by a female officer on the far side of their car, helplessly screaming, Don’t kill him! What are you doing? Are you just going to kill him for no reason?
Every assault, emotional and physical, metaphorical and literal, public and personal, recounted one by one by one over thirty years.
In the beginning, when Marlene first invited me into her family, I believed America was past this sort of racialized violence. My white ignorance allowed me to think that. Three decades later, I recognize the lie at the heart of that ignorance.
I live in Oklahoma now, so we have to reach across miles to do it, but our count continues, seemingly endless, like counting stars. But I’d never heard the kind of despair I heard in her voice that day. It was the morning after the killing of George Floyd and the viral video of the white woman in Central Park calling the cops on the Black man who’d asked her to leash her dog.
“It’s getting worse,” Marlene said. “You can’t know what it’s like, Rilla. What we go through every day.”
“I know,” I said. “I mean, I know I don’t know.” And I don’t, not in the same soul-killing way. I’ve stood witness to the assaults Marlene and her family go through, never suffering the same kinds of assaults myself, because my skin color is not a marker for suspicion and violence and death.
“I cry every time I watch it,” she said. “I know there will be more deaths like this. It’s getting worse! I don’t know what to do!” Watching the slow, torturous murder of George Floyd caused her to relive watching white cops beat her handcuffed husband; her grief and anguish were beyond bearing, choked and plaintive and sorrowful, to the very heights and depths of the world. And yet she couldn’t not watch.
I knew the details of the video, had seen the still photographs, the white cop’s nonchalant gaze as he crushed the life from the Black man on the ground, but I could not bring myself to watch. Nine minutes and 29 seconds eking out in real time the nightmare of our nation’s history. I think about that now. I couldn’t watch, and Marlene couldn’t not watch, and this delineates as clearly as anything just how our lives are corralled on either side of the racial divide.
This, then, is part of my computation, one small item of my privilege: I can choose to avert my eyes if I want. I can tell myself it would be voyeuristic to watch that slow, tortured death, I’d be like those white faces turning toward the camera in old postcards of lynchings. I tell myself it’s more respectful not to watch. But Marlene has lived this same white-on-Black violence, she has cried out to white cops to stop murdering her husband, she’s watched her son arraigned in criminal court for the crime of being a young Black man who looks, to white eyes, like any other young Black man. In uncountable ways, overt and covert, Marlene and her family live it every day. They don’t have the choice to turn away.
What I did not turn away from that day was the video of the white woman in Central Park calling 911. I watched it over and over. “There’s an African American man threatening me!” The woman’s fake strident fear, her rising hysteria, the very use of the term African American — such a privileged, middleclass Caucasian thing to do. She knew precisely what she was doing, and yet she would have said then, and indeed did say afterwards, I am not a racist.
That white woman is the one I write about in fiction and nonfiction; she’s the one I know from the inside. I hear her voice at book clubs and church socials, in line at the grocery store. I don’t see color. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. She’s embedded in white America, whether we want to claim her or not. She’s embedded in me.
She’s the one I need to recognize, and own, and cut away. It seems to be taking a lifetime.
This, too, is part of the count.
A few days later, as Black Lives Matter demonstrations roiled across the country, Marlene and I spoke again. This is when I first used the word. “Maybe we’ve reached a tipping point,” I said hopefully. “All these white people marching in the demonstrations. Maybe we’re finally really reckoning with this stuff.”
I wanted the marches to be authentic, not performative, not a passing got-woke fad but evidence of the deep, true racial reckoning the country has needed. I’m not sure I believed it, even then, but I hoped it could be true. To my small white hope that day, Marlene answered nothing. Whatever I wanted those marches to be, I believe she knew better.
2.
an accounting, as for things received or done
“So let me ask you this,” my friend Catherine said one roiling day in midsummer — yes, that same summer: the summer of the pandemic and the ascendance of Black Lives Matter and the wrenching open of our superficially scabbed wounds. “What do you think will actually shift white consciousness?”
That white consciousness needs to be shifted is a given in our conversations. That it equates with white supremacy, fear, implicit bias: all givens too. Catherine writes about the African diaspora and Black culture and consciousness, and I write about white consciousness and bias, not in theory but in memoir and fiction, and we were colleagues at Oklahoma’s flagship university, where racial scars run deep as the bloodred soil in this part of the state. I fumbled around on the phone, offered something about love being the only force I know of that can really change people — but love alone sounds so sentimental and inept. So I told a story. And Catherine told one. In my story, white consciousness is changed. In hers, not so much.
“What’s the difference?” Catherine said.
In my story a white woman goes into Black spaces. She loves a Black child and becomes a part of that child’s family. In Catherine’s story, a white woman loves a Black child but raises the child inside her white world. We talked about this paradox: that white bias isn’t simply about skin color, though in white folks’ shamed hearts we believe that it is. But we are perfectly capable of loving or liking or admiring an individual Black person — a grandchild, athlete, music star, coworker, friend at church — and still loathe and fear, often unconsciously, Black America itself.
I know I was conditioned as a child to react to skin color, to see Black people as different, alien, an unknowable “they.” I’ve tried to describe this to Catherine, but I can’t pinpoint specific moments. Who taught me? When? How? I want to trace back the words, recreate them so I can own them, repudiate them, but it’s like trying to grasp air. If I cannot remember the precise ways white supremacy was instilled in me, how can I make an account of things received or done?
The time and place where I grew up, Oklahoma in the 1960s, was little different from the old Jim Crow South: we were radically separated. White people did not live in the same neighborhoods as Black people; we did not shop in the same stores, play in the same parks, swim in the same pools, attend the same churches, eat in the same restaurants, drive the same streets. Our lives intersected at no juncture that I can recall, except the hallways at our high school.
And yet most white folks I know from those days would swear ours was not a racist town, we loved our Black athletes, we never had any racial trouble: we were not like the Deep South. They would truly believe this, despite reality. One of the deadliest white assaults on a Black community in the nation’s history, the Tulsa Race Massacre, took place only fifty miles and fifty years away, and we knew nothing about it — and this is only the tiniest part of what we didn’t know. And still don’t.
Once, when Catherine and I were talking about how the reckoning has got to be white folks’ work, white folks’ journey, I said, “Yes, and reparations are important, I absolutely believe in them, I know nothing will change until we make restitution. But reparations aren’t going to change things if we don’t do the internal reckoning. White folks have got to own the whole truth, we’ve got to understand in our hearts what’s been done here, and our part in it.”
Catherine laughed. “Believe me,” she said, “there won’t be any reparations unless that happens first.”
Then we both started laughing, because we both know white folks won’t be turning loose of any money unless there’s a deep soul turning first.
I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? It’s true.
3.
a settlement of accounts: a day of reckoning
I tell my white friends I’ve been grappling in new and deeper ways with slavery as America’s origin story. Yes, we know slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples are the nation’s original sins, and I’ve long thought of it that way, but this wrestling now feels different, more acute and wretched, though it’s hard to describe what I mean, because there’s no story here—no characters, actions, setting, plot. No event. It’s just me reading, talking with white friends and Black friends, feeling things, watching the news.
I think, how do we settle our accounts? What constitutes our day of reckoning?
In the Baptist churches of my childhood, the preachers talked about “coming under conviction” as the first step on the road to Salvation. You can find similar principles in Twelve Step programs, self-help books, and reconciliation panels, because the process of spiritual regeneration seems to follow a certain path.
First comes the awakening, the acknowledgment, the “coming under conviction” about one’s own responsibilities, or defects of character, or, if you will, sin.
Next comes repentance, the turning away from that defect with knowledge. We have to know precisely, in acute detail, in all honesty, in full ownership, the harm/sin/wrong we’ve committed, and then choose, willingly, to turn away from it.
After repentance comes atonement, amends, actions we take to try to set things right. This includes going to the ones we have harmed and making amends. This includes restitution. This includes reparations. This includes sacrifice. In Old Testament days, it was blood sacrifice. Now the sacrifice is time and money, privilege and treasure. The harmed ones are telling us how to do this — if we’ll listen.
In this path to regeneration, it is only after atonement (read: restitution; read: reparations) that redemption begins. Lots of white folks I know want to skip right to redemption; we’re anxious to put that old stuff behind us, get to reconciliation, forgiveness, peace. We want to reach kumbaya, right here, right now, when we haven’t even fully reckoned the cost. When we’re only just now, just barely, just beginning to take account.
Or are we even doing that? All this time later, and I’m thinking: what have we really accomplished? Who’s talking about racial reckoning now? Besides those who still suffer this country’s racism and racialized violence, that is. Where are the hashtags, the Black Lives Matter profile-picture frames?
4.
an itemized bill or a statement of an amount due
Sometimes I feel as if I carry the whole country inside me: America’s hard history, our promise and guilt. My novels are about this hard history, but not that alone. Maybe being steeped in the King James Bible all my young life gave me a belief in the sins of nations, this notion of collective guilt. Growing up in Oklahoma, where the threads of America’s white supremacist narrative came together in such dramatic and violent ways, gave me awareness of my people’s place in the nation’s collective sins. And by my people I mean myself, my own family, and I mean Oklahomans. I also mean, in general, white folks.
I listen to what white people say: my friends, kin, and others. From even the most progressive I hear words that glide right past reckoning. What we want now is inclusion, equity, a peaceable kingdom, a nonracist culture. We say to the disenfranchised, “Come on in,” but we don’t say, “I’ll move over.” We think there’s room for all of us. We don’t want to give up anything — none of our privileges, perks, hegemony. But I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think we can redeem five hundred years of devastation without personal and collective pain, without sacrifice. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think of what it’s going to take to turn this country. But when I think as an individual, I know there’s work to do on my own.
I consider decades of mindlessness on my part, a lifetime of presumptions and assumptions that are my birthright as a white American. I think of jokes I’ve made, people I didn’t see, others I saw only through the prism of my whiteness. I think of the devastations in Tulsa in 1921, the thefts of land and oil from Natives and freedmen in my home state, how my father worked for Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville and raised us on a paycheck from an oil company born of coercion and theft. I think how my family could not have transitioned from hardscrabble lives as sharecroppers and coal miners to middle class educators and landowners without the privileges of whiteness, the inequities baked into the system. This is only a partial list, only the beginnings of the computation.
The work of racial reckoning belongs to those of us who’ve benefited all these centuries, and this work has to be done before we can begin to get to reconciliation. How do I, personally, reckon, repent, repair? I’m willing for the sacrifice, I tell myself, willing to make restitution through donations and taxes, beginning, most personally and close to home, with reparations for the victims and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I keep returning to the conversation with my friend Catherine that summer of reckoning. I believe in reparations, I told her, but white folks have got to understand what’s been done here, and our part in it.
Believe me, she said, there won’t be any reparations unless that happens first.
