I walk into a well-known Newburyport restaurant accompanied by a young black man, whose family are close friends of my family. There is sudden silence as people turn and stare. Stare at what, I wonder? I look at my companion. Do you see what I see, I ask? He nods and smiles, obviously used to these occurrences. I am not. What piques their interest, I wonder? And then I realize what the stares are about.
At first, I am shocked. In this day and age, people are actually surprised to see an older white woman and a younger black man about to have brunch together? Could it really be because he is black and I am white? Is it so odd that two such different people could be friends, or even relatives? Then I look around again and realize that in this very white enclave, only 40 miles from a major city, in a crowded restaurant full of people who have come for Sunday brunch, my companion is the only person of color in the room. Is that what people are staring at? A person of color who looks out of place in their overwhelmingly white community? Don’t black people inhabit larger cities like Lynn or Boston? Do they even indulge in brunch?
My mind races as the stares continue and the waitress arrives to fill our water glasses, looking a bit nervous as she does so. After a short time, which seems far longer than it actually is, the conversational buzz resumes and people turn toward their table companions and away from the spectacle that has captivated them, attempting to shed their discomfort. What is this discomfort about? It couldn’t really be about us, since there is obviously no external danger here…
And then it hits me. The danger is not external, but internal. Their discomfort is grounded in racial attitudes learned before they were old enough to recognize them. It’s a discomfort born of cultural training that defines white people one way and black people another. And this training happens before we become conscious of these attitudes. Before we understand what we are thinking. Our attitudes submerge themselves underneath the conscious part of our psyches, directing what we see and how we behave. This internal discomfort is dangerous to people whose color separates them from the majority, but it is equally dangerous to us.
The American writer, James Baldwin, has a name for this discomfort. He calls it “innocence.” It is an innocence grounded in fear, the basis of which, he writes, is a loss of identity.
A unique part of American identity is based on the disjuncture between white and black identity. To claim our white identity, he says, we must divorce ourselves from black people. If we don’t, we risk being absorbed into a giant amalgam, a fusion with “the other” that threatens our existence. It threatens who we are and who we have always been; it threatens our superior status in society; it takes away our value, a value which is, sadly, dependent on having an “other” to outcast so we may continue to belong to the inner circle of society.
And of this deliberately cultivated “innocence,” Baldwin says we: “do not know it and do not want to know it.” And yet we are responsible for holding it close, maintaining the separation between black and white to retain our identity. It is a civil war which extends inward as well as outward. That’s why a young black man and older white woman, walking together into a local restaurant on a Sunday morning, are stared at — with surprise by some, with hostility by others. But with consciousness by few, if any, of the source of their stares.
Baldwin exhorts the reader to transform the anger generated by these conditions into an understanding of the struggle in which the white community is embroiled; to accept white people with love; to banish their innocence and replace it with awareness; to aid them “to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, to make America what America must become.” And, I might add, to create an America that has not yet been.
Prof. Lois Ascher
Newburyport resident
Passionate about a local issue? We want to hear from you. Check out our submission guidelines.
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Leave a Reply