The White Man’s Burden

Ever since James Agee took rich samplings of America’s racial subsoil in the late 1930s for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” other young white writers have tried as he did to untangle the roots of this country’s obsession with color. These penitential pilgrims have enlisted both journalism and scholarship in civic witness against “blood and soil” nationalism--not only the white supremacist triumphalism that has driven or rationalized so much territorial and cultural expansion but also the reactive, racially reparative kind championed by some Indians, Latinos and blacks who’ve dreamed of carving out protected spaces.

Scott Malcomson explores this in “One Drop of Blood” with a depth and acuity beyond Agee’s, perhaps because he was born into some of the racial and spiritual mysteries of a continent that looked pristine to his own westward-trekking, hard-pressed white forebears. Some of Malcomson’s ancestors carried what he calls a “faith-crazed” Baptist belief from colonial Virginia to Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma, commingling their blood with that of Cherokees and former slaves. Malcomson has found the descendants and talked with them. His conversations with them are intimate and arresting, not least because his father was a Baptist preacher who bequeathed an ambivalence about whiteness while raising the family in pastoral venues around the country.

The Malcomsons moved to Oakland in the late 1960s, just as Scott entered adolescence and the curse of race was catching up with what he characterizes as a white California dream of a “raceless” future that depends on denials of racism. The boy who was ready, if any white boy could be, to pioneer the new national frontier of colorful “racelessness” that lies before us felt only helplessness as he and classmates “began to separate, friend from friend, into races--to think with our skins, so to speak, and to act in them--a painful and violent process. These were roles prepared by the American generations that had gone before; the past was forming us, and so we would carry that past into the future. I have never ceased regretting that process, because it diminished each of us.”

He resisted it then and in “One Drop of Blood” he tracks the many-headed monster to its lairs of racial protectionism, drawing us out into moral conversations about experiences like his childhood ones, writ large. Because his own viscera are entwined in the story, Malcomson’s accounts of how whites’ myths of racial belonging were woven--out of encounters with Indians in forests primeval, with blacks on African coasts and Virginia riverbanks and with Mexicans in the often-fatuous deliberations of the California Constitutional Convention of 1849--are moral without moralizing, intimate without self-pity or self-importance and only occasionally, forgivably self-indulgent. He spares us the all-too-familiar ceremonies of willful innocence and remorseful hand-wringing that media moralists and academic ideologues recycle to simulate redemption.

He writes learnedly but not academically, like Emerson’s American Scholar (“Man Thinking”), and as a pilgrim who keeps the faith without imposing a doctrine, weaving threads of historical narrative, reportage, personal experience and cultural speculation into a tapestry of the national obsession with race whose vividness is both jarring and liberating: “America is not a crime scene; it is a place for the performance of a tragic drama” that need not stagger toward the expected sad conclusion. He explains how early 19th century white men, whose fathers hadn’t been allowed to vote, staked claims on “frontier” land and a new social status before law or custom guaranteed it. “The land was ours before we were the land’s,” wrote Robert Frost, and Malcomson makes us know the gnawing insecurities that made racial identity the easiest organizing principle against civic chaos.

The result is a book almost biblical, as ungainly as it is imposing, with lots of “begats” (including Malcomson’s own diffuse genealogy) and long passages that read like Herman Melville’s accounts of the derivation and refinements of sperm whale oil. It’s as messy as America is, but Malcomson’s writing redeems the confusion with commanding flights of moral imagination and poetry.

Most of Malcomson’s historical narratives are well grounded, subtle and prodigiously, if atypically, sourced, eschewing eminent scholars for primary or contemporaneous secondary accounts. He offers a medley of pre-American apprehensions of race back to ancient times, against which some of today’s moralizing seems fatefully misguided. He shows that long before Europeans, who precipitated the primal racial encounters, ever thought of themselves as white, they obsessed about escaping their pasts for new spiritual and economic dispensations--a new Jerusalem, a “New” England and, soon enough, just beyond the Appalachians a newness so vast one simply dropped the word “new” and became past-less, as most Americans still are, to the country’s unending advantage and peril.

But isn’t past-lessness a prescription for racelessness as well? National identities before ours were forged in mythic bonds of “blood and soil,” but Malcomson notes that “the American Revolution was nationalistic without having a nationality,” aiming instead at universality. Set against such pretensions, white settlers’ offenses against Indians and Africans were nightmarish enough to accelerate their own escapism from the shock of their whiteness, whose emergence Malcomson describes in capacious, non-censorious imagery that improves on much of what is now called “whiteness studies.”

The evil that came to be called “whiteness” lay in a dehumanizing thoughtlessness that had less to do with color than with hunger and power: Indians’ color was less important than the fact that they were keepers of the very timelessness and rootedness the Europeans had come to escape; so the newcomers killed them to banish their spiritualism and sacralized landscape, not their color. Only as bloodstained whites’ own market-driven past-lessness faltered on the evidence of its crimes, despoliation and irresolution did they begin to hold dying native cultures in wistful regard: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others showed that whites “vastly preferred living with these Indian ghosts to sharing the country with living Indians.”

Black slavery, too, began more in economic opportunism than in color-charged antipathy, according to Malcomson. Blacks were already enslaved when white colonists bought them from Africans “to solve a labor problem, not to solve a black-white one, which hadn’t existed, as even slavery itself had known no color.” So the individualism that was so critical, so liberating to Europeans in a New World got sluiced into racially walled camps, cheating its own promises with the lie that “human inequality can be ordered in categories of race.”

This is obvious to Malcomson even now in the myth and market of American suburbia, which conjoins our old tropes of individual property, privacy and past-lessness in miniature Ponderosas with split-rail fences out front. It is obvious, as well, in the myth and market of white California, which figures often in this book as the El Dorado of yearnings for clean breaks and fresh starts: Malcomson writes that even California’s conservatism is radical in that it tries to preserve not the past but the obliteration of the past or to save selective, sacralized re-creations of the past, served up by emblematic conservatives like Ronald Reagan. I would add, as Malcomson does not, that tragic misapprehensions of how to escape racism are made also by “anti-racist” liberals who think that equality, like inequality, can be ordered in categories of race. Our misadventures with excessive racial preferences and bilingual education regimes suggest that it can be, but not for long without subverting itself.

Whites’ attempts to escape race consciousness through racial self-segregation prompted analogous nonwhite responses, ranging from efforts at assimilation into “whiteness” to complete self-segregation: Malcomson reexamines the long-standing American impulse to resettle blacks in Africa, expressed by white abolitionists and in directives from Abraham Lincoln as well as in Marcus Garvey’s famous exploits. Colonization “essentially proposed to blacks that they go to a black place so that they could cease being black--so that they could be human like anyone else. . . .” Even “the racial-identity impulse in blues culture”--that is, in the music and lyrics of tragic black yearnings for freedom--reflected an “ambivalence toward personal blackness,” Malcomson writes. Blues “was not so much racially separate as independent of race, even anti-racial, keeping alive ‘a spirit of nonracial humanity.’ ”

Malcomson ranges similarly, if erratically, across early Indian attempts at assimilation in white mission schools; efforts at black “uplift” during Reconstruction and under Booker T. Washington; minstrelsy and its many masks; the Harlem Renaissance; and other templates of our racial politics and culture. The tragedy of racial group-think shadows these accounts; Malcomson even assails the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s “soul killing” of the 1964 Freedom Summer by inviting white college students into harm’s way, “opposing racial thinking with racial thinking” in a cynical gamble that white corpses would attract national attention. And he draws a rather surprising conclusion: “In appealing successfully to the basest and most contemptible of white thoughts--that white people are simply more valuable than others--SNCC had strangled something in itself. It lost track of human unity; it lost contact with any higher power; it had played the white game by white rules, and sold its soul.”

Yet how else could blacks of the early 1960s have disabused the willful white innocence that cast outrages such as slavery and Jim Crow as mere anomalies in an ever-more “race”-free, universalist America? Whites had “abjured every form of hatred except one: a belief that the racial past had no hold on them, that they were free. This was not a form of hatred really. It was just a mistaken self-love and selfish ignorance,” Malcomson writes. The relatively few whites who acknowledged racism at all--from abolitionists to Justice Louis Brandeis, historian Oscar Handlin and the typical 1950s local booster of National Brotherhood Week--easily proclaimed the country’s transcendence of race even as others were setting or strengthening traps for nonwhites in countless daily ways, sometimes with gauzy good intentions.

But must the racial optimists ultimately be proved wrong? At times, Malcomson seems to think so. He visits an aging black pastor who exchanged pulpits with his father in Oakland in the heady days of black activism and finds the Rev. J. Alfred Smith racially isolated, forlorn, “trying not to think too much about old what’s-his-name who somehow got up over the hill to the suburb and has a Malcolm poster in his study and white peers and a good safe public school for his children, and wasn’t this a little triumph for the race? [And now,] on the horizon, dimly, he saw a somewhat new type of white person who liked jazz too and did not think in terms of race; rather, who thought that other people should not think in terms of race, whether about him or about themselves, and therefore when these other people did think that way, they were simply shouting up from a repudiated and irrelevant past and should not be listened to. J. Alfred Smith should not be listened to.”

How does Malcomson think Smith should be listened to? Even if suburbanization is a national blunder, should we disdain blacks who got there by bucking stereotypes? Doesn’t Malcomson’s own diffuse genealogy suggest it’s presumptuous to consign people, by color or surname, to the ministrations of racial tribunes? This book provokes such questions without answering them. As Malcomson’s rich, heavy burden of racial understandings ripens almost unto bursting, he doesn’t quite puncture the skin of our racial self-protection and let them run brilliantly into our newest frontier.

Ernest Renan argued a century ago in “Qu’est-ce Qu’une Nation?” that nation-building involves forgetting as well as remembering. Far from condemning us to race, our past-lessness may dissolve it and, with it, the desperate resorts to race which Malcomson finds among the frightened. Skin color no longer holds cultural meanings aside from those imposed and embellished in oppression. He acknowledges this: “The belief that the United States ought to be a laboratory for the creation of a place where people could be most truly human had been wildly productive and would continue to be so. The new republic celebrated the changeability of individual fortune in a way unknown to human history.” But then he demurs. “We may never know whether an individual or society can actually bear with such an unhinging of the self. This may help us to grasp why race would continue to be so central to white Americans.”

Yet religion has been there and has not always been racially divided; much of today’s Baptists and Roman Catholics show a transracial momentum, the more so as the shifting tectonic plates of our secular culture and economy change everyone’s terms of survival and their cultural tools. Malcomson’s pilgrimage may have taken him too often to racial fantasists, forlorn black pastors and schoolyard memories to let him anticipate George W. Bush’s smooch with Oprah or the havoc the Columbine High School murders have wreaked on old racist conflations of blackness with licentiousness and violence.

“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” Auden wrote in tribute to Yeats. Racially mad America has hurt Malcomson and others of us that way, too. He harvests, winnows and kneads that pain in the bittersweet autumnal bounty of the old Republic, and it’s good that he’s left social science and policy for some other time. Auden was right to add the wintry caution that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but if “the United States are themselves the greatest poem,” as Whitman thought, then good things are happening before even poets, let alone policymakers, catch them.