When White People Pretend

Here’s the problem. An ordinary White person happens to sit beside an ordinary Black person in a public space. The White person notices the two skin colors and thinks, ‘I need to cue this person that I’m not racist. I bet they assume I am.’ The Black person thinks, ‘Here we go again.’

Whatever the White person says, those thoughts show up in their manner. My Black friend, Coach Walters, says that what irks him is how often White people pretend. They go out of their way to demonstrate good will. They are pretending to be what they actually are, a good, well-meaning person. What comes across is pretense, and pretense is ultimately condescension.

My friendship with Coach has taught me the rewards of being my natural self. In America, talking about race is taboo. By breaking the taboo, I lost the self-conscious need to pretend.

Coach and I met when we each attended a gathering set up to discuss race. Afterwards, he and I decided to keep talking.

Through Coach, I learned to keep asking the taboo questions. Respecting my curiosity, he answered according to his natural way of looking at the world. As I gradually turned those conversations into a book, I met more and more of the people in his Black world. I was struck by their universal absence of pretense. They were not trying to convince me who they were. They were natural and with them, I was natural.

There is a chasm between two cultures of ordinary people: those who are Black and those who are White. W.E.B. DuBois called that chasm a veil. The longer Segregation remained the law of the land, the more mythological became ideas about life on the other side of the veil. The more we believe the myths, the more we are stuck pretending.

I know how it feels to be self-conscious and how much better it feels to be my natural self. Let’s drop the taboo. Let’s talk about race. It’s a fascinating subject. In fact, the very idea of separate races is a myth. But that’s another story.