Scar Tissue: An Autopsy
Or:
white wounds
BY SARAH DEYOREO
autopsy: 1) dissection of the body to determine cause of death; 2) a critical examination, evaluation, or assessment of someone or something past; from Greek autopsia: act of seeing with one’s own eyes, from autos, “self” + optos, “seen”:
autopsy: to see from the position of oneself, or, perhaps, to see oneself:
autopsy: a self-seeing.
— Cut 2 —
January, 2020. I ask members of my immediate and extended family, and later two handfuls of my once-close, now more-or-less-distant childhood friends, to think about race. Specifically, I ask them to think about their own race. The word “race,” disembodied, abstract, a concept cleanly cut from love, hands, breath, hearts, does not capture what I ask them to think about. I ask them to think about bodies, about bodies and hearts and hands and eyes—about minds, memories that are connected to bodies, hands, eyes; minds that cannot be cleanly cut from their corresponding senses, from the bodily matter in which those senses reside—and about what “race”—that clunky, cold-syllabled noun, absent of life—does to them.
I ask them a series of questions.
Most of the respondents are white.
Over the following weeks and months, I receive a variety of responses. Silence, non-acknowledgement, is one of the responses I receive. I file it, among the others. The others: aggression, anger, defensiveness, denial, self-denial, admirably elaborate—nay, ingenious—performances designed to demonstrate and convince (them? me?) of innocence, indifference, non-participation, non-complicity. I receive all forms of evasion.
From an extended relative—white, a man—I receive a response, which is really the refusal of a response, which is why I feel justified sharing it here, without his name, without his permission:
Thank you for your questionnaire/census which is pretty fucking arrogant on its face! If you are going to be a real radical you will have to do better! I will be happy to respond to this insult over the next few days when I have some free time!
And, a day later, same man, one who sends me a Christmas gift in the mail each year, and who has a reputation in our family of having been a “real radical” in the 60s:
I’ve decided not to fill out your survey. I will just mention that my father [ ], who wished to a be a big band trumpet player always spoke fondly of smoking weed with his black bandmates...I don’t think your rigid boxes have a spot for him or me!
An intriguing performance. Designed to create a rigid box. The ego, the I, what a relief to be contained! How we love our prisons, our concrete and steel, protectors and containers of things.
I file it.
Too, though, there are other responses that I receive:
From my cousin-in-law, Tony, who grew up in Reno, now lives in Philadelphia, and is the child of two first-generation Chinese immigrants:
I remember when we were children, our neighbor fired his gun and a bullet went through our wall. We were very scared and called our parents who then instructed us not to say anything cause the neighbor was white. We were on green cards then they were afraid that we would get in trouble. I recall frequent jokes where children would slant their eyes, or make fun of our language, food, etc. I remember standing on a street corner holding my mom’s hand when a truck drove by and shouted ‘go back to where you came from.’ I remember sexual stereotypes about Asians have small penises. I mostly used humor as a way of dealing with this, but never really spoke about how I truly feel about these things.
How I truly feel: “When I think about that truck yelling at me and my mom, even as an almost 40 year old grown adult, I still [feel] exactly the same now as I did then.”
From a close friend, a white man about my father’s age, who lives in Kentucky, who is also gay:
By now, any self-respecting liberal leaning person has heard (if not fully understood) the maxim that ‘race is a social construct.’ And so it is, and so it was. ... Being gay may have helped me intuit the truth of race or sexuality as socially built, but it hasn’t kept me from noticing that when I walk through a ‘comfortably’ gentrified neighborhood, go just a bit too far, and then, suddenly, cross an invisible line, all my ‘understandings’ of race evaporate in an instant, and guiltily, I feel afraid.
That racial trip wire is buried deep in my psyche. I didn’t knowingly put it there. It is an inheritance, mostly unconsciously received, but in all honesty, I have not spent a great amount of time or effort trying to uproot it.
That deep wire must run through many hearts.
My friend, Bill, goes on to ask: “What’s the antidote?” Indeed, it is a question I ask myself.
He speaks of Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela; he speaks of spirit, liberation, community, what it is to be human. He says:
If Martin Luther King is any guide, I think it must come in some form of community and spirit. African Americans took the religion of their oppressors and found in it a message of liberation. Desmond Tutu heard a call of freedom in the Anglican liturgy, certainly unintended by the forces of imperialism who authored it. Nelson Mandela tapped into the spirit of being human that could not be confined by a tiny cell or rock quarry on Robben Island.
In my email response to him, I say: “These wounds we are talking about are so deep and so real (in a felt, psychic way) and go so far back, that healing them, and healing from them, sometimes seems almost impossible. But I don’t think it’s impossible, and I don’t think the people you mention—Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and so many others—thought it was impossible, either. I think the possibility of healing, of some kind of reconciliation, of coming together as a community, was/is the motivation for their work.”
/
February 23, 2020. Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old black man from Glynn County, Georgia, is shot and killed by two white men: a father, Gregory McMichael, a retired Glynn County police officer; and his son, Travis. Ahmaud, unarmed, is jogging through the other men’s neighborhood. The other men, who are white, imagine that Ahmaud is a criminal. “Because white men can’t / police their imagination,” writes the poet Claudia Rankine, “black people are dying.” Gregory and Travis, the father-son duo—oh, to be white and male in America—act on the story of what they imagine Ahmaud Arbery to be: a criminal. The story predates all of the actors; they have inherited it the way one inherits a spacious, comfortable house, if one is white. (A centuries-long history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, racial covenants, and discriminatory lending, among other things, has ensured that American homeownership, and therefore home-inheritance, is reserved largely for whites.)
Gregory and Travis McMichael have chosen to live, comfortably, in this house, which cannot tolerate the sight of a black body, running.
The day ends with Ahmaud dead and Gregory and Travis free to return to their comfortable house of white supremacy.
Ahmaud’s father, Marcus Arbery, Sr., has called Ahmaud’s death a “modern-day lynching.” A white CNN reporter, earnest, sympathetic, asks Ahmaud’s father to explain what he means by this.
To lose a son, and then to be asked to perform and explain one’s grief to an audience of white people, so that they, from the comfortable, spacious houses they’ve inherited, which, if we are being honest, are all the same house, can perform their concern and righteous indignation.
“Mr. Arbery, first of all,” says the concerned reporter, “I know it’s been ten weeks but I’m sure that doesn’t make it any easier. Let me just say we’re so sorry for the loss of your son.”
We’re so sorry. What does this mean? What is the purpose of this apology? Who is it for? Who is “we”?
“He had ambitions,” says Ahmaud’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones. “I mean, he had plans. Ahmaud was still young. He had dreams that wasn’t fulfilled.”
/
May 6, 2020. From the comfort of my home in Portland, Oregon—a home I do not own, have not inherited, although I have inherited the silver Mercedes-Benz, now with large dents and a broken, duct-taped window, parked along the street—I learn of Ahmaud’s death, along with much of the rest of the country. Ahmaud’s death is visible and trending because online video has surfaced of his killing: of his being chased down by the McMichaels and shot, an incident that many observe is eerily similar to the killing of the Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012.
“because white men can’t / police their imagination / black people are dying.”
From my comfortable house of whiteness—a house designed to keep me comfortable, safe, at all costs—I do not know what to do with my outrage, my grief, which is also outrage, grief, at what it is to be white in America: it is outrage at myself, at this house I have inherited: a house that is not a real home but that exists nowhere and everywhere, its protection all around me. The question I ask: how to burn it to the ground?
And:
Once the house of whiteness is demolished, what might grow in its place?
A video of the author reading this piece can be found on her YouTube page.
Sarah DeYoreo is a writer and educator living in Portland, Oregon. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in The Rumpus, Propeller, and Entropy. As a white writer and teacher grappling with race, including and especially her own racial positioning, she is trying to contest and dismantle whiteness from within. She sees this work as necessary to any form of reconciliation and cultural healing. She can be reached at sdeyoreo@gmail.com or on Facebook.
