Narcissism

The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners
by Debra Dickerson

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What is racism but a fascination with oneself?

Why, a seventeenth-century European newly arrived in Africa must have mused, are these odd creatures not pale, not straight-haired, not freckled, not wearing filthy pantaloons, and not praying to two pieces of wood nailed at a right angle? Why are they so unlike me? What's the matter with them? Whites couldn't have been white until they saw someone who wasn't.

Fundamentally, racism and xenophobia are more about self-exaltation than about exploiting others, more about filling the human need to feel special, set apart, and touched by grace, than about hatred. A sixteenth-century European genius perfectly illustrates this need and the ripple effects that ethnocentrism can set in motion across the centuries. Gerardus Mercator solved an age-old navigational problem by devising the map that every schoolchild has grown up with for nearly five centuries. The trouble is, partly for practical reasons but mostly for reasons of cultural narcissism, he built huge distortions into "the world." To better showcase his native Flanders and Europe generally, Mercator inflated and situated the northern hemisphere so as to dominate the map. Africa is dwarfed by Greenland, though it is twelve times larger. South America was pygmyized. Those smart enough to figure out the world were arrogant enough to try to make it over in their own image.

But has there ever been a society that didn't think itself naturally superior to every other? Anthropologist Earl Shorris explains:

"Ethnocentrism was not ... a European invention. Most of the cultures native to the Americas named themselves "the People," as if no others could even be described as human beings. The practice was not limited to any language group.... We know [Native American tribes] ... by the names given them by their adversaries. The Lakotas, Dakotas, and Nakotas are known to us as "Sioux," ... it means "snake" or "enemy." Similarly, the word "Apache" ... meant "enemy," while the word the Apaches ... used for themselves, "Diné," means "the People." [Just as whites had no respect for the native American cultures they encountered, the natives had no regard for whites' culture.] ... [They] thought of the invaders as avaricious individualists who smelled bad; the word for a white in the Lakota language, for example, means greedy (literally, he-who-eats-the-fat)."

Early blacks also thought whites suffered from delusions of grandeur and a preening self-importance. The cakewalk, a dance performed while goose-stepping with arms stiffly outstretched and parading as if observed by adoring millions, was created by Reconstruction-era blacks to send up white ostentation and pretension. Olaudah Equiano, in recounting his capture in Africa and arrival in Barbados, wrote, "We thought ... we should be eaten by these ugly men." Every group thinks itself exalted and all others debased. China considered itself the "Middle Kingdom" between heaven and earth. An American journalist visiting Japan noted,

"Whenever there are warning signs or warning ads in Japan, they always show white people doing whatever stupid activity is being warned about. At the Ueno Zoo, the pictures showing a child crawling into the lion's den shows a Caucasian. Dozens of Japanese kids have died because their moms left them in hot cars when they went to play pachinko. So the pachinko industry launched a huge ad campaign to remind parents not to leave their kids in the car. But all the ads show Caucasian kids! There probably are not 10 Caucasians who have ever played pachinko!"

Unfortunately, the mix of narcissism, technological superiority, and greed spelled doom for that race most unlike, "most inferior to," whites. Centuries later, having refined their narcissism into high art, whites have learned to place themselves, however irrelevantly and distractingly, at the center of any discussion. They anoint themselves not simple citizens but judge and jury.

When confronted with a demand for redress or for a justice-based redirection of societal resources, whites invoke the royal prerogative of their race and change the subject. Like the Old West stagecoach robbers who flipped the road signs to point their victims into the wilderness to be fleeced, whites divert black complaint to the question of whether white approval of the complaint itself will be bestowed. Needless to say, if the complaint doesn't involve German shepherds or fire hoses, if the complainant isn't a saint, racism is unlikely to be considered the culprit. Most maddeningly for blacks, whites refuse to consider complaints on their merits but instead issue their opinion of a complaint, so that it can be dismissed unexamined.

Thus, black complaint becomes a subject-changing round robin of white criticism of blacks. In the 1930s Woodson noted that "few whites of today will listen to the [Negro's] tale of woe." Imagine, then, how little patience whites in the twenty-first century have for black complaint. That impatience is frequently demonstrated. When blacks make demands after police kill unarmed civilians, whites respond by demanding to know what blacks have done to improve themselves.

Note the assumption that whites need no improvement and that they get to judge blacks' civic fitness to be allowed to complain. Second, arguendo, let us posit that blacks have done nothing toward self-improvement; is indolence then a police license to kill? This implies that while blacks are societally abused, until they surmount the Everest of white approval, their abuse will justifiably, if regrettably, continue. How else will blacks ever learn?

Blacks claim that their schools remain segregated and underfunded, leading to decreased educational opportunity, and they demand educational affirmative action. The white response: Why do all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria?

This question is really a denunciation of blacks as unworthy of societal effort, of blacks as the "real" racists. Access to the good things in life is wasted on them. Whites never notice the all-white tables that usually outnumber the all-black ones, because white behavior is beyond minority critique (and because, when it's them, the silliness of this "critique" is apparent). Black comment on white behavior is still uppity, but that these days uppityness will find blacks only dismissed rather than hanged is undeniable progress.

The velvet rope of white privilege dangling before their eyes fascinates too many post-movement bourgeois blacks; instead of finishing their rhetorical meal at the table of their choice, they make a mental shuffle off to the margin, where they dance for white approval and cringe whenever a black commits a crime or loses a job. No better are the bitter bullhorn blacks who fume and mutter from their assigned spot on the sidelines, the spot from which they can most closely monitor whites who preen in this way. Note that neither the bourgeois nor the bullhorn Negro is about his own business but is catering to any random white who cares to opine on that which doesn't concern him.

This is what Albert Murray would deem the white norm/black deviation dialectic, the main vehicle for white supremacy. Counterintuitively, white supremacists and black polemicists work together to implement this strategy, though we are most concerned with the black leaders who succumb to this gambit. The problem is both parties' adherence to the literalist, white supremacist notion that all that is necessary for the construction of social policy is a direct comparison of black social measures, like illegitimacy or crime, with those of whites. Odd bedfellows indeed, these seeming enemies hope for the same outcome - a showing of black "pathology," that is, worse statistics for blacks than for whites. For whites, with their behavior enshrined as the norm, insofar as blacks fail to meet "the standard," their problems are their own fault rather than the result of racism. From the point of view of the wailing-wall polemicists, any black lag is to be celebrated because it must result from racism. The worse blacks do, the better they both like it. The focus, Murray says, "is never placed on the failure of white Americans to measure up to the standards of the Constitution. The primary attention repeatedly is focused on Negroes as victims... . [T]he assumption ... is that slavery and oppression have made Negroes inferior to other Americans and hence less American.... [H]owever, slavery and oppression may well have made black people more human and more American while it has made white people less human and less American."

Copyright © 2004 by Debra Dickerson

About the Author

Debra J. Dickerson was educated at the University of Maryland, St. Mary's University, and Harvard Law School. She has been both a senior editor and a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, The Village Voice, and Essence. She lives in Albany, New York.