Rage

Whether it’s black rage or white rage—justified or not—rage makes me uncomfortable. That discomfort spurred me to write the novella, Upstate, that is included in my new collection, Treason: The Sallie Bingham Reader (Sarabande Books, August 2020). That novella makes its readers uncomfortable, as it should. It ends with a woman burning down her absconding lover’s house.

Now comes the first raging accusation I’ve read connecting white women with the miseries endured for generations by black women, stating explicitly that we don’t care.

I wanted right away to argue that that’s painting with too broad a brush, but then I recognized the root of my defensiveness: I’ve cared, but I’ve never cared enough to do anything.

Long ago, when I was growing up in Kentucky, there were many opportunities. We were waited on by black people; they were treated with the superficial, remote kindness that has always been the hallmark of progressive women’s treatment of black women. They were paid, although certainly not much, given their meals and bedrooms and a day off a week. My mother loaded them in her car (they had no cars) and drove them to the polls to vote. I’m sure they knew what candidates they were assumed to support: “liberal” white men who would do nothing about injustices so wide-spread and so deeply rooted most white women took them for granted.

I was a child and a young woman—I left Kentucky for college when I was seventeen—but I don’t want to use that as an excuse for my silence. I could certainly have questioned why my mother had our swimming pool emptied after a young black man, invited by my brothers, swam in it. She claimed that no white children would be allowed to swim in the pool if it was not emptied, cleaned and refilled first. I learned later that a silent, deeply ingrained belief in the illnesses carried by black people, syphilis particularly, motivated her act.

I was already an adult and could no longer claim childhood exemption when I learned that our black cook, who had a talented son, had asked Mother to help him get into Harvard. This was when the civil rights movement was making such a request possible. Mother told me the story, to illustrate the cook’s ludicrous over-reaching. Of course she said no, and I said nothing. I don’t know what happened to this young man.

I haven’t lived in Kentucky for three decades and what confronts me now is my failure to react to acts of racism here in New Mexico. New Mexico has few black residents but many Hispanics and Native Americans and they are subjected to the same injustices suffered by black people in other states—and the same silence on the part of white women.

Are we white women particularly to blame? Are we letting white men, who possess more power, off the hook?

I think our historic stance as women caregivers and caretakers, displayed in many individual and institutional acts of charity, do make us more responsible. We have often presented ourselves the conscience of a cruel culture—but we have not taken on the worst of its abuses.

The New Mexican yesterday morning headlined the death of fourteen-year-old Ramiro Miranda Urias of cancer. His parents were arrested last week here in Santa Fe and charged with one count of child abuse resulting in death because they failed to get medical treatment for their son until three days before he died.

His mother told the police that they did not take Ramiro to the doctor for two years because they did not have Medicaid.

Ramiro is gone and his parents face consequences. How many more children of black, Hispanic or Native American families will die before this injustice is confronted? We all know that these groups are less likely to have medical insurance than white people; they work at jobs which are not required to provide this coverage, and their incomes are too low for co-pays.

And we say, and do, nothing.

Yes, rage is the correct response no matter how uncomfortable it makes me.

In My Family, Writing racism