6. The Simplest Life Is a Triumph

Just as The Bluest Eye set out to interrogate the life of a young girl who did not ascribe to the 1960s rallying cry “Black is beautiful,” Morrison intended for The Black Book to function, at least in part, as an interlocutor to the refrain, which she felt was “an accurate but wholly irrelevant observation if ever there was one.”

The slogan provided a psychic crutch for the needy and a second (or first) glance from whites. . . . The phrase was nevertheless a full confession that white definitions were important to us (having to counteract them meant they were significant) and that the quest for physical beauty was both a good and worth while pursuit. . . .

When the strength of people rests on its beauty, when the focus is on how one looks rather than what one is, we are in trouble. When we are urged to confuse dignity with prettiness, and presence with image, we are being distracted from what is worthy about us: for example, our intelligence, our resilience, our skill, our tenacity, irony or spiritual health. And in that absolute fit of reacting to white values, we may very well have removed the patient’s heart in order to improve his complexion.

The Black Book, then, was to focus on the heart— “the old verities that made being black and alive in this country the most dynamite existence imaginable.

Similarly, there is an understanding of schools, workplaces, and public spaces of our society that we would like people to trust— that they are basically fair places that offer genuine and equal opportunity. But for people like George Floyd, and others whose families and communities have experienced identity-based disadvantages, this proposition can be difficult to trust. Saying that these places are now color-blind doesn’t help much. People remember. They know that the inequalities that stem from those disadvantages have not been remedied.

Was wiseness a strategy for everyone? Would people with less enfranchised identities, those occupying lesser roles in the Wilkerson play, be comfortable using it?

For these people— women, minorities, gays, white men in diversity workshops, low-income earners— hearing that they should offer “trust” in diverse settings could trigger more “remembering” than “forgetting.” And there waiting for them is a compelling argument: “How can I trust people from groups that have done bad things to my group, people who benefit from advantages won by those bad things, people who often justify those advantages with dehumanizing stereotypes of my group, people who often see my group’s progress not as a good thing, or as justice-restoring, but as a zero-sum loss? Wouldn’t being ‘wise’ just make me more vulnerable to them— women to men, Blacks to whites, gays to straights?” And their churn wouldn’t stop there. It would also ask: “Why does responsibility for building trust in these settings fall to me? Shouldn’t it be first the responsibility of the more empowered?

Our society has an inherent challenge: Many of its settings still have features that reflect our identity-stratified history and organization. Our schools, workplaces, churches, classrooms, civic organizations, and boardrooms have features that can make it harder for some identities to trust that they are a part of the “we” in the setting. Identity-blindness implies that, along with identity itself, these features don’t matter much— they can, or should, be ignored. But they do matter— to all of us. Think of being the “only one” or “one of only a few” in any important setting— as my hands reminded me, for example: one of only a few whites in a Black History seminar, one of only a few Blacks in a symphony orchestra, or one of only a few women in an advanced math course on Riemann surfaces. But there’s good news: as the Stephens experiment and the 3M company show, when these features are addressed, improvements can happen, sometimes without much effort or cost.

In life we seek like-minded people despite—or because of—the limit of knowing and understanding. We do so to feel less lonely, though it brings a different kind of loneliness. In seeking others, inevitably we try to control an interaction. We insist on being known only as the version we prefer to attach to ourselves. A narrative catering to others is not far from memories revised for ourselves: both move us away from the quicksand of feelings. And those who do know us beyond our chosen version—by proximity, by intuition, by observation—must provoke similar discomfort in us as melodrama does. Does our wariness of melodrama contribute to our wish to escape their eyes, or is it the other way around, that in avoiding meeting those who have more access to our interior world than we are willing to allow, we can feel momentarily protected from our own memories?