Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?


Maybe it was because I was listening for it.  But that very night I heard something new in America, a shout from a new generation.  It came in a video of a protest in Brooklyn, shot live by the Reverend Julie Hoplamazian, associate rector of my church, St. Michael's Episcopal in Manhattan.  She was bearing witness, along with two other young, white clergywomen  -- brought together by the New Sanctuary Coalition, an interfaith group for social justice.  

The video showed police herding a racially-mixed crowd of protesters into a narrow street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood, then blocking both ends of the street.  Unarmed, peaceful protesters were trapped, facing off with multiple ranks of cops in riot gear.  That's when the cry went up, at about 3:55 into the video: WHITE BODIES UP FRONT! -- immediately followed by a surge of young white people to the front ranks. They were using their privilege, their relative immunity from police brutality, to protect their black brothers and sisters.  

This is more than a new tactic. It is a mutual recognition, across the racial divide, of the real state of race relations in America, covered over for decades with bromides, e.g. "we're all the same under the  skin."  No, we're not -- we're shaped by our different experience of life, and we can only trade places by putting our bodies and lives on the line.     

I don't want to make too much of this, but here is a new generation, raised with new images and ideas of race.  They are able to acknowledge racism, reject and reverse it with their bodies, in symbolic atonement for the violence and terror that still shadow every black life in America.  It's a start.  

Two roads diverge for America this spring, soon to turn into a long, hot summer.  One leads to new life; the other to a holocaust.  We'll contemplate that in our next Viral Spring.    

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips