The Slur of White Identity
By: Tonya Pinkins
Tags: White Privilege, Identity, Violence, Fear, Race

Celebrity is no shield from the violence of “the whites.”

September 12th at 5:00am in Seoul, Korea I listened to my brilliant, mentor, teacher, friend plead her humanity to a Police officer on the phone.

I screamed through the Zoom screen, “STOP TALKING! GET OFF THE PHONE, DON’T GO TO THE DOOR, DON’T GO OUTSIDE, HANG UP!!!”

The bile rose in my throat, my heart raced. I have watched the police taze, pinch, beat black women to death. Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Pearl Golden, Yvette Smith, Aura rosier, Shelly Frey, Tarika Wilson, Rekia Boyd, Aiyan Stanley, Rekia Boyd, Eleanor Bumpers, Breonna Taylor

As a facilitator at Kimberlé Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum “Breaking The Silence Camp,” I have held these dead black women’s mothers in my arms as they wailed and wept to Jesus for peace, for comfort, for understanding of why the lord has forsaken us.

White Jesus has forsaken us. White women and men and children betray us every day.

I am a Civil Rights baby. My mother, Anita was able to access government opportunities to move into the Jeffrey Manor area on Chicago’s South Side. It was adjacent to Pill Hill, the home of wealthy Jewish Doctors. It didn’t matter that every night another White family moved out until there were none left. My dead end street was a safe haven.

My mother had been preparing me for the opportunities she must have heard Martin Luther King prophesy, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

I had been taught to read by 4 and elocution and etiquette lessons followed. I was being raised to rise in the new world of King’s dreams.

But then “the whites” killed him.

I was only six. I don’t remember King’s death. What I remember is that my path to success seemed to be paved with yellow bricks tomb stones of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Bobby Seales. Patrice Lamumba, Sam Cooke, and many more whose names I would not learn during my distinguished education at Robert A Black Elementary followed by Whitney Young high school where I attended class with Michelle Robinson who would grow up to be a FLOTUS.

My world was multicolored and racially and ethnically balanced. There were white kids, Jewish kids, Latino kids, bougie black kids, poor white kids, bi-racial kids.

The best part of my life was that White people liked me. I got invited to their homes. I was amazed at how they disrespected their parents and lived to see another day. I once muttered under my breath that I wished I was white and got a belt beating that only cemented the desire.

All of my troubles came from the Black people. On my block they would try to beat me up because they I thought I was white they said.” Your hair is too springy and you talk white.”

Talking white helped me talk my way out of many an ass whupping. White people were my saviors.

That is until I started doing better than they thought I should. My first dose was getting a Broadway show, Merrily We Roll along over Xmas break during my Freshman year at Carnegie Mellon. Not only was I not, not applauded, I didn’t get an A in any performance classes and Carnegie never acknowledged I was an Alumni until in 2019 when they wanted a donation.

I tossed it off to a few bad apples, like they say there are in the police force.

Then after Merrily closed, most of the other “kids” were “placed” in Hal Prince’s long running shows Evita and Sweeney Todd. This was the first time I began to wonder what I was doing wrong. Hal did not give me another job.

The, “what am I doing wrong” continued over the next decades of being treated differently by people in situations in which we should all be equal. I mean that’s what the civil rights legislation gave America. It had to be me.

My wake-up call came when I was in a custody battle with a professed aging hippy who had found his first taste of power in the American legal system.

During this case and the many other law suits I would be involved in over the next 28 years I came to know that the law is what one white man will do for another on any given day of the week.

The kicker was that no one believed what I was experiencing except other women who shared my experiences. In court, if my ex and I practiced identical behaviors, in his case it was appropriate, in my case pathological.

I am a good student and a hell of a researcher, I learned the law. I played the rules at the level that I do everything in my life. And I was defeated again and again.

I got up again and again. Litigated the next custody battle 17 days against 3 attorneys with over 50 years of combined experience. Wrote a winning appeal against a school-teacher and 9 parents who said, they didn’t care how many Tony’s I had, they didn’t want me around because “YOU” people are trouble.

A psychotherapist even testified that I suffered from grandiosity because I said that I had won a Tony award.

I won the Tony for Jelly’s Last Jam in 1992.

It really did not hit me until I had lost my children that this country was not made for my happiness or success unless somebody white was profiting off me.

I became activated. I began to actualize. Instead of blaming myself I began to fight back. Yes, it was an uphill losing battle all of the time. That did not mean I had to lay down and take it and be complicit in my own abuse.

I grew further and further apart from the people who were still intoxicated with the illusion of justice and equality. I had been in the belly of the beast and I knew it devoured its young.

I felt guilty ordering Cynthia around that day but I could see she still believed she was a human that she could reason with them, that they would understand, that she had honorary white status as an Oprah Winfrey book club choice.

I knew she was just another nigger to Jason Feld. And I screamed and I ordered and I was angry at her for not listening to me, for continuing to pour out her heart and explain. I couldn’t stop her reasonable reflex to appeal to the Police officer’s humanity.

It hurts to not be able to convince someone of something that you know because you have already lived it. It hurts to have to watch a loved one go over a cliff.

I prayed I wouldn’t have to watch her die that day.

When the police finally went away. We sat on the phone together. I had no time to be sympathetic, empathetic. I had to give orders, instructions, the uphill battle before us lasts until we take our last breath.

I avoided writing this essay. It hurt too much. It hurts to be smart and powerful and beautiful and talented and to be treated like a cockroach. Not even like a dog because white people love their dogs.

It shames me to say it but that is how white people treat us.

I trembled and cried that my own humanity had to be repressed. I had to surrender to the reality that I cannot save Cynthia as I cannot save myself or my own children.

White people are a virus on the planet. They have infected the hearts and minds and souls of everything they touch. And if my writing this stings you, know that it has infected you too and that only the deepest penance and scouring of your every thought, motivation, action, belief till you take your last breath can even begin to undo the damage that you do with every breath you take.

Gavin Newsome signed AB 1775 into law on September 30, 2020. It is a slap on the wrist. And the risk is worth the reward for the plethora of Karen’s and Ken’s who wild out ever day.

My podcast, You Can’t Say That, this week and next week features Cynthia and I in conversation about what happened. Then next week, I am ion conversation with Singer songwriter, Franki Cox and Filmmaker,Tchaiko Omawale, the two other Black women who were traumatized by witnessing the attack on Cynthia. Go to Bpn.fm/ycst to listen.