White People’s Blindness

Conservative columnist David French discovers racism

Image generated by ChatGPT

“Make me wanna holler, throw up both my hands…” – Marvin Gaye from “Inner City Blues”

In the fifth chapter of the book of Jeremiah, the prophet scorns “foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see.” As a self-described evangelical who writes frequently about religion, New York Times columnist David French is probably well acquainted with that verse. He is also likely to know the following proverb: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

What French may not understand is how snugly those admonitions fit him.

French, who is white, went viral last week after his appearance on a podcast called the Fifth Column. Asked if he considers himself a conservative, he answered in the affirmative, but then went on to describe how, despite that political affiliation, he has “absolutely changed in my perception of the lingering severity of race problems in this country.” This sudden enlightenment fell on him, he explained, after he adopted a child from Ethiopia.

“This might sound super naïve, but when we adopted our youngest daughter, I did not have in my mind that she was going to come to my community and have a substantially different experience as a child than my two older kids. But by golly, she had a substantially different experience. There was not a school that she went to where she was not called the N-word repeatedly.”

He went on to tell a story about a time the abuse went beyond language. “There was a point,” he said, “where I picked her up after a high school football game – this was in Nashville at a game at Montgomery Bell Academy, one of the highest end schools in all of middle Tennessee. This is a very wealthy school. We went to pick her up and she was shaking, and her friend, who was a Latina, was shaking as well and it was like, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘A truck full of guys was screaming the N-word at us and drove straight for us and they just swerved away at the very last second.’”

French said that raising this African child caused him to realize, “all of a sudden,” that he had “been in a bubble and that my white, educated, upper-middle class bubble in the South had really, intentionally, screened out racism.”

It is always interesting (read: frustrating) to watch white people discover America. That, you understand, is essentially what French just did at – according to Wikipedia – the advanced age of 57 years. He landed on the shores of a nation that was always there but that somehow (“There are none so blind…”) he failed to see. For 57 years. Not surprisingly, the belatedness of his discovery was greeted with jeers from observers online.

“This is like buying a house next to the airport and being surprised at the noise,” said one.

“Your black child should not be your first black friend,” counseled another.

“How utterly embarrassing,” observed podcaster and writer for the Atlantic Jemele Hill.

Wrote comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, “I know many transracially adopted people (Black and POCs who were adopted by white people). Many of them have explained to me that they love, love, LOVE their white parents, ANNNNNNND also they don’t think white people should be allowed to adopt Black children and children of color. What David French is saying here is EXACTLY why.”

Actor Don Cheadle’s response was a model of eloquent concision: “Sigh…” he wrote.

“Sigh,” indeed.

In fairness, French also had his defenders. They say he deserves credit for his transparency, his willingness to change his mind and admit where he was wrong. Laudable traits, all. But are we, at this late date, really expected to give participation trophies to white people for admitting that racism exists? Is that where we now place the bar?

Lord, have mercy, if it is.

David French brought an African child to Tennessee. Tennessee, not to put too fine a point on it, is in the South. It is one of the eleven states that seceded from the Union in defense of the “right” to enslave people who looked like his daughter. It is the state where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, which makes it the state where organized racism was born. It is the state where Martin Luther King was murdered and the assassination of Barack Obama was plotted. It is the state where just yesterday French’s fellow white conservatives celebrated the Supreme Court’s latest vandalism of the Voting Rights Act by voting the state’s sole majority black district out of existence, stripping from African-American voters even that much meager ability to make their voices heard.

Yet French is surprised his daughter found racism there? That’s not a bubble he lives in. It’s a force field. And his description of himself as “naïve” is profoundly offensive. His story doesn’t tell us he was innocently unaware of what the country is like for people who are not white. What it tells us is that his force field actively repelled such knowledge, protected his conscience from it. And it could not have done so without his implicit approval. He is not, after all, a child but a man closing in on his sixth decade.

Note the proverb again: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” Not “cannot,” but “will not.” In other words, the blindness is a choice.

And it is one conservatives continue to make, loathe as they are to deal with America as it is. Instead, they love to talk about racism as if it were yesterday’s news, a sickness from which the country is all but cleansed. When he was president, George H.W. Bush used to speak of the “vestiges” of racism. Almost forty years later, David French tells us racism is “lingering.” You’d think the idea a thing that was supposedly down to mere “vestiges” in the early ‘90s still “lingers” halfway through the 2020s would give them pause, make them reconsider their rosy evaluation and the lies they tell themselves thereby.

But you would be mistaken.

One is reminded of the old axiom that a fish doesn’t know it’s wet. Well, in America, racism is the water in which we swim. And anyone who doubts that should try a simple thought experiment: name the government or private institution or field of endeavor where racial bias is not an ongoing challenge for people of color.

Spoiler alert: you can’t. No, not even professional basketball which, while its labor force is dominated by millionaires of color, grows progressively more white the further up the management chain one goes. You think that’s accidental? Yet people – white conservatives in particular – suffer conniptions and vapors when anyone dares to speak the obvious truth that this is a country founded upon and maintained by racism. The undeniable progress of the last six decades notwithstanding, that bias is not vestigial and lingering, but abiding and enduring.

That’s what makes French’s “discovery” so maddening. Oceans of ink have been spilled, forests of trees have been felled, terabytes of digital data have been created, and millions of words have been spoken in documentation, illustration and quantification of this American reality. We have screamed it as loudly as we know how. But somehow David French remained ignorant for 57 years? It wasn’t real for him until some group of white guys aimed a truck at his daughter?

Lord, give me strength.

As it happens, the same thing happened to my daughter and son thirty years ago – a car, not a truck – and while I was infuriated, I certainly wasn’t surprised. I certainly didn’t discover an America I didn’t already know.

But then, I’m black which means I’m a native of that other America. White conservatives, on the other hand, typically find it impossible to imagine themselves into any America other than the one they know– which is to say, into the lives and challenges of people who are not like them, unless one of those people happens to have a seat at the dinner table. Remember in the early 2000s how Dick Cheney, the former vice president, towed the conservative line on every litmus test issue, but broke ranks with his fellow travelers over marriage equality? It was absolutely not coincidental that his daughter Mary was a lesbian.

Yes, it’s great that he was willing to go against his own in order to support his child, but make no mistake: that’s not conscience and it’s not principle. It’s self interest. It’s a statement that bad things don’t matter until they touch you and yours.

And that, at bottom, is the statement David French just made.

It makes you worry for his daughter. His ideological predisposition will likely render him next to useless to her as she navigates the gauntlet of race in America. Yes, he can assure that she is loved, and that’s not nothing. But practical advice or even a relevant explanation of what she’s going through? Don’t bet on it. How can you explain a country you’ve only just discovered yourself? His daughter will be forced to figure that out on her own. She will have no other option.

See, blindness is a choice some of us don’t get to make.