I’ve written on several occasions about my favorite quote by W.E.B. Du Bois, responding to a student who asked: “Do you trust White people?”
You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God. [W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil 102 (1920) (Humanity Books, 2003)]
Many times, I’ve been told that Du Bois’ expressed sentiment here was racist. Even if Du Bois would have allowed individual Whites to prove their trustworthiness (which he did — Du Bois worked with Whites all his life), his “default” stance of mistrust towards Whites-as-a-class is mere racial prejudice. To which I respond: at what point in American history would it had have been justifiable for a Black person to say that their default position is to be untrustworthy of Whites? I would have thought 1920 would be well within the range, but apparently not. So — 1896? 1856? When?
Some have strongly implied that there is no such time — Blacks are always obligated to have a default stance of trust for Whites, until Whites specifically show themselves to be incontrovertibly racist. What these writers do not understand is that, for much of American history, a default stance of “trust” in Whites was not just a matter of having friendly, egalitarian sentiment towards all of humankind. It was, quite literally, a risk to Black lives. Black people who were too “trusting” of Whites — too trusting that they would treat them fairly, that they wouldn’t mind breaching Jim Crow racial “etiquette”, that they were the “good kind” of White folks — these were Blacks destined to get lynched. A Black person in 1920 who — trusting the fairness of the typical White — asks a White man if he can marry his daughter runs a serious risk of death. In positions of such power asymmetry, mistrust is a survival skill. There were German rescuers, but the Jew attempting to hide from Nazis in 1942 would be forgiven for defaulting to mistrust towards the average German…..