In Edward P. Jones All Aunt Hagar's Children, the story Blindsided gives one of the most poignant phrases for the Black experience in America today. In the context of the novel, a little boy Taylor is asking suddenly blinded Roxanne if being blind physically hurts. Roxanne then turns the question on the boy and asks what he thinks:
"I say yes, but Mama say no. It hurt in other ways." (316)
While speaking of the "other ways" in which being physically blind hurts, this gives a fair reflection on the ways in which White privilege in seen at work in Black culture. The hurt of purely de jure discrimination is a thing of the past; quite honestly it would be a shame to see legally sanctioned race discrimination anywhere. But, the other ways in which African Americans feel the sting of racism is present in so many other ways. Much like the pain of blindness Roxanne feels because her existence as she knows it has been taken away, so too is the Black person in our culture prey to the continuing White privilege idea. The problem is no longer the overt racism that is glossed over in public schools, where a student might leave knowing the name of one or two leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. The problem now is the unseen racism that corresponds to the inner hurt of Roxanne. It is seen in the housing market, in the racism of the job market, in the ability to have access to healthcare, the following of a black man in a grocery store by a store detective: these are the hurts that myself as a white woman never have to experience.
Edward P. Jones speaks about these ideas so well because just like the racial issues are not something often seen overtly through de jure discrimination, the racial force is not stated overtly in the stories. Instead of saying, "The racism in America is seen in character X here," Jones is able to integrate the ideas of isolation and separation of Black cultures from White counterparts through more subtle ways. It is in the statement at the beginning of Blinsided:
"The white woman had her ideas about what black people did with their lives, especially on weekends, and just about everything they did in her mind could lead to blindness." (293) While that statement is just a thought from the white woman, the thought is what matters. You can never trust those Black people, the white woman seems to say, and Jones is able to elicit a response from all people when he says a statement like that. Everyone knows that is what some white people are thinking, but it is never uttered; just like White Privilege is merely an invisible bag of things White people can do and get for no reason other than they're White.
What Jones is able to do is show the different kinds of hurt that correspond with being an African American, but showing that there are problems with that idea of White privilege that are unspoken. And even in a black man that still "makes it" like the character of Noah in Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a New Sister, the problem of poverty and abandonment meet him head on through his new grandson with a label on his shirt. These problems continue to occur because of White privilege as well as a host of other things, but it is unspoken to the White girl learning about the Civil Rights Movement in a 9th grade history class.
Through writing people for people, Jones is able to get the affects of White Privilege out in a form that is engaging and thought-provoking without being "preachy". I appreciate his work because he is magnificently talented but pointedly honest about the lives of these people. They all live in the same place, but they all go through different experiences based on how their lives have been affected by racism. It hurts in so many different ways, and through Jones' myriad of types of stories we experience the myriad of racist sentiments seen in the lives of his characters. Because the hurt is much more than just being Black: it is what being Black means to those looking in on Jones' world and characters.
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