Free White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son by Tim Wise Page A

with about the tenth throw of the series. As the ball left Bobby’s throwing hand and whizzed toward its destination in Vince’s outstretched arms, only to be thwarted in its journey time and again by my leaping effort, they would repeat, one and then the other, the same exclamation.
    “My nigger Tim!”
    Pop! The ball would once again reverberated as it hit my hands and was pulled in for another interception.
    “My nigger Tim!”
    I would toss it back, and we would repeat the dance, Bobby moving left, Vince right, me following their steps and taking cues from their body language as to where the ball would be going next.
    Pop! Another catch.
    “My nigger Tim!”
    After the first dozen times they said this, each time with more emphasis and a bit of a chuckle, I began to sense that something was going on, the meaning of which I didn’t quite understand. A strange feeling began to creep over me, punctuated by a voice in the back of my head saying something about being suckered. Not to mention, I instinctively felt odd about being called a “nigger” (and note, it was indeed that derivation of the term, and not the more relaxed, even amiable “nigga” which was being deployed), because it was a word I would never use, and which I knew to be a slur of the most vile nature, and also, let’s face it, because I was white, and had never been called that before.
    Though I remained uncomfortable with the exchange for several minutes after it ended, I quickly put it behind me as the bell rang, recess ended, and we headed back to class, laughing and talking about something unrelated to the psychodrama that had been played out on the ball field. If I ever thought of the event in the days afterward, I likely contented myself with the thought that although their word choice seemed odd, they were only signifying that I was one of the club so to speak and had proven myself to them. Well, I was right about one thing: they were definitely “signifying”—a term for the cultural practice of well-crafted verbal put-downs that have long been a form of street poetry in the black communities of this nation.
    As it turns out, it would be almost twenty years before I finally understood the meaning of this day’s events, and that understanding would come while watching television. It was there that I saw a black comedian doing a bit about making some white guy “his nigger,” and getting him to do whatever he, the black comic, wanted: to jump when he said jump, to come running when he was told to come running, to step ’n fetch’ it, so to speak. So there it was. On that afternoon so many years before, Bobby and Vince had been able to flip the script on the racial dynamic that would, every other day, serve as the background noise for their lives. On that day they were able to make me not only a nigger, but their nigger. The irony couldn’t have been more perfect, nor the satisfaction, I suppose, in having exacted a small measure of payback, not of me, per se , since at that age I had surely done little to deserve it, but of my people, writ large. It was harmless, and for them it had been fun: a cat and mouse routine with the white boy who doesn’t realize he’s being used, and not just used, but used in the way some folks had long been used, and were still being used every day. Today Tim, you the nigger. Today, you will be the one who gets to jump and run, and huff and puff. Today we laugh, and not with you, but at you. We like you and all that, but today, you belong to us.
    As I thought about it, however, I was overcome with a profound sadness, and not because I had been tricked or played for a fool; that’s happened lots of times, usually at the hands of other white folks. I was saddened by what I realized in that moment, which was very simply this: even at the age of nine, Bobby and Vince had known what it meant to be someone’s nigger. They knew more than how to say the word, they knew how to use it, when to use it, how to