The City of Stanley witnessed weekly social justice demonstrations in June. People stood at an intersection and held signs protesting institutional racism in general and the murder of George Floyd in particular.
These were not massive protests. At the largest, there were twenty-four or -five demonstrators, twenty-two or -three of them white people.
That Sawtooth Valley is a white tourist enclave in the middle of a white state is not an accident. A good many of Idaho’s early miners were ex-Confederate soldiers, and they brought their politics with them. Add ethnic cleansings like the Bear River Massacre and the Chinese expulsions from Blaine County in the 1880s, the 1950s signs in Caldwell cafes reading “No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed,” and the Aryan Nation’s 1983 call for the establishment of an all-white nation in North Idaho, and you have a nasty cultural substrate, one that discourages people of color from thinking about Sawtooth Valley as a place where they can relax and have a good time. You can forgive them if demonstrating white people don’t change their minds.
No matter how beautiful the Sawtooths are, no matter how warm and sunny the beaches of Redfish, no matter how welcoming the hoteliers of Stanley, the surrounding territory acts as a minefield of bigotry.
White people in the valley get to go through life without having to come face-to-face with the human costs of racism. We do think about racism, but in the abstract way we think about Russian hypersonic weapons and Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and police savagely suppressing Hong Kong demonstrations. It’s evil but safely distant. When we protest racism, we aren’t talking about here.
It’s a bit like not having any positive cases of coronavirus in your hometown because nobody has agreed to be tested.
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I didn’t join the Stanley demonstrators, but I admired their bravery. Idaho still has pickups whose back windows display Confederate battle flags. Open-carry advocates, clad in camo, have shown up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Boise, claiming to be protecting the peace. Letters to the editor in Idaho newspapers warn of Antifa agitators coming to town to break windows, sell drugs, and turn teenagers into angry dinner-table orators who question their parents’ values.
A pickup driver yelled that our Stanley demonstrators were Commies. Another pickup driver told them to go back where they came from. Lots of people looked at them and then looked away, as if what they were seeing and what they were thinking were in two separate universes.
But other people in cars, and a few in pickups, honked their horns and waved in support. Nobody was run over. Nobody showed up with a gun to protect anybody.
Stanley has not always been so pleasant. In the 1950s and 60s, some residents showed up in their KKK robes at the town’s Halloween parties. These were real robes, and real KKK members, and their costumes weren’t a joke. There had been bone-breaking fights between white people who had hired black people in their sawmills and other white people who wanted Sawtooth Valley to remain all-white. Black and Hispanic Forest Service seasonal workers had been harassed, and few of them came back in subsequent seasons. Since Stanley had been founded, racial violence was always under the surface, and occasionally above it.
That was what I remembered when I heard of the demonstrations. Most of it was fifty years or more in the past. It seemed barely distant enough.
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On the Fourth of July, the traffic on Highway 75 was a constant rumble, punctuated by horn-honks and brake screeches and squealing accelerations as people tried to pass in the face of oncoming vehicles. That night, the City of Stanley put on its annual fireworks display, and after it was over, a line of cars left Stanley for the campgrounds upriver or for their homes in Blaine County. We couldn’t have pulled onto the highway between 10 and midnight if we’d wanted to.
Fortunately, we didn’t want to. We went to sleep and when we got up at seven the next morning, the highway was empty. Because of the noise, no one was camped in the Sportsman’s Access. The campgrounds downriver were silent. The sunrise slowly turned the whole sky shades of pink and orange. When the sun hit the meadow behind our house, its light backlit paintbrush and elephant’s head and lupine. They lit up like unwavering torches in the still morning air. Looking toward the mountains, you could pretend that you were living in a quiet and beautiful world that hadn’t changed much since the Pleistocene.
It was lovely to think that way, but the illusion vanished when the traffic began to pick up. We heard gunfire from the campgrounds. Someone was target practicing with a 9mm pistol. A pickup full of people unloaded at the Sportsman’s Access, and we began to hear laughter and shouts from the river. Motorhomes went by, towing SUVs and boats.
Yesterday was the supposed end of the holiday weekend, but this year holidays have indefinite extensions. They may go on until winter, because jobs and school years have been the traditional reasons for having to end a camping trip. Now, our tourists don’t have to get back to jobs. It looks as if their kids will not have to go back to school if they don’t want to. Add in an extended weather forecast that has promised us warmth and blue skies for the next 90 days, and there’s not much reason for them to head home unless the local stores run out of beer and tortilla chips or the money runs out or the forest fires get out of control.
Forest fires aren’t a worry for the moment. Our wet spring and wetter June have left the valley green and damp and full of tall grass. It won’t be dry enough to burn for another ten days or so. In ten days, we’ll worry about tourists and their campfires, and the human costs of burnt forests, pandemic disease, and pooping in the woods. If they’re still here after Labor Day, we’ll have to ask them to leave. I worry that by then, their homes will be in foreclosure.
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It’s easy to understand what Ralph Ellison is getting at in his novel Invisible Man. He says that when nobody sees who you are, but instead sees what they’ve been culturally conditioned to see, parts of you disappear. You lose substance. Your life loses meaning. In the end you have to construct a room whose walls and ceiling are covered with high-intensity lightbulbs, a place bright enough to see what remains of the self you once thought you had.
Julie and I have become invisible this summer. If we’re seen lounging about on the beach at Redfish, people assume we’re tourists. If they see us out on the river, they assume we’ve driven across three states to catch a six-inch rainbow, even when we’ve packed our going-to-the-symphony chairs out to the riverbank and are reading New Yorkers and dozing and occasionally taking the dog for a swim.
Yesterday two people in a raft floated by where we were sitting, passing within ten feet of us. They might have seen us, but if they did their eyes moved on to other parts of the scenery. They didn’t say hello, and neither did we. Even Juno sat silent. We all watched them until they disappeared around a bend a hundred yards downriver.
If we worked in the tourist industry, we’d have a different kind of invisibility. Wait-persons, cooks, housekeepers, horseback guides, and even the local Forest Service personnel all have roles and uniforms that make them extras in tourist industry dramas. Their duties demand that they follow a script, and as long as they follow it, nobody gets called out for breaking character.
Of course, tourists have their own struggle to remain visible. Our gaze takes a bite out of them.
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For years, I taught Invisible Man to white college students in my literature classes, telling them to write essays about how its lessons about race might apply to their own lives. It’s cultural appropriation, I told them. You’re a white person taking on the forced empathy of a black person. Go ahead. Take as much as you want.
It was not a popular assignment. For the first time, my students saw that thinking about race could cause pain even when you were white, even if you were from Idaho, even if your religion said black people were the descendants of Cain. Many of them quit reading when they started realizing that everybody gets destroyed when one group of people oppresses another.
The things you won’t let yourself see end up devouring you in the dark. It’s all there on every page of Ellison’s book. The connections with your own white life are there, if you dare make them.
I don’t know if my literature classes did any good or not, just like I don’t know if our local demonstrations did any good or not. The lesson that some of my students took from Invisible Man was that everybody’s white under the skin, which I don’t for a moment imagine was Ellison’s point.
But it nonetheless got young white people thinking critically about a system that destroyed some people and arbitrarily showered others with educations, jobs, and wealth. It may have been a small step toward justice.
I don’t know what lesson the people who drove by the demonstrations learned. I hope it was that white people, too, could be disgusted by the murder of a man in handcuffs, and by a police culture that allowed it. That seems an awfully small step toward justice—an awfully small step toward common human decency—but it’s a step.