TREMENDOUS
On the Incredible, Beautiful Psychology of the Performing Racist
Something goes numb before the argument begins.
Not fear, not anger. Something older and less dramatic than both, the body’s way of managing a recognition it has carried so long the carrying has become involuntary, the way breathing becomes involuntary, the way the jaw sets before the mind decides to set it.
You have been here before. Not this room, not this particular man or woman. This arrangement. The one where you are required to witness something and witness it quietly and then continue with your day as though witnessing did not have a weight, as though the weight did not accumulate, as though accumulation does not eventually change the shape of the thing doing the carrying.
The numbness is not anesthesia. Anesthesia is a gift. It requires someone to care enough to administer it. The numbness is the body’s own management, unsanctioned, unprescribed, arrived at through repetition rather than mercy.
It keeps you functional. That is all it was ever designed to do.
“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.”
— Toni Morrison
There is a word that arrives before the performance begins, before the shirt is chosen and the parking lot is navigated and the small daily insults of entitlement are distributed like receipts nobody asked for.
A word that has been doing its work in the culture for years now, quietly, the way water does its work before the shape of the rock changes.
Tremendous.
Say it the way he says it. The way Trump says it. The mouth rounding on the first syllable, the weight of it arriving with a certainty that assumes agreement before agreement has been offered. Tremendous. Not a description. A verdict. The word does not ask you to measure anything. It tells you the measurement has been made and the result was already known before the question was asked.
The superlative is the mechanism. Hatred and ignorance merely serve it. Tremendous, beautiful, incredible, perfect, the best. Words that do not describe reality but replace it, that manufacture in the mind of the listener a world where the speaker has already been to the conclusion and returned with confirmation. Come live here, the words say. The math has already been done. You are already winning.
The listener does not need to verify. The listener needs only to want to live in that world. And a particular kind of listener, the kind who has been told by every available signal that their claim to the room is diminishing, that their position is no longer guaranteed, that the room is filling with people who were never supposed to be in it, that kind of listener receives the superlative the way a drowning man or woman receives a rope.
They do not ask where the rope came from. They hold on.
What he is performing is not power. That is the con nobody names loudly enough. What he is performing is the memory of a permission he was told was his birthright and cannot locate anymore in the actual conditions of his daily life. The gap between the promised permission and the life that keeps failing to confirm it is where the performance lives. It is also where the performance costs him something.
The superlative does not only give permission. It provides anesthesia. The tremendous man or woman does not have to feel the weight of what their performance requires, the daily maintenance, the management of the split between who they perform in certain rooms and who they are when the performance is not required, because the word has told them the performance was never necessary. The real self is the tremendous self. Everything else was an imposition.
This is the lie that makes the shedding feel like liberation.
The projection mechanism is not complicated once you decide to look at it directly, though looking requires a willingness to follow the logic to where it actually leads rather than stopping at a more comfortable destination.
The person most engaged in a behavior is almost always the one most aggressively naming that behavior in others. This is not a moral observation. It is a structural one. The specific texture of the accusation follows the specific texture of the practice because you cannot invent in language what you have not already rehearsed in the imagination at minimum, and usually in private, and often for longer than anyone around you was permitted to know.
The racism that announces itself loudest is almost always the racism that has spent the most energy attempting to sound like something else. The men and women who scream about reverse racism understand, more precisely than they will ever admit, the mechanics of what racism actually does to a person, because they have been operating those mechanics. The specificity of the charge reveals the intimacy of the knowledge.
The split personality does not sustain itself without cost.
Think of a room you have been in. Not an unusual room. A work meeting. A holiday table. The kind of room where the performance is operating at full maintenance because the audience is mixed and the cost of failure, of the self surfacing without permission, is social and professional and relational all at once.
Watch the face that is performing. Watch how it manages its own neutrality. The eyes making contact at the right frequency, not too long, not too short. The laugh arriving slightly before the joke is finished because the body has learned to anticipate the cue. The hands that know how to occupy themselves without drawing attention. The shoulders that have learned the correct amount of ease, enough to signal belonging, not so much as to suggest obliviousness.
That management is constant. It runs on the same energy as breath, which means it competes with everything else the body is trying to do. And the cost of it does not announce itself. It wears. The way anything wears that is used continuously without rest, the face slightly less flexible by December than it was in January, the distance between the performed self and the dominant self slightly shorter, the mask slightly thinner, the dominant self slightly closer to the surface than it was the year before.
How long before the arrangement becomes the face? That is the question the performance cannot answer. That is the question the shedding answers for it.
This is what the performance conceals most effectively: its own exhaustion. To perform tolerance in certain rooms and drop it in others, to produce the alibi, the my best friend is Black, with the rehearsed ease of someone who has kept it ready for exactly this occasion, to manage which version of the self is on display for which audience while the dominant self waits for the room to clear, that management has a metabolic price.
The dominant self does not wait quietly. It agitates. It looks for the permission that will let it occupy the center without the cost of management. And when that permission arrives, wearing a slogan and a superlative, the relief is not ideological.
It is physiological.
The shedding is not a radicalization. It is an exhausted man or woman finally setting down a weight they were never committed to carrying.
I want to be precise about what I am not saying before I continue saying what I am.
I am not saying all white people. I am describing a specific and identifiable configuration: the ones for whom the performance of tolerance was a daily negotiation rather than a genuine orientation. The ones for whom the alibi arrived too quickly to be earned. The ones who experienced diversity in the room as an arrangement to be managed rather than a condition to be inhabited. The ones whose relationship to accountability was always adversarial, who understood equity as subtraction, who carried the specific exhaustion of people maintaining a performance they privately resented.
That is a real population. It is not a metaphor.
My sister and I were taught early. Not look both ways before you cross the street, though that was also a lesson and one that carried its own weight. Something more specific and more permanent. We were taught that our worth would be tested. Not occasionally. Consistently, in every room, from directions we might not anticipate. That what we had earned would be called unearned. That our presence in spaces our presence had not previously occupied would be experienced by some as a taking, as a subtraction from a sum they had decided in advance was fixed and finite and theirs.
That lesson is a different lesson than what gets taught on the other side.
What gets taught on the other side is not awareness. Awareness requires the acknowledgment that other people exist with the same interiority, the same legitimate claim to the room, the same right to accumulate without being made to justify the accumulation. What gets taught on the other side is priority. The assumption that the room was built for you, and that arrivals who complicate that assumption are complications to be managed rather than people to be met.
The awareness we were given trained us for the world as it is. The priority they were given trained them for a world that was already changing when they received it. The gap between that training and the actual conditions of adult life is where the grief lives. And the grief, untreated and unexamined, is where the performance is born.
They are not grief-struck because they have been wronged.
They are grief-struck because the promise was a lie and nobody in their formation was honest enough to say so.
RELATED ESSAYS: AN EXTRAORDINARY WHITE LIFE, WHITE, BEREFT
I have been alive for thirty-six years in this country.
The body learns the room before the mind catches up. Shoulders rise before speech. The jaw sets before the sentence that will require it. By thirty-six, this is not drama.
It is training. It is what living here has done to the nervous system of a Black man who has had to keep arriving as himself in a country that still treats that arrival as a negotiation.
The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. My mother was alive. Her mother remembered before it. What we are calling the great emboldening, the shedding, the men and women finally feeling free to be what they have always been, is not a departure from the American character. It is the American character, surfacing after a period of expensive performance, finding the superlative that told it the performance was the problem and the truth beneath it was tremendous.
In January 2025, the federal government issued an executive order ending DEIA programs across agencies and directing contractors to certify compliance with what the official language called merit-based opportunity. By 2026, the regime is in force. The terminology is now state-sanctioned. Not a private sentiment. A government-issued phrase that confirms what the performing racist always privately believed: that the room was being taken from them by people less deserving, and that the correction has finally arrived. The performance did not just become socially acceptable. The state gave it a vocabulary.
The shadow self has been given a job title.
I am not surprised by any of what we are watching. I was taught to see this weather.
I was given the language for it before I had the experiences to confirm the language, which meant that when the experiences arrived, as they always arrived, I had somewhere to put them. That is the gift of the lesson my sister and I received.
The cost of the gift is the numbness.
Because the awareness does not protect you from the weight. It only means you understand the weight precisely when it arrives, which is its own kind of burden.
The person who cannot name what is happening to them has the mercy of confusion.
The person who can name it has to carry the name alongside the thing itself.
The shoulders learn to carry it before the mind names it. The jaw that holds itself slightly too still in certain rooms. The eyes doing too much work at entrances, assessing before the door is fully open. The peripheral vision that never fully rests, that is always running a calculation too quiet to be called fear and too persistent to be called habit. You do not decide to do this. The body decides. The body is more honest than the mind about what the conditions require.
The numbness is what accumulates when you have been carrying the name and the thing for long enough that the carrying becomes the condition rather than the response to it. Not despair. Despair has a bottom and a direction. The numbness is neither. It is the body’s permanent adjustment to a temperature that was never supposed to be the temperature, settled in so long it is no longer experienced as cold.
I write from inside this. I want that on record.
The man or woman who drops the mask does not find themselves on the other side of the performance. They find the shadow self, the one that was always there, now required to stand in the light without the protection the performance provided, without the alibi, without the my best friend, without the managed split that at least offered occasional access to decency.
What is left is the shadow. And the shadow has been practicing in private for decades and does not know how to be anything other than what the private practice made it.
The tremendous vision promised a world where the shadow self could be the whole self. What it delivered was the actual consequences of that self operating without restraint: the infrastructure dismantled, the systems that were holding everyone’s lives together, including the lives of the men and women wearing the shirts, being disassembled by the hands that needed them most.
The grief-struck man or woman voted to burn the house they were living in because someone told them the house belonged to someone else. Now they are standing in the ash calling it a conspiracy. A $1.776 billion fund for men and women who stormed the Capitol, drawn from the public treasury, tabled only after members of both parties objected. Trump moved as though the question of how it looked belonged to someone else.
The shadow does not lie. The body keeps the record the mouth refuses to maintain.
Morrison understood this. They were not holding hands. But the shadows were always there, always touching, always telling the truth the performance was designed to suppress.
That truth is available to anyone willing to stop performing long enough to read it.
This essay is written from the assumption that you live in the same reality I do. That the thirty-six years, the Civil Rights Act your grandparents lived before, the weather we are all standing in right now, is not ambiguous. That you do not need me to prove what you already know.
If that assumption is wrong, no amount of documentation will correct it. I refuse to write for that reader. I am writing for the one who is already here, already carrying the weight, already numb in the specific way this country produces numbness in the people it was never designed to protect.
For that reader, this is not argument. This is recognition.
Let that be enough — for now.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I sat with the word tremendous longer than I expected. Not because it is complicated. Because of what it cost to apply it honestly to the thing it was being applied to, to take the language of the performance and turn it toward the performer’s interior, to follow the cost all the way down to where the numbness lives and name what I found there.
Writing this did not dissolve the numbness. I did not expect it to.
What it did was give the numbness a precise address. I am not sure yet whether that is better or worse than carrying it without the language.
I suspect it is both.
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