I have hardly been able to look at the images from my home
state this last week. I grieve for what we have become, and I don’t understand
how we have gotten here. I could tell a story about that path, but there are
too many stories, and this is not a moment to get lost in the multiplication of
complexities. Fifty years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, we
have somehow reached a place where the ugliest ideas of the past centuries have
a renewed following that we can no longer ignore.
W.E.B. DuBois once described Atlanta as “south of the north,
yet north of the south.” This has seemed to me an apt description of Virginia,
especially Richmond, where I was born and raised. I have grown tired of
explaining to people that it had never occurred to me to think of myself as anything
other than a Southerner. This was the milk on which I was nursed, the roots
that I could never deny, however my sentiments shifted about them over the
years. Behind all of my ambivalence, I fear there was always a kind of pride. I
was taught that there was a Southern ethos, a delicacy, something lilting in
our mode of life that put Yankees to shame. But we did not, natives of the
Commonwealth, share in the distaste for learning or the scorn for nobler things
that we saw portrayed in caricatures of Southerners in national media. Southerner
I always was; redneck or Bible Belter, never.
It took me far too long to see that the stories of heritage
were at best self-deception and at worst downright lies. That you cannot
separate a flag that waved over those who fought for their right to trample on
the rights of others from that ugly history, that disposition to tyranny. That
no matter what ideals individual people might associate with that flag, black
Americans could not but associate it with fear, hatred, and centuries of being
treated as subhuman. No person’s heritage or ideal could possibly make up for
so much pain. It is an insult to even place it in the balance.
I fear that the pictures of
angry, pathetic white men brandishing torches are distracting us from some difficult truths. This is not aberration. It is an extreme version of something that
some of us can usually ignore from day to day: the ongoing, systematic oppression
of a whole group of people whom we categorize by the myth of separate races. It
is an oppression that has been carefully documented with statistics and
powerfully portrayed in film. But its counterpart, perhaps its source, lies
within the breast of many individual people, most of whom would swear that they
are not racists.
Moral indignation at being accused of racism is the order of
the day among a certain set. Ironically, there is considerable overlap between
this set and those who make fun of others for being offended by vulgar
stereotypes and the languages of shame. In response, others have tried to point
out that one can very well be racist in subtle ways, and that we may have
racist attitudes and not even be aware of them.
The indignant often respond with questioning the testing,
about which there are some real scientific problems, that seeks to quantify
this “implicit bias.” These same problems do not affect numerous other data
sets that show, for instance, that you can change an applicant’s interview
chances simply by changing the name at the top of a resume to something that
sounds like it might refer to a non-white person. But I don’t need implicit
bias tests anyhow. All I need to frighten myself about my own attitudes is an
old-fashioned—indeed, ancient—method. It is the method of self-reflection, part
of the way in which some of us try to obey the adage to know ourselves.
In implementing this method, I have caught myself with
passing sentiments of frustration based on the race of the person before me. I
have seen myself noticing “patterns” that the wiser, more scientifically-minded
part of myself knows are not there. We are not natively good at noticing
patterns. We see them too quickly, and we infer things from them with far, far
too little warrant.
This self-reflection is a tiny, pathetic first step. It is
nothing by itself, except a caution against hubris. But it is an absolutely
necessary first step for those who are quite sure that they are not racist.
There is a deeper level of reflection that is called for,
which asks questions about our explanations for real patterns. We know that
there is a socio-economic gap between the races: how do we explain this? Do we
think it’s likely that “biological differences” explain this gap? Then we are
racist, because we believe that one race is naturally inferior to another.
Those who like the biological difference explanation may well throw John Stuart
Mill at me and demand that I exercise my mental capacities by considering every
possible argument, however disgusting I may find it. But as much as I admire
Mill, I fear this ideal fails to take some important factors into
consideration.
Our commitment to freedom of speech demands that we not
imprison people for considering such arguments, or even for defending them
vociferously. But it does not demand that we take all arguments equally
seriously. That first step of self-reflection ought to teach us that we are
likely to find some arguments more attractive than others. They serve our lower
needs better. Why have I been so fortunate while others have languished?
Because I have worked hard and they are lazy/incompetent/not quite as smart? It
is such a beguiling answer. And precisely because of this, we ought to work as
hard as we can to find another. Plenty of alternative answers are readily
available, each too simple to explain the whole. But when we are engaged in
this search, it is a moment for multiplying complexities.
But there is another level of mendacity here, more brazen
than the squirrely self-deception involved in never paying attention to
fleeting racist thoughts or reaching for the most flattering explanation for
social inequalities. And here is where I must return to that bizarre world in
which I was raised, south of the north, yet north of the south.
As I child, I heard many adults tell me that they were not
racist, and even that racism was wrong. And then they told me what sort of
people to avoid, and why it was still unwise for nice white girls to date black
boys. They made jokes using the n-word and wrung their hands when black
families moved into their neighborhoods. In the Southern world, people have
long known what they could get away with saying in public and what they could
say among themselves. Not all of my Southern friends and family were like this.
Some were as disgusted by it as I should have been then and now am. And many of
those who were like this were also capable of loving-kindness and noble acts;
some even fought for civil rights for all. But their privately-public racism
was the edge of an angry cancer. We are now seeing that cancer break out of its
previously-contained bonds. What happened in Charlottesville is not only a
Southern problem; would it be wrong to wish it were? But we lie to ourselves
again if we pretend that we Southerners have not nourished that problem with
our own special food for many, many years.
And so I grieve for my state, for the university I didn’t
attend but always admired, and for the raw wounds that all of this inflicts on
so many who are so much more affected by it than I am. This is a time, above
all, to speak truth to power—to tell our children and our fellow citizens that
there is no moral equivalence between Nazi ideology or white supremacy and the
ideals of Heather Heyer and her brave partners in protest. But is also a time
to speak truths to ourselves. We can no longer afford not to.
