Sunday, August 20, 2017

Speaking Truths to Ourselves--On Charlottesville

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.