The Hidden Agenda of Hiding the Wound

The hidden factor in the Fisher v. UT case is Texas public schools.

The state legislature passed a law, in an effort to avoid affirmative action counter-claims like Fishers, that required UT-Austin (part of the UT system, but the law does not apply to the system) and Texas A&M to accept the top 10% of Texas high school graduates.  Period.

This is a "color blind" system.

UT obtained a change in that rule.  Now it only has to automatically accept the top 7% of Texas high school graduates.  Why?  Because so many students from small school districts were coming to UT and flunking out.  They simply weren't prepared for the academic rigor of UT-Austin.  (And here's where the system gets interesting, because students who don't win automatic acceptance to UT can apply to a college in the UT system and, if they do well enough, can transfer to Austin after 1 year.)

The fact that the top 10% of high school graduates across the state cannot function at UT is an indictment of the Texas public school system.  But instead of noting that problem, we pay attention to whether or not white Amy Fisher was unfairly denied her "legacy."

The deeply hidden factor is the idea that tests like the SAT are "objective" and "unbiased" and establish a pure meritocracy where the fit prove their merit.  Or that all grades are equal, and thus all students equally compete on a level playing field when we only consider grades and test scores.  (I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't "prepare" for the SAT, because it didn't work that way.  Does anyone truly imagine middle-class whites don't have an advantage in preparing for the SAT that is denied to lower income students?  Does anyone anymore seriously think test scores are an objective and absolute measure of college merit, and is wholly colorblind and class-unconscious?  I've seen the "meritocracy" of wealthy white parents supporting their children's education, and "merit" is the least of its salient features.)

Which doesn't explain why UT is allowed, even under Alito's dissent, to consider other factors in admissions, as long as (per Alito) that factor is not race which excludes white students (Amanda Marcotte informs me that 47 students were admitted over Ms. Fisher, 42 of whom were white.  Ms. Fisher had no objection, and apparently neither did Justice Alito, to their admission.)

The hidden wound of racism remains hidden, because to look at it would indict us too deeply, and expose our complicity in the system too clearly.

The Wasteland

Now I'm just being obnoxious to point this out, but Noam Chomsky is right:

“Is there a slave museum in the United States?” Chomsky asks. “Actually, the first one is just being established now by private—some private donor. I mean, this is the core of our history, along with the extermination or expulsion of the native population, but it’s not part of our consciousness. ”

There are a number of "Holocaust" museums in America, including one in the town where I live.  Nothing wrong with that, but America had bugger all to do with the Holocaust, yet we want to remember it.

Fine.  Well and good.  Where is the museum commemorating the "Trail of Tears"?  Wounded Knee?  Indeed, the virtual extermination of the natives who were here when Europeans first arrived?  Slavery was a 400 year old business.  It built much of the wealth of America.

Where do we remember it?

We don't, of course. We remember the Holocaust, because we should never forget.  But we forget our own historical genocides, our own complicity in slavery.  The wound runs deep, even today.  I tried to find the link for it, but BBC World Service is not so accommodating.  They've been running a series of stories from Selma, Alabama.  Day before yesterday residents of Selma complained about their notoriety based on events which happened 50 years ago.  Selma has changed, they insisted; it isn't like that anymore.

Yesterday they ran a story about schools in Selma.  Seems the public schools are predominately, and in some cases exclusively, black.  Private schools are predominately, and in some cases exclusively, white.  They interviewed an African American woman who told of getting her child enrolled in a private school.  She was invited to the first meeting of parents, before school started, and was treated to a parent standing up and castigating school leaders for destroying the "traditions" of that school; by admitting her daughter, of course.

But wait, it gets worse.  A spokesman for Alabama schools told the BBC that Brown v. Board had tried to force people to do what they didn't want to do, and the federal government can't mandate that.  State governments, of course, can mandate racial segregation, but the federal government can't override that mandate.  White private schools and black public schools are just a result of Brown v. Board, of the federal government meddling where it doesn't belong, of not understanding what people really want.

In short, the very same racist arguments I heard as a child, unchanged by time, undimmed by the passage of the years.  But challenge that man, call him a racist, and you would offend him; as you would had he been making those arguments 50 years ago.

As Charlie Pierce says, it's not about race, because it's never about race (especially in Ferguson).  As Wendell Berry says, we have a hidden wound, and that wound is how much our country was founded upon, and still depends upon, racism.

We work very, very hard to keep that wound hidden.

The View from 30,000 Feet

AG Barr says its not racist... to be racist https://t.co/3dP6Qa7kVF

— Sam Karimzadeh (@KarimzadehSam) September 2, 2020

Don't worry, that tweet ties in with this post before it's over.

Organized religion reinforces the cultural and social standards of the culture it exists in:

“If you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you’d likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot of an average white Christian church—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic—than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop,” he writes.

QED.  Same reason we associate burkas with Islam; but we never associate Islam with Asia, because we don't see women in burkas in Asia, or much of Africa, for that matter.  Burkas are Middle Eastern (if you stretch "Middle East" to include Pakistan, because I know people from Pakistan).  Burkas are cultural, not religious garb.  White supremacy is Christian, but not so much, I suspect, in black American churches; or Christian churches in Latin and South America, or Africa.  But we have to face the fact that America is a racist country.  Racism is cultural, but not necessarily religious.  But it is American; it is our hidden wound. We have to see our hidden wound, if we are going to ever heal it.

Not that that argument is going to win any hearts and minds.

I could quote the New Yorker article at length.  Dr. King, if memory serves, observed the old chestnut that the most segregated hour in America was the hour before noon on Sundays.  I remember reading an article by Harvey Cox (he is a Baptist, he tends to favor churches like the one he grew up in; don't we all?) about Pentecostals and how they explicitly organized around mixed-race churches, blacks and whites worshipping together.  Cox hoped that would become a model for American Christianity.  (Sadly, no; and now "Pentecostals" are lumped in with "evangelicals," at least in the popular discourse.)  None of that, though, makes it into the article, which doesn't really deviate much from the popular discourse on Christianity in America.

And instead of Cox's hopeful vision we got Donald Trump and his little piece of bread and his little cup of wine, and "Two Corinthians" and why should he ever repent of anything he ever did?

This, for example, is a brief sketch of the world I grew up in:

After the South’s defeat in the Civil War, Southern church leaders struggled to help their congregants make sense of their loss. The result was the religion of the Lost Cause, a mythology that ennobled the Confederacy and idealized the antebellum South as a bastion of Christian piety and morals. This fusion of religious and cultural values, delivered from the pulpit, helped to legitimize a social order that continued to subjugate Blacks. Later, as evangelical Christianity, anchored in the South, grew to become the dominant expression of Christianity in America, its cultural scaffolding, rooted in white supremacy, spread as well. During the era of Jim Crow, when Southern statutes enforced the strict separation of races and restricted the rights of Blacks, Northern Protestant churches remained largely segregated and muted in their criticism. Many white Christians saw segregation as simply part of God’s plan for humanity.

I knew that was wrong even as I was growing up in it:  the disjunct between "all people are one in Christ" and "except for those dark ones who we hire to clean our houses and take gifts to at Christmas, but otherwise don't associate with."  I wanted to change the church from the inside; radically, when I was young.  Incrementally, when I was older.  I couldn't do it.  I found a church split directly on generational and political lines.  Most of my generation was not interested in anything but comforting platitudes about how much Jesus loved them.  Most of my daughter's generation (or slightly older) was not interested in a religion so tied to an "old" culture.  I wanted to bring the church into the 21st century.  Now my Millenial daughter doesn't see any reason to bother.  I don't argue the point with her.

Which leads me to jump ahead a bit in the article, and land on this rather paltry discussion of theology:

In his book, [Esau] McCaulley outlines a theology of policing, political witness, Black identity and anger, and justice. On policing, for example, many white Christians focus on the opening verses in Romans 13, when the Apostle Paul urges people to submit themselves to the “governing authorities” because they have been “instituted by God.” But McCaulley traces the logic of the next two verses, when Paul writes, “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval.” McCaulley argues that, while Paul states that the rulers are “not a terror,” he is also articulating an ideal, one that can undergird a Christian approach to the problem of police violence. “Paul recognizes that the state has a tremendous influence on how the soldier/officer treats its citizens,” McCaulley writes. “This is grounds in a democracy for a structural advocacy on behalf of the powerless.” McCaulley also dwells on Jesus’ call in the Beatitudes for his people to be “peacemakers.” Biblical peacemaking involves resolving conflicts between nations and individuals, so it must necessarily involve “making a judgment about who is correct and who is incorrect,” McCaulley writes. A false choice between calling out injustice and preaching the Gospel has burdened American Christianity. “Through our efforts to bring peace we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent,” McCaulley writes. “The outcome of our peacemaking is to introduce people to the kingdom.”

In the end, however, ameliorating the theology of white Christianity is likely inadequate. In “Taking America Back for God” (Oxford), published earlier this year, the sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry examine racist and xenophobic attitudes among white Christians through the lens of a distinct set of cultural beliefs—most notably, the idea that America is, and should be, a Christian nation. They find that this collection of cultural markers, which they call “Christian nationalism,” was a better predictor of support for Trump in the 2016 election than economic discontent, religious affiliation, sexism, or any number of other variables. The defining concern of Christian nationalism is the preservation of a certain kind of social order, one threatened by people of color, immigrants, and Muslims. 

The sum of American theology is salvation, and salvation in general means being "saved" from your
"sins" by accepting Jesus into your heart (I would ask people in high school how Jesus fit in there; they never liked that question).  It means very little about you really has to change, except now you don't have to worry about going to hell.

Jesus famously asked his followers to give up all they had and follow him.  American Christianity, for the most part, just asks followers to feel even better about themselves.  You can't do that if you feel like you should atone for slavery or how we regard immigrants who are the wrong color or what we think of the "Middle East" (a region we mostly know absolutely nothing about, but think we know who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are, as if it were a movie series).

Actual theology has changed radically since the 18th century, but American churches are still mired in the 17th century (Pietism) or the 18th century (Great Awakening) and the hymns of that era, most of which I grew up on and still love inordinately.  Church theology is still stuck there, too, despite the Biblical scholarship of the 19th century and the scholarship of the late 20th century.  Theology, soteriology, Christology, ecclesiology; most have been scoured with new brushes and have given up some of their Hellenistic deadwood, but no one outside of seminaries knows or cares, or wants to know.  I speak to that from personal experience.  Theology that should be as lively and engaged with the laity as Twitter is instead as dead as the Thanksgiving turkey, and not nearly as useful or even ornamental.  Christianity has withered into a lifeless husk that clings to American culture as its raison d'etre.  It is useful to one or two as a true faith, and perhaps that is as it should be.  But the cultural Christianity of America is no more a shining city on the hill than Rome was when it dominated Europe from the Vatican.  Same as it ever was, I suppose.  But all of that is a dead hand on the present, one younger generations are happy to crawl out from under.  And no wonder; it's all as relevant to life in 21st century America as the Pelopenessian Wars (unless you can make comic-book fodder and a comic-book movie out of them; and even then, that's all now passé).  Actual theology won't change the church because actual people in the church won't change because the change that is needed is cultural, not sociological (the article makes much of sociology and studies of the church, some of which I've even read) nor theological nor even political.  The root problem is cultural, and that's about as easily changed as skin color.  I take it back; it's easier to change skin color.

Culture is damned near immutable.  And that's the fundamental problem of Christianity in America.

This bit of the article is a bit interesting; but, I think, completely wrong.  It could only have been written by someone who remembers the 90's (maybe), but only read about the '60's in a book somewhere:

The boundaries that evangelical leaders draw around “reconciliation” may help explain a seeming contradiction in the polling data on race and religion. In surveys that measure how warmly people say they feel about Blacks, the sentiments of white evangelical Protestants exceed those of the general population. (Other white Christians’ responses fall close to the mean.) Yet the vast majority of white Christians remain indifferent to the symbols of white supremacy and skeptical of the realities of racial inequality. In “Divided By Faith” (Oxford), published in 2000, the sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith suggest a cultural and religious framework for understanding this inconsistency. Evangelical theology is individualistic and interpersonal—it stresses both a believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ and the way that forgiveness from God impels forgiveness of others. As a result, white evangelicals’ understanding of the race problem tends to be rooted in beliefs about individual decisions and shortcomings rather than the ways that broader social forces, institutions, and culture can constrain and shape them. It’s as if they’re wearing reading glasses when their problem is nearsightedness—a failing, Tisby showed in his book, that has troubled the American church throughout its history.

Dr. King's famous letter, directed at white church leaders who won't follow the gospel but instead follow the culture, is mentioned only in reference to Billy Graham:

In April, 1963, shortly after King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Graham declined to characterize himself in an interview with the Times as a “thoroughgoing integrationist,” and said that the civil-rights protesters ought to “put the brakes on a little bit.” 

If you don't know King's letter, you don't even get the irony of Graham's statement.  The article also quotes Graham's autobiography on his encounter with Dr. King:

In his autobiography, “Just as I Am,” Graham writes that King encouraged him to “stay in the stadiums, Billy,” because his impact would be greater there. King also told Graham that “if a leader gets too far out in front of his people, they will lose sight of him and not follow him any longer.” Graham wrote that he followed King’s advice.

Again:  not exactly what King said in his letter.  And given how King broke with even his "liberal" supporters over Vietnam, and was shot fighting for economic justice (the March on Washington had the same purpose as his visit to Georgia that fateful day), not really that believable an anecdote.  But so the argument discards the ‘60’s and then by the turn of the century, hope supposedly appears, only to be snuffed out by indifference to "broader social forces, institutions, and culture"?  In the '60's, we called the attitude described in that paragraph quoted above: "I've got nothin' against 'em, I just don't want my daughter to marry one."  The irony here is the article opens with a long passage from Frederick Douglass about how his master became a Methodist after a revival, and became even crueler for it (a non-change "conversion" I saw played out again and again in the Southern Baptist dominated town I grew up in).  Did Douglass' master just fail to see the "ways that broader social forces, institutions, and culture can constrain and shape" him?

Bill Barr (see?!) insists he's not racist because a racist is an ignorant in-bred backwoods knuckle dragger who hates all black and brown people.  Of course Strom Thurmond had a black mistress, but that didn't keep him from being an unrepentant racist (doesn't keep Thomas Jefferson from being a racist, either, but we refuse to acknowledge that, too).  Racist is bad, and William Barr doesn't think he's bad; well, not that bad.  Racist is beyond the pale; racist is unfit for human society.  Racist is that guy; not me.  I just don't want my daughter to marry one; that doesn't make me a racist.  These things are cultural, and they are nearly ineradicable.  As the country's population shifts from majority to minority white, the culture will inevitably shift.  And the greatest fear of white people is that justice will be done, that they will be treated by black people the way whites have treated blacks in this country for over 400 years.  There's gotta be a reckoning, and don't we know it.  Which makes me think of another church song, but one from the black church; a fitting one.

Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
All on that day

Run to the rock, rock was a meltin'
Run to the rock, rock was a meltin'
Run to the rock, rock was a meltin'
All on that day

Run to the sea, sea was a boilin'
Run to the sea, sea was a boilin'
Run to the sea, sea was a boilin'
All on that day

Run to the moon, moon was a bleedin'
Run to the moon, moon was a bleedin'
Run to the moon, moon was a bleedin'
All on that day

Run to the Lord, Lord won't you hide me?
Run to the Lord, Lord won't you hide me?
Run to the Lord, Lord won't you hide me?
All on that day

Lord said "Sinner man, you oughta be a prayin'"
Lord said "Sinner man, you oughta be a prayin'"
Lord said "Sinner man, you oughta be a prayin'"
All on that day

Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to
All on that day

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.

As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

Amos 5:18-20, KJV

Yeah, when justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, who is it gonna roll right over?  Not us!  We didn't do nothin' wrong!  Been watching "Lucifer" on Netflix, a Neil Gaiman version of Satan come to El A for a vacation.  In this version Hell is not a place of torment but of guilt, where the damned suffer their own self-inflicted punishment like nightmares, but rooted in their guilt and sense of how unjust they were.  Interesting concept, that we punish ourselves (steps neatly around the problem of God's damnation of humanity, for one thing.)  But it's a very American hell, it seems to me; as if we know this fabulous life we lead (L.A. is a glittering playground in the series, where every day is beautiful and meant to be enjoyed as hedonistically as possible) must someday, somehow, be paid for.  Lucifer says the damned could walk out of hell whenever they want to; but their guilt won't let them.  "Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to"?

I still think it should be to a new theology.  But I'm not sure what real good that would do, when there are so many problems not touched on by theology, when our culture is so deeply rooted in the racism we dare not accept, dare not deny.

"Oh my God, I think America...is racist!"

"By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded."

--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Rachel Martin has a sad, because Ta-Nehisi Coates' analysis of racism in America doesn't leave her with a savior who will fix it for us.

There is a profound difference between what's going on in Houston, and what's going on in America. Houston faces concrete problems which can be solved if we are willing to do what it takes to solve them, which mostly means:  spend the money, including the money lost to more development of areas that will simply be flooded by the next "unprecedented," but not at all unpredictable, storm.  What America faces is a more abstract problem:  it faces the "hidden wound" of its inherent racism, a racism that started literally with Columbus landing here and making slaves of the natives, and continues to this day, because it was literally slavery and racism that this country was built on.

But we can't admit that; "we" being white people, to whom the wound we inflicted on ourselves and our descendants for generations upon generations, is hidden.  It isn't hidden from those who suffer from that racism, like Mr. Coates.  Oddly enough, it wasn't hidden on Saturday Night Live not so long ago:

"This is the most shameful thing America has ever done."

Yeah, we're gonna be stuck there for awhile.

Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

Need to spend some time reading Mr. Coates' thoughts on this.

The Hidden Wound

Wendell Berry called racism America's "hidden wound." More and more, he's proven right.

I hadn't caught this until Maureen Dowd's column, and Atrios provided a link:

"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That's all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.

Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.

"This was the worst night of my life. We were really scared. We're getting no help. I know the military police are trying. But they're outnumbered," Jones said.

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line — much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome. The Hyatt was severely damaged by the storm. Every pane of glass on the riverside wall was blown out.

Your government at work.

"The Hidden Wound"

I shouldn't rely on Atrios for my springboards, but what the heck. He picks this up from DailyKos, so we're all in it together. The question before the house is: when will the U.S. accept nationalized health care? And the consensus answer is: when business demands it. And that is because?

Because we are a humane culture that cares about people first? Because we are a caring and generous people who take care of the needy, the poor, the destitute, the downtrodden? Because charity begins at home, and we take care of our own in this land of the free and home of the brave?

No. It's because Coolidge was right, and the business of American business is business. And it's become the business of American culture, too. We're all about business. All the time. All the other myths we tell ourselves about ourselves: George Washington and the cherry tree; Abe Lincoln and the log cabin; the Alamo; religious liberty; our generosity: it's all smoke. Ours is a "bottom line" culture, and the bottom line is: when it starts hurting business, is when we start doing something about it.

As Rick Wagoner, chairman and CEO of GM says: "I don't feel good about health care costs. I don't feel good about what it does to our profitability." What it does to the workers, is another matter. If not, in other words, for union contracts, market pressures, competition, legal obligations, well...this issue probably wouldn't even arise.

It would do us all well to remember the violence that greeted the birth of the labor unions. It would do us all well to remember people like "Mother Jones," who championed the cause of child labor protection. It would do us well to remember that when Teddy Roosevelt had his "bully pulpit" and acted to establish Yosemite National Park and the National Parks System, he did nothing to change the practice of using children to run factories on the "graveyard shift," where they were often left alone all night to attend large, powerful, and dangerous machinery. Changing that situation, one that we consider as abhorrent as slavery today, took a an unstinting effort by a lot of people. It wasn't finally done because business demanded it. It was done because humane, compassionate, caring people, demanded it. It was done because using children like that was almost as corrupting and debasing and inhuman as treating human beings as slaves. The practice of treating humans as less than human is a deeply ingrained one in American society, part of what Wendell Berry calls the "hidden wound" that we inflicted on ourselves early in our history, and from which we have never fully healed.

And we won't heal from it, until we realize that people matter more than things, that families matter more than possessions, that neighborhoods and schools and communities matter more than corporations and bottom lines. One does not negate the other, but we act as if it were either/or: either we have profit, or we have compassion; either we have the corporation, or we have no jobs at all.

If we wait for business to demand this change, we concede that business is all that matters to us, that mercantilism is all that counts. Why does it feel daring and naive and pointless, to tell Americans that there is more in this world than that?

The preacher done stopped preachin' and gone to meddlin'!

I want to agree with Josh Marshall, but, coming from a white man, I find this a bit hard to take in full:

But race is never an abstract reality without deep roots in class, gender and cultural factors. Coates’ vision and argument is so unitary and totalizing that any ‘excepts’ or ‘buts’ are not only dismissed but actually marshaled as further proofs of the totalizing premise.

Race has been a central organizing feature of American life – specifically the binary subordination of enslaved people of African ancestry to white Europeans – since the middle and late decades of the 17th century when African slaves first became a core feature of the economic order in the emerging commodity export colonies of what we now call the South. As the late Edmund Morgan explained forty years ago, the dignity and standing of middling whites – something like what we’d today call the ‘white working class’ – was not only buttressed by but was in many ways manufactured out of the subordination and degradation of African slaves. But no unitary explanation can ever capture the fullness or messiness or simply the complexity of human societies. There are exceptions and contradictions and complexities that get crushed by any totalizing narrative, perhaps especially by those which are largely true, precisely because they have so much accuracy, coherence and emotive and explanatory force.

Self-examination is hard; and the end result can sometimes feel like self-negation, like flagellation, like mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa which, especially to those outside the recognition, the realization, the acceptance of responsibility, can seem extreme and unnecessary.

But that's the whole point of self-examination.  The catechism, much as I might reject its soteriology, was not wrong:  "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."  You have to start with the extreme of the desert fathers.  And if Mr. Coates has become "oracular," then maybe the problem is in your heart, not in his.  It is not that Mr. Coates is a prophet from God who deserves your immediate respect and admiration; it is more that, if Mr. Coates has disturbed you deeply with his words, you need to examine why you are so disturbed.  George Packer and Josh Marshall want us to reject Mr. Coates' words and his ideas.  But if we are challenged by them, if they seem to flatten history itself into a singular cause and effect, perhaps that is because we don't really understand the cause and effect of race in America, especially if we are white men (as I know at least two of us are).

A white man in America can say:  "Race has been a central organizing feature of American life."  But a white man in America cannot finish that sentence with any kind of qualifier that lifts some of that burden from his shoulders.

This is our wound.  This is our hidden wound.  This is the wound we keep hidden, at all cost. Yes, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and set their children's teeth on edge; that's the responsibility of the elders to the children.  Humility is hard.  Responsibility is hard.  That does not mean we get to qualify them, to not accept that they are totally and absolutely applicable to us.  We cannot say:  "This far and no further."  We have to complete the journey.

secret de Polichinelle

Or, the danger of reading Derrida.

What is a secret?--Jacques Derrida, On The Name

A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that is a secret for no one. Leave it to the French to have a good phrase for it. Racism is our secret de Polichinelle, in America. Wendell Berry calls it our "hidden wound." But hidden from whom? From Richard Cohen, apparently. From whites in general, certainly. Perhaps the problem is that we don't have a definition of "racism" we can all agree on. Perhaps it is because we "whites" don't want to have a definition of racism.

To "whites" in America, racism is not a secret, it's a sickness; it's a diseased state of mind that doesn't even allow us to say "n---er" in public anymore. (Someone here in Houston likes to call local bookstores and ask if they have Dick Gregory's 1960's memoir, just to get the employee to say the word on the phone.) We prefer to call it the "N" word, to prove we would never harbor even a racist thought. "Racism," after all, is the Ku Klux Klan, and cross-burning, and white supremacy. It is not negligence, incompetence, or simple lack of attention. Racism is worse than that.

Or at least, it's hidden from us. "Us," of course, being the people accused of being racists. It is hidden from us because racism is a meanness we don't possess. It is a cruelty we would never knowingly inflict. And yet, if we intentionally hide from ourselves the results of our actions, if we knowingly choose not to know about the very people we have to exploit for our comfort, are we absolved because we didn't mean to be cruel?

How many of us enjoyed the music and culture and food of the French Quarter, and didn't spare a thought about the people who made it possible? And will we spare them a thought for long, now? How many of us, like George W. Bush, never spared a thought for people kept conveniently on the other side of the highway, the river, the railroad tracks, the boundaries of the neighborhoods that attraced the tourists? Did we think about how they had to suffer, to sing the blues? Or did we just admire the music and the culture and the food, and never stop to think where it came from, the lives the people led who gave us a place for our tourism, our curiosity. Twenty years ago I saw a young boy play jazz trumpet next to St. Louis Cathedral, a boy no more than 10 playing to make Wynton Marsalis weep with envy. He played for coins. I wonder where he is now.

Is racism really all that different from negligence? Is it only our intent that makes us good, not our actions? If I don't think I'm a racist, can I not be one? What is racism anyway, except an attitude, or a system, or a morality, that depends on, or exploits, or accepts, "race" as a determining factor of another person's worth? Was it racism when FEMA didn't begin to get aid to New Orleans until 5 days after the hurricane destroyed the levees? Or was it just incompetence? Was it racism when FEMA handed out $21 million in recovery funds to people in Miami after a hurricane struck Florida in an election year? When no one in Miami suffered damage from the storm, because it didn't strike Miami? Was it incompetence, or negligence?

We want racism to be all about intent, because then we let ourselves off the hook. We want racism to be all about what we mean, because then we can absolve ourselves from fault. Was it racism that made us enjoy New Orleans as tourists, but overlook the squalor and the despair that made the city Phalaris' bull? As we roasted them over the fire of our indifference and the capitalist system that served us so well and them so poorly, was it racism that made us enjoy the sweet music that came from their lips? If it was, we still cannot acknowledge it.

Racism is our secret de Polichinelle, but one we pretend no one even knows exists. Michael Brown and George W. Bush are not racists; they are, instead, incompetent. Much better to be incompetent than racist. Racism is the adjective we cannot stand to be attached to. Gretna, Louisiana was not racist; it was protecting its property. When 700 guests at a Hyatt were rescued by FEMA, it wasn't racism: it was your government at work, or perhaps it was just incompetence. As "white" people, we see a clear and identifiable difference. Because we never defend racism; it is the indefensible, the unforgivable, sin. But incompetence, well, that can be forgiven; that is, at least, understandable, and certainly not really anyone's fault. And so our racism is hidden; so we keep it secret. But it is a secret that is no secret; and it is hidden, only because we refuse to see it, even when it stares at us out of the national mirror of our TV.

If outrage were enough to change matters, the outrages of the response to Katrina, of the black faces crowded into the Superdome and the New Orleans convention center, of Michael Brown blaming the victims for their misery, or Michael Chertoff being "unaware" that there were any problems at the Convention Center even as CNN broadcast pictures of corpses there, would have been enough already to provoke a national wrath that would have brought down the whole sorry house of cards on every politician responsible for this nightmare. But then the responsibility would come back to us; and we don't like for that to happen. We understand that power brings responsibility, but we don't want responsibility; we only want the power. We want to be free to wield our national will in the world, and never to be accountable for the consequences. We still grieve our foolishness in Vietnam, but we don't accept responsibility for being there. In our national life, we blame anyone but ourselves. We grieve the unforgivable sin of slavery, not because we were slave holders once, but because our slave holding was based on race. Because we decided the value of a person based not on our conquest of them, but merely on our ability to hold power over them, and merely because of skin color, of pigmentation. No one else in history had committed a sin quite like that; no one else had built a country on it quite like that. No one else in modern history continues to sustain their country on that. Our nation is racist to the core. That is our secret de Polinichelle. That is why it is so disgusting we cannot bear to name it.

We cannot bear the truth.

If words were enough to change matters, Maureen Dowd (also here, and again here) and Anne Rice and Harold Meyerson would have already made the earth stand still. In fact, to just wander back through my own archives for this month is to renew the anger and disbelief and be amazed at how much has already gone cold, turned to ashes, plunged us into Lent without benefit of Mardi Gras. Thje Economist called it "The Shaming of America." But can we be shamed? Wouldn't that require accepting responsibility, first? Are we ready for that?

What it all comes down to
Is that I haven't got it all figured out just yet
I've got one hand in my pocket
And the other one is giving the peace
sign
--Alanis Morissette

Maybe that's the best we can do, right now, with our dirty little secret.

Change is the new pink

"Classic--a book which everyone praises, and no one reads."--Mark Twain

Martin Luther King is in danger of becoming a classic, so I want to consider the words of a man who really stood for change. His sermon on 31 March 1968 was: Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution . He took as his text Revelation 21, and he started off with the story of Rip Van Winkle who slept through the American Revolution, a revolution which, as Dr. King noted, changed history.

First, think about how truly frightening this statement is (and the fact that it was made over 40 years ago; there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun):

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away."

Why do I call it "frightening"? Because I learned in ministry that the one thing people do not want, is change. We all say we do. We all claim we want to be different, that "change" is good, that "improved" is better than the status quo, that we have to "move forward" toward an undefined goal which is always identified as better than what we have now.

And yet nobody wants that.

What we want is what we have: the familiar, the known, the same cereal/soap/politics/spirituality, just in a shinier, re-designed, labeled "NEW & IMPROVED!" box. We don't want something we've never had before; we want more of what we know. I look back over the 40+ years I've been observing/participating in American politics, and I realize no real change was ever in the offing. The ending of the interminable Vietnam War was supposed to change things, finally. A generation later, here we are again. The Civil Rights struggle was supposed to change how we talk about race in this country. 40 years after the death of Dr. King, the hidden wound of racism in America means we still discuss the candidacy of Barack Obama in terms of race. Some support him simply because of race, others say almost any criticism of him is inherently about race; and how does one argue they are wrong? Any attempt to slap that tar baby just gets you mired more deeply in that which you assure yourself you don't participate in. Change is the most frightening thing of all. It is a frightening thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with the challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution that is taking place in the world today.

But Dr. King could speak words of reassurance as well as challenge, something seldom heard from public officials today (and almost never heard from politicians). Change can be what happens to us; or it can be what helps us in our predicaments. The impact of "automation and cybermation" makes it possible for you to read these words right now, for me to access the sermons of Dr. King and read them again and again, even to listen to them. Change can certainly be a good thing, but that kind of change, again, largely happens to us, not with us. Someone brought us computers, the internet, blogs; and we took them and accepted them and adopted them. "And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away." And still nobody wants that. Look; look at how much has not changed:

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.

I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.

But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God’s children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.

As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, "Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, "I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night." And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

The hidden wound is racism; but the hidden wound is also denial. We willfully inflict this wound on ourselves everytime we deny the reality of poverty, of sin, of selfishness and evil. Two words in there are theological ones, and perhaps are too freighted to be included in that catalogue. But they are not just concepts; they are realities as much as selfishness and denial are realities. Still, Dr. King puts it just a bit better, when he introduces the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and he points out that the rich man didn't go to hell becaus he was rich:

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

Dives went to hell because of his sin; because he was selfish; because his selfishness was evil.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

Does this mean hell is a place, and the country itself will end up there? Not at all; but can anyone who has observed the national scene for the past 7 years seriously argue that the country hasn't gone to hell, and that our national selfishness, our pursuit of evil to ostensibly defeat evil, hasn't taken us there? We can quibble about the terminology, or we can focus on the reality. But don't take my word for it; consider the words of Dr. King:

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That’s the question facing America today.

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Auden famously removed his poem "September 1, 1939" from his canon because it ends with the line: "We must love one another, or die." "That's a damned lie," he explained; "we are going to die anyway." But there is physical death, and there is spiritual death, and the choice between nonviolence and nonexistence presents both to us. But one comes individually, and as a nation we are clearly willing to pay that price over and over again. The spiritual price, however, is another matter. That's the one we don't even acknowledge paying anymore; that's the one we're almost not permitted to acknowledge paying. I can't help but wonder, if Dr. King were to preach this sermon today: would the IRS investigate the church he preached in, for violating its 501(a) status*?

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

I've let Dr. King's words to most of the talking here as, indeed, how could I not? But his words speak to us today as much as they spoke to his audience 40 years ago. If change is the new good we seek, and certainly change from the political status quo of this country is a good thing, a desirable goal, what kind of change do we seek? "New styles of architecture/A change of heart," as Auden once described it? Or something more fundamental, more radical, something digging down to the root and seeking replacement, not just redecoration? "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away." That is God speaking, not us. That is not the voice of the politician, or the preacher, or the pundit, or the blogger; that is the voice of the Almighty, and when God says all things are new, former things have passed away, who are we to cling to those former things and insist this "new" not include them? We want the box to be new, but the cereal inside to be the same; the soap inside to be familiar; the politics and policies to continue the status quo. Most of all, we want to be safe, to be assured the future will look like the past, and deviate from the present only by leaving what we don't like, behind. But as Dr. King never tired of pointing out, there are very few times in history when we have that luxury; and this time, is not one of them, either:

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t goin’ study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.

Our goodwill is not proven by how well we take care of ourselves, or our own; it is not proven by how secure we are in our goods, in our possessions, in our comforts, even in our opinions. We are sleeping through the revolution if we don't realize the revolution must include a change in our hearts and minds also, that everything old must pass away in order to realize, to see, the new that is being made.

The words from Revelation Dr. King cites come at the end of the long symbolic descriptions of destruction and judgment that book is famous for. Dr. King makes no reference to that theme, but it is an important one. Just as there is no Easter without Good Friday, there is no new heaven and new earth without the destruction of the old heaven and old earth, and the hope is in the redemption after the calamity, not in avoiding the calamity altogether. Revelation is about how unjust the world is, and about how God will ultimately bring justice. The Greek idea of John's culture was that creation would return to chaos; while John saw that creation would ultimately be redeemed by justice. The idea that science or nature (evolution) leads inexorably to a telos or even makes progress, is rooted in John's assurance that all things shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Even our science, our knowledge, is rooted in this confidence, despite the chaos our senses percieve and history teaches. So we don't have to speak in terms of sin and evil and salvation, in order to understand justice and morality, or even to pursue ethics. But we do need to understand: the problems that face us today are the problems that faced us 40 years ago, are the problems that have faced us for millenia. And the only valid response to them, the only proper answer, is a massive act of conscience, and the agreement, the confession, that we aren't going to follow the old ways, anymore. And we aren't going to sleep through this revolution; because if we do, there'll be no revolution at all. And we'll have only ourselves to blame, for that.





*King's sermon was given at the National Cathedral, an Episcopal church. Coincidence? I think not.

Hide the wound

I remember "Mammy" images from my childhood.  Objects like cookie jars, salt and pepper shakers, etc.  I was a little kid, I didn't think much of them, any more than I considered "Aunt Jemima" a clearly racist caricature.

Sometime in the '80's, I took a weekend trip with friends to New Orleans.  Stayed in the French Quarter in a B&B with real French doors (the narrow ones, each about 12" wide, the whole opening no bigger than a standard door opening), listened to jazz in the Preservation Hall, ate beignets at Cafe Du Monde, the whole spiel.  And I came across a lot of "Mammy" figures that I hadn't seen since my childhood.  I was really convinced they'd been swept away sometime in the '70's, but there they were, larger than life and twice as ugly.

I put it down to the South changing far more slowly than I had wanted to realize.  The "n-word" finally was expunged from public discourse, but "Mammy" took a bit longer to go away.  I remember it on wall hangings (objects meant to be displayed), towels, even aprons, if memory serves.  And lots and lots of objects, though I don't remember ever seeing a cookie jar.

And now they're back, selling for four figures on eBay and other web outlets.  They are extremely racist, no less so than cartoons of blacks with balloon lips and bulging white eyes.  But apparently the generation buying them doesn't realize that.   They couldn't have nostalgia for them, so it must be just the novelty, and the rarity.  We are less overtly racist than before, but that doesn't make us any less racist than before.

I have thought of buying something on that New Orleans trip 3 decades ago, just for old time's sake, just for the nostalgia factor.  I knew better, even then.  I was repulsed by the items, and it didn't make it better to see them in more than one store.  Repulsed and attracted, because they were a childhood memory, because I thought they'd been lost forever.  But being a childhood memory, I knew what they were, and I knew why I was repulsed by them, even as they stirred memories of more innocent, or really naive, times.

We carry that naïveté with us, still, as a shield, as a sword, as a defense against being called "racist."  But just as ignorance of the law is no defense, being clueless is no excuse.

I do despair of ever healing this hidden wound, as long as we insist on keeping it hidden.

Smashing 💥 The Mirror 🪞

Notice the word “escape.” Too often Christian schools are set up as enclaves with high walls barring their students from “the world.” Attempts to engage other ideas are seen as attacking the Christian foundations of the school. https://t.co/RUYpz8VINe pic.twitter.com/YaodcaKq8J

— Jemar Tisby, PhD (@JemarTisby) February 16, 2022

Sunday morning worship is STILL the most segregated hour in America. I think Dr. King observed that. It's true, whoever said it first. Most people go to church to "escape" from "the world." I know Karl Barth said a preacher should hold a Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other. Put the newspaper down, Pastor, unless you want to be looking for a new church real soon.

In other words, “Don’t invite the Black guy to preach about race…unless he refers to it only as a past-tense reality. Plus those Black Christians have suspect theology anyway. They should leave ‘politics’ out of the pulpit.”https://t.co/RUYpz8E7VG pic.twitter.com/bT0HRPPtSH

— Jemar Tisby, PhD (@JemarTisby) February 16, 2022

I was fortunate to attend, not "Christian school," but a seminary where I was challenged emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and personally like I never was in college, graduate school, or law school (yeah, I'm educated far beyond my station in life).  I had a black professor who told us about going to department stores and having clerks watch him until he left, because, you know....they steal!  There was a black woman in my class, about the only one in the seminary the four years I was there, who was furious with white people for what they'd done to her, mostly things we were wholly unaware we were guilty of.  We were guilty, but not guilty in the sense of the law or even of eternal shame, ashes and sackcloth.   We learned the hard way (well, I will speak only for myself, though we all, in the end, came to love and respect each other, and honor her truths and re-examine our own), that "all white people benefit from a system that grants advantages to those considered white and disadvantages to Black people and other people of color." And yeah: "What you do with that fact says more about you than me."  Most white people cannot STAND that fact.  Too bad for them.

I keep telling y’all. CRT is simply the latest scare tactic meant to intimidate Christians into ideological conformity, curtail efforts to create racially inclusive organizations, and demonize those who speak up about it. Anyways, check out my work…https://t.co/2haGh0O7vz

— Jemar Tisby, PhD (@JemarTisby) February 16, 2022

I honestly think (believe; whatever) that CRT is not an external force being foisted on white people by FoxNews and random trolling Facebook pages.  The reaction is too intense, too personal.  I've seen it before.  White people recognize themselves in that mirror, and the only response is to smash the mirror.  "CRT" is a conveniently neutral term for the n-word and "I really don't like THOSE people!," and all the other things white people would like to be more comfortable saying (well, even when I was a child, the n-word was not used in polite company, but nobody demurred if you didn't want your daughter to marry one) if they only could.  The root problem here is Barack Obama was President for 8 years, and some people think it will take generations to wash that stain out of the body politic.

They think it; but they won't way it.  Or even admit they think it; not even to themselves.  They also know they "benefit from a system that grants advantages to those considered white and disadvantages to Black people and other people of color."  They know it, and they're afraid of losing those advantages (see, e.g., the reaction to the halftime show at Super Bowl LVI).

I SO thought we'd be over this shit by now.  That was before I understood this is America's hidden wound that cannot heal, because we work so hard to keep it hidden. And keep it a wound. Conservative means not letting anything change, right?

The Hiddenness of Our Wound

Okay, maybe it's not all McCain's fault:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

...
“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsdale, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

....
“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

....

“He doesn’t come from the African-American perspective — he’s not of that tradition,” said Kimi Oaks, a prominent community volunteer in the Mobile area, with apparent approval. Ms. Oaks, along with about 15 others, had gathered after Sunday services at Mobile’s leading Methodist church to discuss the presidential campaign. “He’s not a product of any ghetto,” Ms. Oaks added.

At the same time, however, she vigorously rejected the idea that race would be important in the election, a question met with general head-shaking from those assembled; Ms. Oaks said she was “terribly offended,” as a Southerner, at even being asked about this.

The quandary of the modern South in a nutshell: we have successfully excluded race from public discourse. We haven't begun to eliminate racism. What we have succeeded in doing is making racism unfashionable, and an offensive inference. But frankly, it was always that. In the South I grew up in "nigger" was an offensive term, and used as such. The only difference now is, people are more cautious about who they use the term around.

These sentiments are a distinct minority, just as it wasn't the entire town of Jasper, Texas, who murdered James Byrd, Jr. I've known some very decent people in East Texas; I still do. I've also known some very scary ones.

But America's hidden wound is only hidden because people insist on hiding from it. On the other hand, before you sink into despair, consider the generations espousing these sentiments, and what a minority they are today. Personal experience changes things, and in that there is always hope. Just consider the final words of the article:

“I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

Dare Not Speak Its Name

'You can’t tie me to white supremacy': Inside the fight over 'critical race theory' in America's richest county https://t.co/f6JAyv20Bq

— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 11, 2021

It's a very good article, detailed and thorough (an admitted rarity at Raw Story).  That quote alone, in the tweet, speaks volumes. 

As I've said repeatedly, in America you are either a white supremacist, and therefore a racist; or you're not.  It is not, as I've also noted, the way blacks and "browns" (I hate "Latino," it's a stupid grouping; but then you're stuck classifying by skin color, which is by definition, racist; yet what else do we have?) see the matter.  It's actually better if white Americans admit they are racists, the same way alcoholics and addicts admit their addictions.  It's the first step.

The article includes this quote, from a presentation made, ironically, by a group fearful of critical race theory:

"Since white people are in a state of privilege with regards to racial issues (meaning they can choose not to think about racial issues that don't affect them) they may respond to the whole discussion of race with discomfort."

That's exactly right, and exactly the problem with addressing our national "hidden wound."  I don't have to think about being stopped by a cop for DWB (Driving While Black), yet I've seen cops do that to black drivers.  (I used to sit and wait for my wife to leave work in St. Louis County.  I often observed police stopping drivers for some reason, I never knew why.  The drivers, 100% of the time, were black.  The sole black seminary professor told us stories of being followed, regularly, in department stores.  He looked as "gangsta" as I do, but he was black.  Nobody pays attention to me in department stores.  I had to think about those things to realize how much I've never had to think about racial issues.  I'm a white male, I walk through the world confident nobody's going to bug me, approach me, consider me for assault.  My daughter doesn't.  She explained that "hidden world" to me, too.  It opened wider when my wife nodded in agreement with my daughter, and said she knew what her daughter was talking about.  I've known my wife for 50 years.  I never even suspected.  Yeah, I have a lot of white male privilege.)

That quote in the tweet deserves to be put in context:

Broadly summarized, according to a slide in a presentation by the consulting group that provided the training, critical race theory "analyzes the role of race and racism in perpetuating social disparities between dominant and marginalized racial groups."

Mineo told Raw Story that people who oppose critical race theory don't deserve to be stigmatized.

"Being against critical race theory doesn't mean that someone holds the position of a white supremacist," he said.

The "slide presentation" is the same one that quote above came from.  The summary of critical race theory is seriously deficient, but so it goes.  Being against CRT doesn't mean you're a white supremacist; but it also doesn't mean you either correctly understand CRT, or that you aren't a racist.  And let me say here "racist" means having any opinion on blacks based on skin color rather than individual character, or being blind to the world we've created and defended since at least 1619 that preserves white male privilege above all else.  Yeah, that sounds harsh.  Truth hurts.  If you think that's "in your face," I sympathize.  But the problem is you, not the truth.

Gotta be honest.

So white people can't say they see the world in terms of race, or prefer the system of laws and historical benefits (I recently heard a simple economic commentary that black Americans in general don't have the history of family assets their white counterparts do, and so have a harder time entering into the wealth created by home ownership.  My grandfather ran a used car dealership before I was born.  He lived in a house built by his brother, a carpenter.  My father made his money from the GI Bill and going to college, where he got training to be a CPA.  He did well in the post-war boom, and helped me finance the house I now own free and clear.  He also put me through college, back when it was state-supported and frighteningly cheap.  He had wealth to pass on, and I benefit from that, directly and indirectly, now.  I've owned three houses myself, as he did in his lifetime.  That's a helluva lot of privilege I absolutely take for granted because I don't own two or three houses at once, or have the assets of a Bill Gates.  Most of us don't, but most white people have greater advantage and benefits than most non-whites in this country.  Is that due to racism?  Or is it just the natural order?  Or do we even think about it all that much?).  What we (white people, I mean) certainly don't do is see it in terms of race, or racism.  Racism is bad; and I'm not bad.  I just want to take care of my family, and preserve my property interests by being sure my neighborhood retains its value.  And that means concern for who lives there, among other things.

Flip it around:  you don't have to be a white supremacist to be a racist.  It's actually much easier to be a racist, than it is to be a white supremacist.  To put it in other terms, it's much easier to just not care about religion, than it is to be an avowed atheist.  One is a casual indifference, the other is an activity. Of course, if "none" is your default position (and that mainly means you don't have a church membership, or consider yourself a member of a church, synagogue, mosque, what have you.  Technically I'm a "none," but I'm certainly not an atheist, or even a non-believer), that doesn't affirmatively harm others.  But to say you aren't a racist because you aren't a white supremacist doesn't mean you don't still happily take advantage of the privileges afforded to you if you are white in America.  It just means you are walking through life with your eyes closed.

Orwell said the hardest thing to see is what's right in front of your nose. It's easier to ignore what's in front of your nose if your eyes are closed.  I'd amend his observation, and say the hardest thing to do is to get people to open their eyes.  It is happening (I would not give you false despair); but it's going very slowly.  Most people are quite comfortable with their eyes closed.  So much so I sometimes think the "original sin" is comfort. (I actually think the O.S is selfishness, but remaining comfortable is pretty much the first effect of selfishness.)

One last quote from that slide presentation:

"Critical theory is essentially a religion. Call it wokism, neo-Marxism, neo-racism or identity politics; it utterly lacks in humility and forgiveness and is practiced with religious zealotry."

Usually what people claim for their opposition is what they themselves are proclaiming in the first place.  "Religion" has become an empty term, a placeholder for false ideas, unfounded and untrue, but held zealously by its proponents against all challenges and non-adherents to the idea.  It's an odd replacement for "conspiracy theory," which is really what's being described.  "Religious zealotry" is an echo of the rise of terrorism supposedly rooted in Islam, but terorism and conspiracy theories spring from a common taproot, and that taproot is the refusal to take responsibility.  Oh, the opponents of what they think is CRT think they alone are taking up the responsiblity to protect America:

The Virginia Project launched a "Program on Un-American Activities," which charged that topics like "critical theory, critical race theory, queer theory, equity, transgenderism, cancel culture and other forms of Cultural Marxism" were being wielded as "ideological subversion" against the United States.

That kind of zealotry is actually a way of discarding responsibility, of replacing responsibility to others with responsibility to an idea.  When the idea alone matters, people don't matter.  That sounds like religion to some people, but "Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all."  And the hardest part of that kind of responsibility is that it starts first with the individual, and never really gets beyond that.  I am not responsible for you until I am at first fully responsible for me.  Making myself responsible for you (especially if you seek an abortion and I oppose it strongly; or if you don't support the political ideals I do) relieves me of being responsible for me.  You are the problem I must solve; I'm not a problem at all.  

To the extent proponents of "wokism," or "Neo-Marxism, neo-racism, or identity politics" (and no, I don't really know what any of those terms mean; they are pretty much just shibboleths, nothing more) lack humility and forgiveness, I would agree with the criticism of them in that quote.  But humility and forgiveness starts with me.  Those are my "problems."  I can't expect it from you if I'm not practicing it myself, and to practice it I must extend it to you.  That is what my religion teaches.  That is how my religion is responsibility.  And if it isn't that, my religion is nothing at all.

And any religion that is grounds for insisting I must make you change or see you defeated, is no religion at all.  It is, in fact, my religion that teaches me to see my racism, my hidden wound, the privileges I have inherited and continue to take advantage of, for what they are.  It is up to me to change or to see my sins defeated. That is my responsibility.

And responsibility is the hardest thing to face, of all.

Sympathy for the Devil

The assumption that "Trump voter = racist" is deeply corrosive to democracy. Also, wrong. https://t.co/vxFE571ILV

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) November 10, 2016

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name:

The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.

And so the answer is not to link white working-class people with African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, and progressives; the answer is to understand how misunderstood white working-class people are.

The ones who support Trump have made it quite clear what they understand:

How, exactly, do I misunderstand that?

So, yes, this is true:

So please understand what is happening here. Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality. The upper 20 percent of income earners, many of them quite liberal and rightly committed to the defense of minorities and immigrants, also believe in the economic meritocracy and their own right to have so much more than those who are less fortunate. So while they may be progressive on issues of discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism, they are blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.
The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals and radical activists.

But it doesn't lead to this:

The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans. If the left could abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.

Especially since the "inner pain and fear" being "misunderstood" there is that of white people.  Blacks and Muslims and Jews apparently have no "inner pain and fear. "  Well, correct that:  Jews are allowed to, but Black and Muslims are still predominantly "scary," so they need to confront that before confronting the "inner pain and fear" of working-class whites.  And as for that lack of "inherent malice," get real:

White students @ Southern Illinois University (@SIUC) decided to put on blackface and pose in front of a Confederate Flag to celebrate Trump pic.twitter.com/OEP2yEW3So

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

 Yeah, just a couple of misunderstood white kids expressing their inner pain and fear with no malice toward anyone.

Frankly, any pastor telling the truth will tell you there is an enormous amount of malice inherent in even the kindest person.  Pushed hard enough, they either won't oppose evil, however banal it is, or will actively (or passively) support it, because they like what it obtains; especially in the case of people in groups.  Working-class whites are not some special group we should now privilege with excessive concern.  At least not anymore than Democrats should continue to assume African-Americans and Hispanics will always turn out to vote for them (the largest single reason Hillary lost in the electoral college), or that they can't overcome the white working-class voters who will continue to vote in frustration against their own interests* (what, exactly, is a rich boy from Manhattan going to do for a former factory worker in North Carolina?).

And answering Chris Cilizza's tweet above:  considering the appointments Trump is making and planning to make, it seems clear he thinks racists have a place in his administration.  And racism is not equivalent to knuckle-dragging white sheet wearer who wants to shoot all non-whites on sight.  Didn't we learn that with David Duke?  It may be better politics to continue to make the white vote in American normative:  but it's racist to the core.  Besides, the idea is "corrosive" to democracy because there can't be that many racists in America?  Why not?  Did we remove them all after Reconstruction?  Then explain to me about the children harassing their peers across America right now.

I learned in law school that when something happens, especially when harm is done, someone is responsible.  It may be a wet sidewalk after rain, a piece of lettuce dropped on the floor of a grocery by a customer, or a product that is harmful even as it is good:  absent "acts of God," there is someone to be held accountable.  Accidents do not just happen.  I learned in seminary that the choices we make matter, whether we make them consciously or not.  Our hearts may be pure, but we are responsible for our actions, not our intentions.  I learned responsibility is the most important matter in human existence and in living with others, and it is the thing we most decline to accept for ourselves, though we alway accept it for others.

We want to keep the hidden wound hidden; to pretend what is happening is not happening, because "humankind cannot bear very much reality."  But, as Jamelle Bouie puts it:  "What we cannot do is pretend this wasn’t a choice, that no one was responsible."  We cannot do that; but I'm sure we will do it anyway.

Dammit.

*No, seriously:

In Macon County, North Carolina, officials are telling residents to wear special masks to keep out the dangerous particulates. Four other counties—Henderson, Graham, Clay, and Swain—are under mandatory evacuation orders. In Rabun County, Georgia, the fire departments are working 16-hour shifts, and these are not large fire departments.

Last Tuesday, by an average spread of 41 percent, those six counties voted to elect a president who believes that the climate crisis is a hoax created in China. Tantrums have consequences.