First off, I would like to say that I work with some amazing people. I will address just how amazing they are in a different post. The reason I mention it here is that this morning I attended a meeting wherein we all discussed an extremely delicate, profoundly important issue in order to establish a protocol for a specific event and it was one of the most trenchant and moving experiences in which I’ve been involved.
In mid-July, Harper Lee’s novel, Go Set A Watchman, will be released. That I am working at a bookstore when this is happening is incredible. That I am working at a bookstore with the commitment to social justice and awareness that Left Bank Books brings to the table is doubly so, and one of the reasons I feel privileged is the discussion we engaged this morning.
It concerned a particular word and its use, both in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird and in the larger community of which we are all a part. Necessarily, it was about racism.
I’ve written about my experiences with racism previously. One of the startling and dismaying aspects of the present is the resurgence of arguments which some may believe were engaged decades ago and settled but which we can now see have simply gone subterranean. At least for many people. For others, obviously nothing has gone underground, their daily lives are exercises in rehashing the same old debates over and over again. Lately it has been all over the news and it feels like Freedom Summer all over again when for a large part of the country the images of what actually went on in so many communities, events that had gone on out of sight until television news crews went to Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and the images ended up in everyone’s living rooms often enough to prick the conscience of the majority culture and cause Something To Be Done.
What was done was tremendous. That an old Southerner like Lyndon Johnson would be the one to sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law is one of the mind-bending facts of our history that denies any attempt to reduce that history to simple, sound-bite-size capsules and forces reconsideration, assessment, and studied understanding that reality is never homogeneous, simplistic, or, more importantly, finished.
It became unacceptable for the culture to overtly treat minorities as inferior and allocate special conditions for their continued existence among us.
Those who objected to reform almost immediately began a counternarrative that the legal and social reforms were themselves the “special conditions” which were supposed to be done away with, conveniently forgetting that the level playing field such objections implied had never existed and that the “special conditions” that should have been done away with were the apartheid style separations and isolations these new laws were intended to end and redress. Pretending that you have not stepped on someone for so long that they no longer know how to walk and then claiming that they are getting unwarranted special treatment when you provide a wheelchair is about as disingenuous and self-serving as one can get, even before the active attempt to deny access to the very things that will allow that person to walk again.
Some of this was ignorance. Documentary films of southern high school students angry that blacks would be coming into their schools when they had schools “just as good as ours” can only be seen as ignorance. Spoon fed and willingly swallowed, certainly, but the cultural reinforcements were powerful. The idea that a white teenager and his or her friends might have gone to black neighborhoods to see for themselves whether or not things were “just as good” would have been virtually unthinkable back then. Not just peer pressure and adult censure would have come in play but the civic machinery might, had their intentions been discovered, have actively prevented the expedition.
But it is ignorance that is required to reinforce stereotypes and assert privilege where it ought not exist.
Bringing us to the present day, where one may quite honestly say that things have improved. That African-Americans are better off than they could have been in 1964. That for many so much has changed in two generations that it is possible for both sides to look at certain things and say, “hey, this is way better!”
Which prompts some to say—and believe—that the fight is over.
And the fact that it is not and that the arguments continue prompts some to believe it is a war and that the purpose of at least one side is hegemony over the other.
Which leads to events like that in Charleston and Dylann Roof’s savage attack. He’s fighting a war.
The fact that so many people have leapt to excuse his behavior demonstrates that the struggle is ongoing. I say excuse rather than defend, because with a few fringe exceptions I don’t see anybody hastening to defend his actions. What I see, though, are people taking pains to explain his actions in contexts that mitigate the simple hatred in evidence. For once, though, that has proven impossible because of Roof’s own words. He was very clear as to why he was doing what he did.
He is terrified of black people.
Irrational? Certainly. Does that mean he is mentally ill? Not in any legal sense. He has strong beliefs. Unless we’re willing to say strong beliefs per se are indicative of mental illness, that’s insufficient. That he is operating out of a model of reality not supported by the larger reality…?
Now we get into dicey areas. Because now we’re talking about what is or is not intrinsic to our culture.
Without re-examining a host of examples and arguments that go to one side or the other of this proposition, let me just bring up one aspect of this that came out of our morning staff meeting and the discussions around a particular word.
After the Sixties, it became unacceptable in the majority culture to use racial epithets, especially what we now refer to as The N Word. We’ve enforced social restrictions sufficient to make most of us uncomfortable in its use. In what one might term Polite Society it is not heard and we take steps to avoid it and render it unspoken most of the time.
To what extent, however, have we failed to point out that this does not mean you or I are not racists. Just because we never and would never use that word, does that mean we’ve conquered that beast in ourselves or in our culture?
Because we can point to everything from incarceration rates all the way up to how President Obama is treated to show the opposite. But because “race” is never the main cause, we claim these things have nothing to do with it. We have arranged things, or allowed them to be so arranged, that we can conduct discriminatory behavior on several other bases without ever conceding to racism, and yet have much the same effect.
Because in populist media we have focused so heavily on That Word and its immediate social improprieties, we have allowed many people to assume, perhaps, because they’ve signed on to that program that they have matriculated out of their own racism and by extension have created a non-racist community.
That’s one problem, the blindness of a convenient excuse. Put a label on something then agree that label represents everything bad about the subject, then agree to stop using the label, and presto change-o, the problem is gone. Like sympathetic magic. Except, deep down, we know it’s not so.
The deeper problem, I think, comes out of the commitment, made decades ago, to try to achieve a so-called “colorblind society.” I know what was meant, it was the desire to exclude race as a factor in what ought to be merit-based judgments. No such consideration should be present in education, jobs, where to live, where to shop. We are all Americans and essentially the same amalgamated shade of red, white, and blue. (Or, a bit crasser, what Jesse Jackson once said, that no one in America is black or white, we’re all Green, i.e. all classifications are based on money. He was wrong.)
While there is a certain naïve appeal to the idea, it was a wrongheaded approach for a number of reasons, chief of which it tended to negate lived experience. Because on the street, in homes, people live their heritage, their family, their history, and if those things are based, positively or negatively, on color, then to say that as a society we should pretend color does not exist is to erase a substantial part of identity.
But worse than that, it offers another dodge, a way for people who have no intention (or ability) of getting over their bigotry to construct matters in such a way that all the barriers can still be put in place but based on factors which avoid race and hence appear “neutral.”
Demographics, income level, residence, occupation, education…all these can be used to excuse discriminatory behaviors as judgments based on presumably objective standards.
This has allowed for the problem to remain, for many people, unaddressed, and to fester. It’s the drug war, not the race war. It’s a problem with the educational system, not a cultural divide. Crime stats have nothing to do with color. Given a good rhetorician, we can talk around this for hours, days, years and avoid ever discussing the issue which Mr. Roof just dumped into our living rooms in the one color we all share without any possibility of quibbling—red.
We’ve had a century or more of practice dissembling over a related issue which is also now getting an airing that is long overdue. The Confederate flag. And likewise there are those trying to excuse it—that there never was a single flag for the entire Confederacy is in no way the issue, because generations of Lost Cause romantics thought there was and acted as if that were the case, using Lee’s battleflag to represent their conception of the South and the whole Gone With The Wind æsthetic. We’ve been exercising that issue in our history since it happened, with even people who thought the North was right bowing the sophistry that the Civil War was not about slavery.
Lincoln steadfastly refused to accept a retributive agenda because he knew, must have known, that punishment would only entrench the very thing the country had to be done with. He did not live to see his convictions survive the reality of Reconstruction.
So we entered this discussion about the use of a word and its power to hurt and its place in art. My own personal belief is that art, to be worthwhile at all, must be the place where the unsayable can be said, the unthinkable broached, the unpalatable examined, and the unseeable shown. People who strive for the word under consideration to be expunged from a book, like, say, Huckleberry Finn, misunderstand this essential function of art.
For the word to lose valence in society, in public, in interactions both personal and political, it is not enough to simply ban it from use. The reasons it has what potency it does must be worked through and our own selves examined for the nerves so jangled by its utterance. That requires something many of us seem either unwilling or unable to do—reassess our inner selves, continually. Examine what makes us respond to the world. Socrates’ charge to live a life worth living is not a mere academic exercise but a radical act of self-reconstruction, sometimes on a daily basis.
Which requires that we pay attention and stop making excuses for the things we just don’t want to deal with.
