Mr. Blow, I don't know if this will help when people vehemently deny being racist. It's something I wrote after Ferguson, me being a reflective sociologist-type. I offer it in the hope it may help (not to excuse racism, but to dig into one facet).
I saw TV news coverage of a counter demonstration seeking to support the officer whose shots killed Michael Brown. We saw the woman in mirrored state patrol-style sunglasses who spoke from a platform, presumably to a like-minded crowd. When this woman, probably in her thirties, called for support for the officer, Darren Wilson, what struck me was she locked together her appeal for support with a categorical statement that his action was “justified.” This has meaning worth examining. She offered no evidence justifying his action. She apparently felt evidence was not called for. But that’s not what requires closer examination. Instead, she linked support of the officer to justification (of the killing). And vice versa. If you are set on supporting the officer, you must declare him justified regardless. That was what the support hinged on. That just turned me inside out, and it didn’t help that I credited her with sincerity, with an unawareness of her own assumptions, her own universe of meaning. Obviously, the linkage is a shared one, among how many I have no idea.
So, before I got all caught up in painting her white folk audience as racists, wherever that gets us, I pondered whether this is a pattern in social thinking—even outside of racial violence. Does supporting someone mean you have to say he or she was right? I think what was really going on in making that linkage is that some in Ferguson were having unmanageably strong emotions that threatened to engulf them in shame. Or in fear, fear of great damage to their world, their town. Unlike the Victoria harbor tour operator who was willing to admit wrongs of two centuries standing, this situation was immediate. It’s strange to think that admitting a wrong action, even a horribly wrong action, just the admitting could feel like it might usher in the end of your world. But is it really so strange to our experience? It’s not just there in Ferguson. It’s in international news—recall when the new Jerusalem embassy was celebrated and dozens of Gazans killed in May of 2018. The next day, an Israeli citizen, clearly disturbed, was quoted as saying, “When we hear of the dead, it pains us. I hope at least that each bullet was justified.” (NYT May 16, page 1).
The word “justify” in my old Collegiate Merriam Webster’s has several meanings, leading with this one: “To prove or show to be just, right, or reasonable. Absolve.” But that is not all. In the same way that this shooting brought out very old race reactions, an old definition seems to have nosed its way back in the emotional aftermath: further down in the definitions, Webster lists one I call almost archaic, because it is associated with the old-time religion: “To judge, regard, or treat as righteous and worthy of salvation.” (Italics mine.)
Is that old definition still today quietly giving an extra zingy charge to the current standard definition? We don’t just want to be in the right—we don’t only want to be shown that we act reasonably—No, we desperately need to be in the right, at the risk of severe punishment. Not jail, but by being despised, shunned, and drummed out of society, as the unsaved. For minor wrongs, this social treatment may not be permanent, but it can cause a severe kind of pain even so. I notice it in myself, and just did with Justice at the Table, though the drama was held within myself. Without thinking about it, I feel if I’m wrong I become unacceptable somehow.
The night previous to the newscast, the movie “The Horse Whisperer” ran on TV, and a scene struck me for the way it illustrated the meme. The storyline itself is certainly not a common instance—a teen who’s been maimed in a horrific accident that cost her friend’s life is having trouble healing. But the story's solution is a commonly prescribed one. She can’t be healed until a trusted elder tells her, “Grace, you did nothing wrong.”
Well, but what if she had done wrong? Would we throw her away? When you scale the emotion up to social groups, it feels like the sky will fall if we don’t re-stabilize our world quickly and with whatever force or harshness it takes in order to feel that we, or our kind, did nothing wrong.
But we can do something better than that reaction. We can acknowledge that we may have a part in the cultural contradictions that lay behind the wrongful action of one of us. And we begin to do things differently, with love, or at least respect.
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