| Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 13:11:38 -0600 From: "David L. Moore" dlmoore@selway.umt.edu> |
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Learning New Ways to Communicate About |
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If we are to deal with racism, race-baiting, denials of racism, accusations, etc., we need to learn new ways to communicate. I suggest we sponsor communications training, sooner than later, especially around diversity issues, in Pacifica communities and stations, but for now here are some initial suggestions in a direction that might move beyond oscillations of accusations: 1) In order to have actual dialogue about race and racism within Pacifica, a first step is for each of us to acknowledge racist tendencies within ourselves. For me as a white person raised in 20th C America, to claim that I am free of racism would be both naive and disingenuous, at best, or self-deceptive and hypocritical at second best. Worst-case scenarios proliferate toward violence from such claims. I can claim good intentions. I might even claim a lifetime of small efforts to root out racism from my own ego mind, and a lifetime of efforts to heal racial injustice in society. But I cannot claim to be free of racism internally. Nor can I ever claim to be free of white privilege externally. Nor can Pacifica claim to be free of racism or white privilege. That's a starting point, a given. To acknowledge white privilege and racist cultural training is to both clear the air for now and to prepare for its cloudy intrusions into future exchanges. Further, to briefly address some much larger issues, it is not sophistry to define racism in relation to power, e.g., where "racism" is race prejudice that supports white privilege; and where "racialist" is race prejudice that does not support white privilege. Those distinctions map certain realities that it is valuable to recognize. Both whites and people of color might be racist or racialist. The history of EuroAmerican "racism" is deeply entwined with the history of slavery and of conquest, where it was not racism that created slavery or conquest, but the other way around. Slavery created racism, that is the modern racism that shapes our economy. Conquest needed rationalization, since it was so un-Christian! so conquest created racism, not the other way around. Race provided the scapegoat for Europe's own sins, and our nation was founded on that fantasy of the "vanishing Indian." (& "Custer Died for Your Sins!") Modern racism was molded out of justifications of black slavery and of dispossession of Indian land, and is quite different from earlier European or various indigenous non-racial perspectives of kinship, nation, and solidarity. If this historical perspective on the slavery-conquest-economy as the basis of racism has even a small value, it is not a stretch to claim that people of color who speak against whites are in fact not racist, but racialist -- precisely because they do not support white privilege. And further, people of color or whites who speak against white privilege might be neither racist nor racialist, but simply critiquing a white supremacist civilization. Why is this distinction relevant? Because it accounts for the power relations that are the real issue. 2) The more philosophical distinction between individual choices and social forces (free will) will always remain a spiraling paradox. The trick is moving with the spiral rather than trying to lock it down. Such paradoxes are the Kierkegaardian basis on which Pacifica was built in Lew Hill's thinking (extended by Wittgenstein's clarity of language) in conversation with Roy Finch, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Moore, Eleanor McKinney, and others. Kierkegaard's solution to paradox was the "leap of faith." Lew's solution was "pacifist dialogue" as a pragmatic translation of that leap. Both of these solutions move with the spiraling paradox. The solution is not to land on one side or the other: neither to proclaim "I am not racist!" nor to wallow in white guilt complaining "I am racist." Instead, it's a dynamic ongoing process, not a static claim. Thus the leap of faith translates in Pacifist dialogue into trust -- trust that if we get to the heart of the conflict, to the heart of each person's "point of view," we will find there common ground, a seed of unity, a mutuality from which we can build something new. Pacifist dialogue does not dismiss anybody's point of view. Nor does it delimit the other's worst expressions by dismissive labels or with irony and reactive rage. For an example of the individual/social paradox, I might choose to be race-blind, but my society constructs me -- and the others in this conversation -- racially. Society places me within language and economic circumstances by racial categories. The liberal dream of the completely free individual pretends that such social forces -- however much they are based on illusion -- do not have material power. America's liberalism has always wanted to forget its past, its history, its social construction. Based on the social facts of racist economics, it is not illogical, nor is it mere sophistry, to make distinctions between "racist" language as language supported by white privilege versus "rage" language oppressed daily by that same white privilege. Those who enjoy white privilege but who work against racism need not be dismissed ad hominem as "honorary persons of color." They are human beings. They might be trying to get at the historical and psychological truth of themselves as well as of society. For another key example of the social/individual paradox, affirmative action was constructed from the "social" perspective to offset historical forces of racism that continue to work against women and people of color. Seen only from an "individual" perspective, affirmative action is accused of being "reverse racism." There's the oscillation of accusations rather than a dialogue. If we approach that paradox of social racism versus individual merit by dialogue, we can build incremental, dynamic processes to address both sides of the dialectic, and perhaps bring in other angles. But if we merely exchange individual accusations of reverse racism, we will remain static rather than dynamic, locked in conflict rather than seeking to understand and resolve it. 3) The clearest formula I ever heard for post-racist dialogue comes from Shoghi Effendi, who suggested simple honesty and patience as the two prerequisites. Whites have to honestly face our white privilege and the white supremacist foundations of this modern society and civilization -- built by capitalism and colonialism on the backs of people of color who continue to be excluded from power. More often than not, that privilege has inculcated in us an "inherent sense of superiority" that takes many miscommunicative forms. Whites -- as a first expression of our honesty, have to be patient with the rage that our exclusive privileges trigger in those we hurt. People of color also have to do the amazing thing called patience -- which is not passive but clearly communicates a perspective on white privilege that whites, like fish blind to water, are the last to see. It is a huge task for people of color to be patient with those who don't see either the little daily oppressions or the huge centuries of oppression of race manifested in today's world. Yet an honest communication, to reach the mutual, common ground of humanity that must open like a new idea in order to heal oppression, has to be patient to get across. 4) None of this means being "nice." It does not mean obfuscation. It does not mean hiding the truth. It means efficiency of communication, unclouded by the rhetoric of negation of the other person. It does require, perhaps, a cultural value that is more common in some indigenous and Asian cultures than in EuroAmerica: humility. If modesty and moderation follow on a humble approach to life, they might arise from a recognition of our common humanity -- rather than an obscuring obsession with my being first and biggest and best. If we clear out language that negates the other, we can get toward that person in both the other and ourselves. That common ground is somewhere in that person, and the trick is to speak to the person while disagreeing with their ideas. Or more challenging, to recognize the legitimacy of their ideas from their perspective, and offer a larger perspective beyond even one's own. The collateral trick is to speak one's ideas without attaching one's personhood to them, to be open to changing one's ideas, to listen to the other person not with manipulation but with compassion. Now what do we do when someone calls us racist? Do we deny and defend, or do we attempt dialogue? What is this Pacifica, anyway?
Yours, |