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Within culture exists expectations and norms that go nearly unnoticed from within, forces that stir thought, emotion, and behavior into pattern. A sputtering flow of formative anxiety shapes us through culture, for better and for worse. Acknowledging prejudices from within our respective subgroups allows us to grow beyond them, our beliefs and behavior to become differentiated from them. As awareness increases, so do our capacities for understanding and relationship and with them a greater wholeness and peace for all.
I am a white man from a small town in Northeast Texas where race comes primarily in two colors—black and white. I was born into a world accepting of the myth that black skin originated when Ham, the son of Noah, received a curse from his father after telling his brothers of Noah’s sin. As a child, black people smelled funny to me, and their hair seemed greasy. I believed that there were not really black families like the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. I grew up in a place and time where the desegregation of black and white schools is not a too distant memory. The difference between my generation and the generation before me is that all I have known is being together. Yet society has its own memory, and memory has a way of lingering.
I was careful to stay away from black students as a young child. Interaction with them was always too involved. They liked to touch you on the arm as they spoke, stand close, and were intrusive as they played. I remember my music teacher in elementary school, a black woman, telling me, “It’s okay. It won’t rub off” as I shied away from her hand on my arm, as it led me to get up from my seat.
In my sophomore year of high school, my locker was next to Reggie’s locker. The year before, his junior year, Reggie had won five gold medals in the state track meet. I am a Christian, and I remember wondering if Reggie was as well. I decided one day, with intermingled excitement and anxiety, to give him a paperback New Testament with pictures and personal testimonies from major league stars. I had purchased it at a Promise Keepers conference I attended at the old Texas Stadium.
When I worked up the courage, he smiled and accepted it graciously. He told me about the church that he attended and how his father was a deacon. He also told me that he had never been to a White church. I told him that I had not been to a Black church. I asked him if he wanted to go to mine sometime. He said, “Sure,” and I said, “How about this week?” I was trembling with the same intermingled excitement and anxiety as I drove to pick him up at his home in the predominately black part of town. As I pulled to the curb by his house, a black man dressed in a tuxedo came over to introduce himself as Mr. H., Reggie’s father.
Before I knew it, Mrs. H. had sat me down on the couch and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. “No ma’am,” I said, gripping my seat, especially when Reggie’s older brother walked straight through the living room and into his room, where I heard him yell to Reggie who was in the shower, “Hey, Reggie, why you have a white boy coming to see you?” Mrs. H. brought out her mother-hoard of photo albums, pictures of Reggie’s entire life. She gave me a play-by-play while she fixed breakfast in the kitchen, finished getting ready for church, and reminded Reggie his company was here.
Reggie, in the mix of it all, had come out in his towel to apologize for running late and to let me know that he would be ready soon. Before I knew it, he was ready and dressed fancy. It may have been the first time a black person had come to the high school Sunday school class at my church. And maybe the first time anyone had come in a full suit and tie. Other students knew who Reggie was. I was so proud that he was my guest.
Then I was reminded I was to perform in a creative movement group to “Great is Thy Faithfulness” in the worship service. Think Napoleon Dynamite. I had completely forgotten. I almost wriggled my way out of it, not wanting to embarrass myself in front of Reggie. I remember looking out at the congregation of over four hundred and Reggie the only black skin in the room. I thought of how out of place he looked and remember looking back anxiously at him over and over again to gauge his reaction to the rather unusual event.
I have remembered that early experience with Reggie at a time when our awareness of and attention to racial disparities has temporarily emerged from the collective unconscious. In it, I find something of getting to know one another in spite of differences and fear, of speaking up and stepping into each other’s lives in more intrusive ways, meaningful ways.
In the preceding year, we have witnessed a steady stream of violence and debate centered on the interpretation of acts and meaning of acts, symbols and meaning of symbols. We are experiencing creatures, conditioned through experience, and our exposures and encounters indelibly mark bias and perception. In one case, the symbolic meaning of an image—an old flag—thrust us into division and dialogue, and in so many others—nearly all—that powerful image of meaning has been the color of skin itself.
The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer cast our lives as an interpretive venture—“To be a human is to be constantly structuring [one’s] world in terms of meaning” (Strenger, 1991). We are always in a perspective, a way of understanding and configuring the world, especially in relationship with other people. We necessarily bring ourselves—with our world experience as pre-understanding and meaning generating context—and step into situations, or into the world of the other. Gadamer (1975) reflected, “If we place ourselves in the situation of someone else, then we shall understand him, i.e. become aware of the otherness, the indissoluble individuality of the other person, by placing ourselves in his position (p. 272).”
We understand the meaning of an image or historical event, just as a work of art or a text, in relation to our own situation and in the light of our own concerns, and in that context, realizing new potential meaning is making a difference to it. Think of perspective as standing in a place and looking out over a horizon. As we move about, so changes our available horizon and, thus, our perspective. And we are able to take the previously seen horizons with us. In our mind’s eye, in our understanding, we integrate them into our inner map of the world, and we expand our appreciation for the breadth and beauty of God’s creation.
Our horizons are being continually formed. The philosopher Hans-George Gadamer contended, “We have continually to test our prejudices,” and in so doing, adjust our understanding (1975, p. 273). Interpretive understanding is, in this sense, a whole-person endeavor and not purely rational.
Segments of our society have allowed propaganda to drive many further to the fringes and further apart. Bill Cosby’s fall from grace has served to bend white ears to subversive racist propaganda we have sadly been reminded remains whipstitched along the fabric of our society.
The psychologist Martin Buber taught that we find ourselves too easily engaging one another as “Its,” failing to see in each the image of God. Whether craftily or compulsively, Lord knows we do it, don’t we? Only in relationship can we transform our misperceptions. We can hardly move toward wholeness and peace as individual persons or groups unless we also move toward wholeness and peace as a community of persons and groups. And we must rid ourselves of the notion that we can talk ourselves into it from a distance. We can’t.
References
Gadamer, H. (1975). Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward.
Strenger, C. (1991). Between hermeneutics and science: An essay on the epistemology of psychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
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Originally published on LinkedIn
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