Whiteness and the Other

“…  if you want to be part of the solution, the road ahead is clear: Recognize you’re the enemy they need; show concern, not contempt, for the wounds of those that brought Trump to power; by all means be patient with democracy and struggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.”

 —Andrés Miguel Rondón

                                                     

America cannot become great without embracing and working through the tragedy of slavery—all that has unfolded from the way that almost unimaginable suffering and injustice is entwined with our origin story and continues to the present day.

America cannot become great without embracing and working through the genocidal suffering undergone by native Americans and the way that suffering and injustice is entwined with our origin story and continues to the present day.

America cannot become great without acknowledging and embracing the ordeals of the immigrants who have flowed in from so many countries and still try to come in until the present day.

America cannot become great without continuing to push for gender equality and overcoming gaps of worth that continue to the present day.

What makes us special as a nation? Even beyond our freedoms, isn’t it the soul power of the African-American experience, the steel of dignity that has been hardened upon the anvil of unmerited suffering? Isn’t it the deep connection of the Native Americans to the sacredness of our landscapes, showing us that if we degrade what surrounds us, we degrade ourselves? Isn’t it the manifold contributions of all the different streams of immigrants (including Mr. Trump’s grandfather) who have made the effort to assimilate and contribute to the dynamism of our unity-in-diversity? Isn’t it because we remain a beacon of possibility, in spite of setbacks, to women worldwide?

Our public airways and our politics have been polluted by an insidious fog of polarization, based implicitly in white male privilege, which denies the full human reality of the other-than-white. Events like 9-11 didn’t help, but the continuous sneer of commentator-entertainers like Rush Limbaugh has further frayed the delicate web of civil discourse, where listening is equal in value to speaking. A habit of continuous rant has overtaken the easy camaraderie of shared citizenship that is still possible. Our media culture has gone from the already sensational “if it bleeds, it leads,” to the far more deeply sensational “if it divides, it abides.”

This perversion of our precious freedom of speech is far more dangerous than crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater—because it is based in the materialism, racism and militarism against which Martin Luther King warned us not long before he was assassinated.

It is materialist because media figures make piles of money by using polarizing frames and because politicians use these frames to rise to power. It is racist because it makes the non-white Other into a faceless mass of complaining, angry, helpless, lawbreaking victims—or, in the case of Obama, into an uppity executive who overstepped his bounds and had to be checked by an obdurate legislative “No!” It is militaristic because it responds to the threat of the Other with overwhelming force (check out the kinds of equipment our police have come to possess since 9-11).

And so at this moment a huge gap has been manufactured in our country, a gap that has the odd quality of being very real and at the same time the grandest of illusions.  The manipulators of political and media power would have us believe that there is an unbridgeable distance between the pain of the pro-Trump unemployed coal miner and the pain of the anti-Trump black woman who experiences housing discrimination, or the pain of a pro-Trump Christian evangelist who feels overwhelmed by the pace of change and the pain of an anti-Trump transgender student being bullied at school.

That is the most effective way that the Powers That Be try to maintain a high wall that blocks our progress toward the inclusive equal-opportunity society we think we are and can still become.

Obama urged us to overcome our divisions. He was right to try and time will vindicate him. The wall between us and them (fill in the us; fill in the them), reinforced by the way we sort ourselves into homogenous groups of adherents on the Internet, is the Big Lie in an interdependent world. This wall will inevitably crumble and fall. There are many reasons why citizens did or did not vote for Donald Trump, but are the differences between those who did and those who did not all that great? They can still be overcome—by keeping in mind how much we have in common, and how illusory is the power of the forces that seek to artificially divide us.

The Light of the World

There are two things that too many of us seem to be reluctant to take in about present conditions on our planet—the first is the threat of mass death, either suddenly by nuclear war, or gradually by changes in climate. The second is the possibility of reconciliation among enemies on the basis of common goals.  Our brains are not particularly well wired by evolution to see either of these both as an immediate threat and as an equally immediate, available opportunity. Perhaps for the first time in history, we are gradually becoming aware that the two shed significant light on each other. In fact, in our historical moment they have become an inseparable duality. As the poet W.S. Auden wrote, “We must love one another or die.”

In a world where nuclear weapons are so destructive that it would only take the detonation of a few hundred of them to fatally affect agricultural production around the globe, perhaps we can now begin to see the absurdity of our hatreds in a new light—almost as if we were growing a new kind of mind more evolutionarily suited to the realities that loom around us. The destructiveness of our weapons is so enormous in scale, that even the most intractable loathing and fear we may feel weighs like a feather measured against a ton of lead. It is really the same, in only a slightly less urgent way, for global climate instability: the imperative has become a level of cooperation on the basis of a shared desire to survive that our evolution has not prepared us for as well as it might, but which is nonetheless essential.

It’s as if a malign alien presence had landed on the earth and all the parties to international and civil conflict, Sunnis and Shia, Arab and Jew, the U.S. and the Taliban, suddenly realized that we had so much more in common with each other as members of the human species than with the aliens, that it would become obvious that we needed to cooperate against the common threat. But we do face  common threats: climate issues, and war itself, with the potential of any war anywhere going nuclear by accident, misunderstanding or passive drift. The “alien” we ought to fear and unite to overcome is found in two places, one physically real, the other psychologically real: the weapons themselves, and the way we have been programmed by evolution to think about the “other,” the different, the fearsome stranger, the enemy.

Our collective fears, hates and desires for security have led us to unlock the secrets of the atom and evolve out of those secrets a bizarre system: deterrence by mutually assured destruction. If we again imagined aliens coming to our planet, this time benign ones, how amazed they would be by the utter ridiculousness of the trap we have willingly set for ourselves. Would they be able to distinguish between the hapless terrorism of the suicide bomber and the strategic deliberation of the nuclear  “balance of terror”? Are these two so completely different? Certainly not either in their threat to the innocent or in their futility.

The trap in full is not just deterrence,  but the way we think about the usefulness of any kind of violence, on any level, to solve problems—the assumptions humans make that flying a plane into a building or setting off a bomb in a marketplace will make a positive difference. The extraordinary freedom of the human condition includes the tragic built-in freedom to kill. This freedom is so very easy to indulge even within the web of a quasi-organized civil society, as we see in the president of the Philippines’ murderous extra-judicial war against drugs.

Many of us are distressed that one duly elected, but apparently very thin-skinned, leader will soon be given the authority to cause mass death on a planetary level.  We pray that his obsession with business success will preoccupy him with making deals rather than making wars. At least we can be somewhat consoled by the fact that the international markets he seeks to dominate will not benefit from nuclear annihilation.

But our apparent programming, our collective thin skin, is not biologically inevitable. History confirms the absurdity of enemy-imaging by recording how arbitrary our animosities are as seen over time—Americans who once incinerated Japanese soldiers with flame throwers or Viet Cong with napalm are now welcome in Japan or Vietnam as tourists or business people.

There is only one way out of our self-devised trap, and that is relationship. The opportunity for relationship is immediate, instant, all around us at every moment, even if we seem to be wired instinctively to hide within our skin, be it thin or thick. I recently entered my first board meeting of a non-profit and made a casually insensitive comment about Mr. Trump’s press conference circus. Next to me sat a woman who unapologetically made it clear that she had voted for the man—but kept her genuine welcoming smile in place.

I felt so grateful that her friendliness and willingness to work with me did not diminish in spite of my off-hand sarcasm, and so we were able to begin a fruitful dialogue—the topic of which became—surprise!—the need for more fruitful dialogue.

Her sort of friendliness may be the light of the world.  It is a ton of gold weighed against the feather of our momentary and potentially superficial political opposition to each other. Sometimes initiating and maintaining a culture of connection may not come easy, but it is constantly there as a possibility. The hoary cliché has never been more relevant and important: a stranger is just a friend we haven’t met yet.  And if that is true, why isn’t it just as true that an enemy is just someone we haven’t tried hard enough to be friends with yet?