Written for the Redeemer Spirit, October 2020 edition.
I guess this is a year for zooming in, as it were, on the ugly. I just read a good book that makes me zoom in on some of my experiences with race. Going to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in the 1980s was supposedly a progressive experience; it was a big, public, high-quality, racially integrated school. It seemed like a classic high school experience: I went to fall football games, helped run fundraising concerts to benefit people in El Salvador, took AP classes and co-edited a literary magazine for student-generated poetry and art.
Looking back on it, I’m not sure that it was a “classic” high school experience for my Black friends and peers. Friendships didn’t always blossom across racial lines and the interracial friendships that had existed in elementary school often faded. Our cliques, classes and activities became more segregated over time rather than less so. I don’t recall major racially driven problems, but the sense of otherness sat insidiously there as we clumped together in like-skinned groups at lunch.
Proof of the long-standing and widespread presence of racism reared its ugly head for me two years after graduation with the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which I watched first-hand from the nearby Pomona College campus. I saw the fires burning, the crowds aflame with frustration and the hatred that erupts when there is contact without connection between people.
What felt strange about the timing of this riot in my small story is that in college, there was integration of a different kind than I had experienced in high school. At Pomona, a student from deeply Hispanic, Catholic community in L.A. lived in the same dorm with a Hawaiian student who never wore anything but shorts and flip flops, a Midwestern Black Emily Dickinson-loving girl in Birkenstocks, a Georgia boy with a drawl who killed the Jeopardy questions every time, and my quiet, White, WASPy self. We bickered over turns in the shower, played music too loudly late at night and ate Fruit Loops together in the dining hall at breakfast. We weren’t just politely integrated, we were integrated. We annoyed each other, respected each other, argued with each other and partied together.
I wonder if this is what Howard Thurman meant in his book Jesus and the Disinherited, when he talked about “fellow-feeling.” “Hatred,” Thurman wrote, “often begins in a situation that is devoid of any of the primary overtures of warmth and fellow-feeling and genuineness” (p. 65). To me, this means that one has to actually be in relationship with another as an equal human being in order to avoid misunderstandings or power differences from festering into disinterest or dehumanization.
First published in 1949, the book was influential in shaping the civil rights movement and equally prescient, unfortunately, in describing an effective approach to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. It’s dispiriting that we are collectively experiencing the same racism problems from the post World-War II era in the heated summer of 2020, but it’s helpful to have instructions to navigate them.
Thurman challenges his reader to look closely at the damage done by individualism and social isolation. (We have to give him latitude in his opinion about the benefits of isolation.) His parsing of the Gospel is practically a set of instructions on resistance for the poor and disenfranchised: Resistance to hatred requires relationships. His guidance to us, whether we have power or not, is not just to have contact with “the enemy,” but to cultivate warmth in a relationship in order to avoid hatred.
What is striking about Thurman’s guidance is that he simultaneously demands that people with less power, “the dispossessed,” live a life of integrity that never caves to fear, hypocrisy or hatred. Um, that sounds hard.
I think about our microcosms of relationships. In our interpersonal relationships, can contact without warmth create hatred in family relationships, between neighbors, and across co-workers’ desks? Certainly. Consider the political animosity that drives wedges between wings of families or puts certain topics on the taboo list. It has become de rigueur to avoid conversations of politics or policy in the company of friends or family who might have a different perspective.
Yet I wonder, based on Pastor Thurman’s counsel, whether a way forward might be to bravely step into dialogue with each other, dialogue based on a desire to understand and build bridges, to cultivate conversations sparked by warmth.
So how do we create warmth? Maybe it’s a mixture of open-minded listening, a desire to understand a different worldview, courageous sharing of personal stories and whatever dose of selflessness is required to share power and resources.
Maybe in order to weave connections, we need to talk to each other about hard things and, just as importantly, listen to each other about hard things. It can be super uncomfortable to have awkward conversations, but I don’t think Jesus asked us to live life with the goal of being as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. If we can brave the discomfort, the contained friction of a good dialogue or mutual acts of service and hospitality might just generate that warmth and understanding that will keep us from hatred and maybe even move us into affection and respect.
Anyway, a civilized dialogue over dinner about racial experiences sounds less awkward than arguing about whose turn it is in the shower while standing in nothing but a towel and slippers in the hallway. I’ll take the dinner option please.
@theterrace 