Up from Ignorance: Awareness-Training and Racism

DEAR BLACK PERSON:

Thank you for your wonderful letter (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 15, 1971). You wrote as a representative of your race, and I can only wish that your attitude of loving concern were the attitude of all blacks everywhere. Alas, it is not. But I can certainly understand why not. I have read Donald B. Gibson’s “The Negro: An Essay on Definition” (Yale Review, March, 1968), and have learned that one cannot speak of a monolithic Black-American culture in the same way that one can speak of Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans. For black Americans lack the common language, religion, and habits of social interaction that other ethnic groups possess. Black Americans lack these cohesive elements because they were systematically destroyed by white slave traders and slave masters.

I am ashamed of what my race has done to yours, and I understand that unless my race permits yours to discover the roots of its heritage and thus formulate a common culture, the only cohesive force your race can possibly have is defensiveness against the white establishment. I understand that certain black leaders have tried to develop a group identity by stressing violence as retaliation for centuries of white injustice. I understand that others have been more constructive, and have demanded instead that history books be rewritten and that black-studies courses be developed, with black instructors, so that your people may find themselves and understand their heritage and recover the proper pride that has been stolen from them. I realize, to my sorrow, that many whites have regarded these demands as trouble-making, instead of recognizing that you are asking only for what white people have had all along: an opportunity to explore their historical identity. I therefore cannot claim to speak for the whole white race as I write this letter. Although I am sure that many others feel as I do, I can speak only for myself.

For many years I was guilty of ignorance of your plight. I was ignorant because the history books I studied, the newspapers I read, and the radio and television that gave me the news were all slanted in favor of whiteness. I did not know that the Watts riot was precipitated by two incidents in which policemen on duty raped black women. I did not know that in 1966 a five-year-old black girl was raped by a white employee of the Head Start program, and that the incident was never even investigated. I did not know that black men were routinely but rudely questioned just for walking along the street, or that black homes were frequently invaded without benefit of warrant. Things like that never got into the news that reached me. Your people knew, I suppose, through their own newspapers or through the grapevine; and I suppose they thought I knew and did not care.

Last year I held a discussion in my classroom with several leaders of the Paterson State College Black Student Union. They accused me of willful ignorance—of not knowing the full facts of racial injustice because it would have been too uncomfortable for me to know. Seething with hatred, they also accused me of having personally killed and enslaved their forefathers, identifying me with my race as if I had been on the spot during every lynching ever perpetrated. It would have made just as much sense for me to accuse them of beating me up when I was in fifth grade. But I understood that the black students who pummeled me when I was a little girl were striking out not at me personally but at what I symbolized to them—the white oppressor. And although those violent fifth- and sixth-graders were black, I could by no means identify them with the Black Student Union leaders who faced me in my college classroom. For I believe we must approach one another as individuals, not as symbols or abstractions. Otherwise, all is surely lost.

But in a sense those Black Student Unionists were right about willful ignorance. Even though until very recently my newspapers did not tell me about brutal injustices, writers like William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell and Richard Wright had for many years been describing the atrocities perpetrated against your people in the South. Why had I chosen to assume that these were “only fiction,” or else represented “isolated cases”? Why had I refused to use my common sense, which would have told me that human nature does not change as one drives across the Mason-Dixon line, and that the combination of a position of authority (like a blue uniform and a white skin) and a vulnerable person without money or prestige (especially with a black skin) will often bring out the sadistic streak in human nature? Why had I simply not thought about these things?

I am guilty. I admit my guilt. But more importantly, I have repented, I have sought the forgiveness of the Christ-Saviour of white and black and every man, and I am seeking to educate myself and others so that the gap of interracial misunderstanding and abuse may yet be closed. With all my heart I echo the words of Dick Gregory in The Shadow That Scares Me:

To do justice means to treat all men with respect and human dignity—Negroes, whites, cops, and all of creation. To love kindness is to consciously seek an atmosphere of human dwelling in which the rights and needs of all men are respected. To walk humbly means to maintain an air of sensitivity which seeks first to understand human expression rather than to thwart or suppress it. Such is the climate of justice. And when that climate is created, respect for law and order—even an increase of genuine love—will follow [p. 87].

I was especially touched by this statement in your letter: “I am telling you these things because I want you to know me.” I feel the same way about you: I am telling you these things because I want you to know me. I want you to know that in order to raise my level of awareness, I have been sitting at the feet of black authors like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin (especially his Notes of a Native Son) and William Pannell and Tom Skinner; I have read and pondered Black Rage; and I have forced myself to read about white-perpetrated atrocities past and present. I have attended black talent shows and plays where I have been almost the only white person present, and have felt the shriveling sense of being in the spurned minority. It was good for me—it made me realize how the single black student in a classroom full of whites must often feel.

And I want you to know that I have left the church that mysteriously contained no black people even though there was a black community only minutes away, and have moved into a church where black families are present and welcome at social events as well as formal services. I will never again content myself with the hypocritical formula that “they are welcome if they want to come.” I have faced the fact that I would not go to an all-black church without a special invitation, and that black people are not any more eager to be rejected than I am.

Please know that many of us refuse to patronize a diner near Paterson State College because the management will not serve black people. Our boycott isn’t much of a contribution to justice, but at least we are trying. And I want you to know that I am endeavoring to help a young black man at an evangelical college who is being persecuted because he has not been sufficiently humble to suit the administration. Would you believe, Black Person, that this administration permitted the formation of a Black Student Union on its campus but stipulated that its members should have “nothing to do with racial problems”? (How is it possible to be black in 1971 America and have nothing to do with racial problems?) But yes, I suppose you would believe, because you have experienced so much radical injustice. I am broken-hearted at the callousness and hypocrisy of these evangelical leaders, and I am saddened by the realization that this is not the only case of such current and continuing persecution. I want to help this young man win the degree his college has threatened to withhold because of his “pugilistic attitude.” and I want to help him reach his goal of studying at a major theological seminary. We need loving and intelligent young people like him. And evangelicalism desperately needs something that black people are in a unique position to supply: soul.

I realize that evangelicals are not the only offenders. Perhaps we are not even the worst offenders. But we are offenders, God help us. God forgive us. And please, Black Person, give us your forgiveness too. Keep on writing to us, keep on teaching us, keep on praying for us. Sometimes we insult you without even realizing it, as when some of us call you “colored people.” We just haven’t stopped to think about the fact that we too are colored, except that we happen to be colored a different color. It has never occurred to us that there could be any implied insult in such a word, a hint of a difference that just isn’t there. Please forgive our ignorance and enlighten us.

Some of us still haven’t caught on that the Wordless Book and all such imagery of black (bad) hearts and white (good) hearts is a vast insult to your race. We simply haven’t imagined how it would feel to be dark-skinned children listening to the white-skinned lady talking about how if only we will open our hearts to Jesus, we can be delivered from what we are and become the way she already is by birth. Most of us haven’t meant to damage the self-concept of your children, but it is getting to the point where our ignorance is unforgivable. Please continue to push back the frontiers of our awareness so that we may develop consciences where before we have been seared by the hot iron of our careless habits.

I have one more confession to make. I am often self-conscious about my friendly feelings toward a black person, fearing that I may be exhibiting prejudice in reverse, perhaps using that person to alleviate my own white guilt. Sometimes I wish I could look at people and not even notice what color their skin is; yet if my wish came true, a great deal of the variety would go out of life. It might be almost as boring as being impervious to the differences between men and women. So—if I am wrong, please correct me—I think that the important goal to strive for in all my relationships is caring for other individuals as individuals, as unique people who are in their own way every inch as valid as I am in mine. I want to learn from your people, and I want to share my experience and friendship with you. I can understand why you will be a bit suspicious of me at first. But please, judge me not by my color but by my individual spirit. Whenever you catch me in what seems to be hypocrisy, please tell me. I want to be honest with you, with everyone. I want to understand you. I want to love you and be loved by you, for we are all members of the family of man. And please, when I reach out my hand in friendship toward you, take it.

Your fellow human being,

A WHITE PERSON

Virginia R. Mollenkott is associate professor of English at Paterson State College in New Jersey. She has the Ph.D. from New York University and has written “Adamant and Stone Chips” and “In Search of Balance.”

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