Over the last several years, I’ve given over a hundred presentations on various subjects related to the elements of racism and racial healing. During this time, I found a palpable yearning among members of the attending audiences – Black and white – to do something personal in terms of racial healing. Many wished to take a next step, but that step didn’t mean demonstrating in the streets or having fraught debates over a multitude of factual and non-factual matters. Rather, there was authentic passion, a consequential desire to reach deeply into a Black-white relationship and give it life, such as the development of Black-white friendships, an effective application of authentic passion, and an unquestioned achievement of allyships – all of them envisioned as part of Black-white racial healing and beyond.
In so many ways, this yearning illustrated a simple transfer from ideology or from a sure, philosophical conclusion or certainty to become a mission for a personal, human attainment. So much time had been spent over many years confronting ideological matters of freedom and non-freedom with Black and white perspectives attached, but mostly they were tests, mentally and intellectually, which have now been settled (perhaps, they had actually been settled a very long time ago, but too few then acknowledged the seemingly elusive revelations serving as persuasive rebuttals to racial biases). Yet, mental or intellectual assurances had not gratified the yearning for something more that has been a much more personal type of desire, that human longing still present to satisfy something not yet attained.
For purposes of prompting others, I can attest and give witness to the remarkable, personal reaction to one-to-one, racial healing and beyond, available between Black and white individuals, as reflected in my own testament: with Sheila Walker, we realized that only by participation beyond ourselves, even beyond what we thought and concluded was true that this one-to-one, Black to white and white to Black commitment and practice – surely beyond intellectual assurance – could we finally become our own, one-to-one friendship that we knew was where we should be together, Black and white together, resolved without debate, in kindness and generality. It was a time unto ourselves, Black and white, not compelled to talk, but to talk about anything under the sun, maybe with no thought at all, that had finally arrived with Black and white acceptance and sufficiency. We could then call it friendship or understanding, surely love, surely a recognizable healing, or rather, on the other side of racial healing with history then behind us, it being virtually unimportant now. . .no convincing needed. Someone once described this kind of racial healing as a near perfect and mutual state of confluence, as though we could capture this friendship and ineffable closeness in a word or phrase that had been sorely deficient.
These were the moments that I detected the Black and white audiences desired and yearned to know for each other. The barriers between Black and white had been too much, too frightening, too false, too abstract, and too inhuman to be right or authentic. The relationship between Black and white had now become itself, something unforeseen by history and distrusted by convention, something unto itself, too unusual to be realized or recognized by those who oppose the opportunity that has now been realized in truth and in Sheila and me, for we had breathed it, for we had lived it now – and the past had died, leaving Black and white allyship in place with care and concord.
Since the preceding paragraphs accurately exhibit and allude to the state of racial healing and beyond, which I experienced, drawing, in large part, on present time over the last ten years, first with Sheila Walker before her death, but also with her family, including, most recently, her husband, Ivor, then whites should eagerly foresee the reward that’s available to Blacks and whites for entering and engaging fully in this journey to racial healing. It is grace I received. In turn, I grieve the loss that both Black and white Americans have missed over generations and centuries from the absence of friendship and love, of authentic passion that we, Black and white, can give to each other. We white Americans, especially, have missed so very much in our attitude toward and instances with Black Americans. I’m sure that Blacks, as subjugated observers and vulnerable interpreters, knew better than whites the terrible loss that the historical estrangement between the two races had inflicted upon us both – all that we could have shared together in honesty and innocence, all the love that we both missed and yet did not show signs that we knew it had been wasted and remained, then, forever irretrievable. So much that waited to be discovered, but was discounted seemingly without thought or regret. Sad is hardly the word or concept to capture or to be employed to express this momentous loss.
A close friend, who is Black and one of the country’s acknowledged, premier writers, upon reading a piece of mine similar in content and tone to the last few paragraphs, posited that “This is how it starts” with “It” referring to the next chapter in the country’s civil rights saga between Blacks and whites.
It is hard to explain the reason for white reluctance, as a general matter, to pursue Black-white racial healing and beyond, for the journey and its results are almost alarmingly substantial. We should also realize – Black and white – all that has been obscured and deleted over so much time, relying on both white brutality and white resistance to change, a suspended contrast between what was and what could have been the history between Black and white.
So, it has become a lingering challenge to explain the reasons that whites have not been motivated, if not inspired, to work on behalf of Black liberation, justice, and equality. How deep has the inertia flowed! For it takes considerable effort to lift so many whites to think in terms of genuine alleviation of Black treatment. Or is it simply white guilt for past practices contributing to the separative attitude? Or, as I’ve written elsewhere, is it fear – political, economic, social, other – for the not-so-quiet releasing of a threat to white folks? Or is it a little bit of each?
After many years focused on this rather meaningful conundrum, I am still not good at deciding on a completely unassailable answer for the existing, white resistance, even after presenting the likely, singular possibilities of racial healing and allyship. Of course, looking retrospectively, not to exorcise this resistance has been a salient loss for Black Americans who have had to brave the curious bedevilment without relief or support for so long from the very practitioners of the cruel inequity and subjugation. A particular concern of mine has been about the racial impact, that is, the historical insensitivity of whites to think that we have had no obligation to try to answer the series of questions posed. No doubt, long-term, interpersonal damage was created as a result of the fact we only recently have come to conclude and believe that we whites had any need to consider unanswered questions for the good of Blacks in our midst.
I wonder whether any of the questions I asked are as relevant as this one: why must so many whites have to be pushed, whether by embarrassment or official pressure, to respond to the obvious inequities that have dogged Black Americans? I first started to ask myself this one question when in my twenties, and now, many decades later, I still do not have a respectable answer.
Maybe, the answer lies, at least in part, in the nature of our respective moral authority figures. There still remains a rather wide dividing line between Blacks and whites that has been formed by the respective moral, philosophical heritages. Of particular relevance is that Blacks, as a result of the racial struggles existing in their lives here in this country, have been heir to a series of major moral authority figures, such as Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name only a few.
But before traveling that path too far, let’s deal with what I mean by moral authority figures? They would include those who have trimmed and shaped the moral responses of their followers. They are, in some respects, icons, who establish the aspirational hopes, dreams, and ambitions of those that come after them. To that extent, Blacks have been beneficiaries of moral standards that have effected meaningful, humanistic goals. For example, virtually every Black home I’ve entered over the course of many years exhibited a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. The language of moral authority figures, like King, has proffered the conduct for many Blacks, such as the value of non-violent, civil disobedience, the weapon of love, etc., expectations that have been articulated for Black behavior. Adherence to the tenets of moral authority figures has been a test for so many Blacks over generations, and the related standards continue to reside for Blacks. We whites have not inherited such specific messages personified for Black-white relations. At the same time, however, a number of whites have borrowed one or more of these Black, moral authority figures and made them their own.
Authority figures among most whites are much different, though we follow or hallow them almost as assiduously as Blacks do theirs, but ours have had a very different slant. Who are our principal, white icons whom we can also characterize as representative of our own standards, those persons who, by their lives, encourage us to stay faithful to our brand of American stories? Among white authority figures to set enduring white examples and goals are business leaders, national (mainly, erstwhile) political leaders, finance tycoons, scientists, and innovators, but, in reality, we would not entitle them moral authority personages, but by our emulative behavior, we treat them as such. Nonetheless, we whites have also had several figures, serving as role models for moral authority behavior. White comparables might include Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, Jonathan Daniels (who died too young to be commonly known), Ralph Waldo Emerson perhaps (though his transcendentalism had only a very marginal effect on our country’s behavior), Henry David Thoreau, and Reinhold Niebuhr (though his attention to solving Black-white racial issues was rather limited), among others. There are white Americans who might also list John Brown, the militant abolitionist, who suffered a martyr’s death; yet, he is characterized by multiple sources as a terrorist and more than a bit unbalanced. In any case, except for Lincoln, none of the other white moral authority figures reached the pinnacle of public relevance those Black figures that I’ve previously identified continue to enjoy.
It is, of course, noteworthy that we whites routinely treat the “Founding Fathers” of this nation as demigods or higher. It is hard to imagine any set of white authority figures influencing white, American history and culture any more than this group. According to legend, they were smarter and wiser than we are; they were also dedicated to right thinking for a new world, if not a new world order with the elimination of familial ruling classes, nobility, and kings and queens. We regularly expect these “Founding Fathers” to be able, in death and legacy, to forecast the future better than we can predict and choose on our own, so that some Americans seem to study the modern equivalency of entrails and other divining tools just to glean knowledge about how the “Founding Fathers” would have ruled in particular circumstances. And yet, these quite pragmatic demigods did not have much trouble with the decision, for inclusion in our Constitution, that each Black was worth only three-fifths of a white person.
This distinction between Black and white authority figures (or icons, if you prefer) tells us much about our respective histories and values and our respective capacities to make and mark change. On the one hand, we whites tend to rely on pragmatic performance to distinguish those we more often choose to follow, admire, and emulate, if not moderately deify. On the other hand, Blacks must follow, admire, and emulate, if not moderately deify those who have brought them this far, and the choice for them cannot be between pragmatism and some other, such white order. This difference in principle tells us a lot about what our respective expectations would and can be, as one seeks positive, pragmatic results, while the other seeks fundamental change to the racial outlook and behavior of the nation, including its social and economic freedom and conscience. Rather, based on the historical backdrop, there is only one choice for Blacks, and that is to follow a path to full racial liberation and thorough, Black-white racial healing, and I can only hope that there are and will be enough participating whites to join Blacks on their way in this quest to take us all there.
Next Time: The Dared Alternative