The concept of authentic passion has occupied a prominent, if not a uniquely crucial place in my writings and oral presentations on racial healing. What exactly is it? We can’t go much further into racial healing without understanding its core meaning or meanings, as consequential in the discussion.
I’ll try to arrive at authentic passion by pointing out the various ways that its core and related meanings have been identified over time – actually, over centuries. We are far from the first to recognize that little can be done beneficially without its application. We will use a method of defining the concept by looking at its whole cloth over time for its meaning.
Simply put, we start with one word that relays an access to the whole, and that word is “love”. But there is an abundance of ways that, for centuries, the application of love has been defined and discussed in the context of relatedness and interconnectedness. Most recently in my last distribution, ‘To Begin With’, I described Martin Luther King’s reference in terms of racial healing emanating from “the weapon of love”, and how love has the ability to drive out hate. At the same time, Soren Kierkegaard emphasizes a different term, but employs the concept always in the currency of the time as King undoubtedly also had in mind; in this spirit, Kierkegaard wrote, “Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the genuinely human from a previous one. . .no generation has learned how to love from another. . .this genuinely human quality is passion.” In other words, love is always expressed and exercised, certainly in the concept of racial healing, by not relying on the past. Personal love and its manifestation through curative action have to be current.
The Greeks long ago held the notion of “agape love”, a love that seeks the well-being of others. Indeed, over millennia, agape love has often been perceived as a model for how humans should love one another – again, for the currency of any particular time. The British theologian, Charles Williams, characterized his vision of relatedness between persons in present time, whenever that occurs, as “co-inherence”, stressing that individuals are not isolated but depend on each other for their own well-being. As a devout Christian, Williams stressed the words of Jesus from John 14: “. . .you are in me, and I am in you.” Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, put it this way: “True beings are lived in the present; the life of objects is lived in the past. . .Love is responsibility of an I for a You.”
The world has also become aware of this concept of essential interrelatedness being expressed through many voices in South Africa, including, if not especially, the Nobel Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, praising the idea of Ubuntu, meaning that a person’s humanity consists of one’s relationship to others, which is achieved through mutual support, respect, and acknowledgement of “I am because we are”.
It is not coincidental that the quotes, set forth above, are, grammatically speaking, in the present tense. I believe there is an ultimate significance and relevance to that realization, illustrating the importance of currency in fostering relatedness and interconnectedness. Indeed, the term I have chosen to communicate this reality – and the obligation that goes along with it – is authentic passion. With this choice, I meant for there to be an inference for action, for human passion is always expressed through action – action in the present tense, action in the present sense.
It has been shown, however, that authentic passion, a natural propensity to love, to demonstrate love by whites for our Black brothers and sisters can unfortunately be replaced instead with filiopietism and damaged heritage, as discussed in the last distribution, ‘To Begin With. . .’ commentary, through aggressive and repetitive proselytization and relentless concentration of prejudice and racial rejection by whites of Blacks and various others. Nonetheless, wherever authentic passion is adopted, it is much deeper than custom, tradition, skin color, etc. It is more fundamental, individualistic, and instinctual as it wills and works the connection between human beings of all colors to understand, empathize, heal, love, and co-inhere. I am a great believer in adherence to authentic passion as a catalyst for anti-racism; I should also say that Sheila Walker and I came to rely heavily on expressions of authentic passion as a compelling agent for our own mutual, racial healing.
When whites adopt authentic passion by accepting the prospect for new friendships and attitudes, enriched personal freedoms and perspectives, and many more racial possibilities, it is just not probable for authentic passion to be consistent with the past. Of course, there are those who will continue to dreamily romanticize a kind of mythical adoration for previous ideas and historical moments and fanfare, which lead to non-communication with prevailing reality, but that behavior is a denial of or counterpoint to love, not of the kind of personal commitment that I have discussed and that results in the present taking control of one’s life and mission.
We can never predict when the light of authentic passion will break through the pernicious fog of resistance to help bring racial healing to places that have endured some of the worst parts of racial tyranny. For example, the grandson of the principal architect of apartheid in South Africa has become one of its outspoken critics and has argued persuasively against it and its residual tentacles. In addition, he has written movingly about the important role that Ubuntu can play for South Africa in achieving Black-white relatedness and mutual support and respect.
For a more personal view, I could not have predicted the following, affirmative example and encounter I ascribe to authentic passion for a change in attitude and perspective. Toward the end of the late September, 2019 weekend ceremonies, surrounding the dedication of the Elaine Massacre Memorial in Phillips County, Arkansas, a white friend, someone I got to know in recent decades, someone with whom I enjoyed spending time even though he had not adopted my ideas about either Black liberation matters or the features that lead to Black-white racial healing, came to me, grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me squarely in the eye, and offered an amazingly empathetic insight. Instantly, I knew, and he knew I knew that what he had said was something beyond the particular words he chose to describe that insight that night; rather, he was actually saying he had received a moment of epiphany about race, Black-white racial healing, and the broader love and adjusted understandings that go into such a moment. It was not a decision by him at all, but a moment of acceptance of something fundamentally different from the hours, days, months, and years he had previously known. The present then deflected the visions and wonts of a more racially biased past.
We’re familiar with the end result of letting the filiopietistic-damaged heritage axis flourish, but we cannot permit that axis to continue unaddressed. In truth, we know that filiopietism and damaged heritage in racial matters make authentic passion absolutely necessary, which allows whites to be truly human; for authentic passion is that attribute we whites are able to access in order to make much greater progress as individuals in Black-white relations.
If a generation fails to address its own and inherited shortcomings in race relations and racial healing, then the generation has forced those failures forward into the future. Unfortunately, we have followed that course repeatedly as whites have regularly chosen a pattern of allowing the past to determine our present and future racially, foisting the racially unhealed and malevolent ghosts onto innocence once again.