Occasionally, I’ve let myself lean into the following possibilities. What if we whites truly allowed ourselves to pursue and fully embrace authentic passion, accepting the commonality of all human beings that supersedes marginal facets, such as customs, traditions, skin color, dialects and accents, history, and the like, which many American whites have relied upon to segregate themselves from Blacks? If we were to adopt that commonality, shouldn’t we be able to mitigate, if not contain the long-living influence of filiopietism, which has regularly employed historical divisions and distinctions and which has been employed to inoculate and camouflage sanguinary and brutal damaged heritage? And if that were to happen, how could damaged heritage remain so close in time and so seemingly inevitable for possible repetition?
And if a little forgiveness could be arranged and applied by Blacks – the equivalent of what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the weapon of love”– and if whites could accept this forgiveness from Blacks, isn’t it possible that (dare I say it?) we could contemplate something beyond (“beyond” in the way a human is capable of achieving that most special state of racial healing through authentic passion and love), something over the mountaintop in visions that speak gently to us all about one to another, Black to white, and white to Black?
Do I believe if this prescription were adopted by Black and white Americans, it would make a difference in racial relations to our nation? Let me put it this way. I am sure that Sheila and my racial healing caused many folks to examine their own racial behavior, and the examinations altered prevailing racial views for those individuals and others who were witnesses – not because I believe it, but because I heard numerous individuals talk about what those demonstrations in attitude and behavior by Sheila and me had meant to them and to others who perceived those examples. However, one approach will not make a solution for all Americans to pursue and achieve varying degrees of racial healing, but as the remarkable poet and writer, Cornelius Eady, said about this promulgated protocol: “This is where it starts”.
I accept that what I have had to say and propose could engender a reaction and a logical process for other racial healing. Some will move in a direction I can envision toward group dynamics that evolve out of the one-to-one relationships, for some people require the support of a multiple number of persons participating at one time toward a common goal. I can also envision families of one or two – perhaps, even three – generations coming together to discuss and, where applicable, to realize aspects of the approach that will be a family exercise to exorcise constantly misleading and fabricated filiopietism that has seeped into and controlled familial conduct and context.
Based on past and current attitudes and engagements, I believe we can safely say that white men will undoubtedly be harder to persuade to participate in these interracial sessions on a one-to-one basis. They will be more difficult to capture, but the weight of history is on the side of this approach, which is more personal and individualized. Indeed, the point is clearly made here in ‘For Racial Healing’, particularly in the earlier essay, “#8: U of Mich Study Finds White Men More Prejudicial Than White Women Against Blacks”. This more intensified level of racial bias shown by white men will not alter the basic elements of the proposed racial healing protocol, but it does mean that those elements may need to be expanded or otherwise managed for white men to facilitate the achievements that can be reached by following the inter-personal, interracial protocol that has been prescribed in these essays.
If we look around at the present state of affairs and how much further, metaphorically speaking, we need to travel to reach true racial comity and equality in all walks of life, the institutional approach that has been carried out, in part, by this greater, white male bias against Blacks cannot continue to be seen as leading us to where we must reside racially for ourselves and future generations.
A legitimate question can be posed: why hasn’t the proposal made here for racial healing to use personal, one-to-one relationships, leading to allyships, to combat racism been made and accepted previously? There are several explanations to answer this question: the country wasn’t ready; more failures needed to be experienced before a thoroughly explored and committed protocol, such as ‘For Racial Healing’, could be accepted; and the adverse and consequential filiopietism-damaged heritage axis had not yet been fully understood and declared, among other reasons.
But the most compelling cause rests with the acknowledgment that we always seem most anxious to assume that institutions are much better equipped to accept problem-solving than we are individually, for they organize better, they execute better, they stress accountability, and they also enjoy the resources. So why wouldn’t the general public largely withdraw, as it did, and see how major private and public organizations fared with the challenge? After all, we usually expect important public and private institutions to be well-suited for solving problems. Yet, we overlooked the personal nature of this Black-white racial healing prospect. We weren’t building a bomb or winning a race to the moon or finding a cure for covid or even winning or losing a war. The difficulties we face with racism, particularly the Black-white conundrum, reflects the deeply complex core issue of how can people get along anew in a way that they had not gotten along or behaved toward each other previously?
Still, we wanted to solve this colossal, interpersonal problem by applying the man-on-the-moon model – let the behemoths in financial services, manufacturing, education, government, transportation, computerization, communications, etc., have at it, and let their successes (and we knew there would be successes) trickle down and through the country as a whole. We wouldn’t have to know each other very well, and we wouldn’t have to know what each felt about her and his own and another’s history, the stomach-churning, personal reference points, and shibboleths that could hardly disappear. Yet now, failure, not complete failure, but evident failure is seen everywhere, and we can no longer afford to ignore the interpersonal dimensions of racism.
How could we find ways to break a cycle empathetically, even spiritually, of domination by one race over another? How do we move from a domination model to one of sure equality in all matters, in all endeavors, in all avenues of life itself? All of those elements in the domination model had to be broken, along with a related, untrue, and exaggerated history – filiopietism, if you will.
This challenge arrives as very personal (even private), elusive but declaratory, necessary. It requires enormous and even unquestioned trust, one for the other. We, both Black and white, weren’t prepared to forge into this effort, and we still may not be in every case, for ‘For Racial Healing’ is not a quick fix. We, Black and white, must know each other better and trust each other more. In so many ways, if we actually had thought about it, giving institutions the main responsibility for solving this unrelenting problem for us may have been simply a way to delay the authentic and ineluctable and to acknowledge ultimately the acute and long-extended failure and incompletion that could have been anticipated.
To be sure, some Blacks made it up ladders within the institutional environment and challenge, and that was helpful to some extent, but at a significant cost of creating frustration for so many who didn’t or who didn’t see a reason to try. We all knew that there would be a very limited number of slots for Blacks, who remained severely outnumbered, while white men continued to be severely limited in their willingness to let the balance change in a categorical and an eventful way.
Of course, there were many whites in multiple places, who chose to ignore the dimensions of the problem and decided to use racist rationale as an excuse for not seeing the interpersonal realities and complexities that must exist between Blacks and whites. We often forget that racism has, for generations, allowed whites to deny that the problem needed an interpersonal prescription. We obviously still have the racists, who are also deniers, for they fear one-to-one sessions for the prospective content and disclosures and are continually alarmed at describing to a Black person why he or she believed Black persons deserved domination by whites.
The rest is left to us to learn for a first time that allyships, born of authentic passion with its fundamental connections of understanding, empathy, healing, love, and co-inherence between Blacks and whites, are now an essential part of the responsibilities of a human being that cannot be presumed away.