Throughout this “For Racial Healing” series, I’ve discussed the reasons that whites are the primary obstacle facing racial healing between Blacks and whites in this country. Recognizing this reality about whites, I’ve focused in this essay on the way I characterize the grouping of whites in racial matters with particular attention to the degree of willingness and ability of these three groupings to articulate views on race from each grouping’s respective placement. Although I am white, I repeatedly struggle to understand fully the reasons that a certain kind of white person continuously has trouble articulating public and private views on race, racism, and racial healing. Hopefully, this essay will provide insight into the dilemma that I and undoubtedly others face in understanding the silence expressed by a significant segment of whites.
Before getting too far into the subject of particular reticence, I wish to suggest that there are primarily three groups of whites, seen as relevant and essentially integrated into racial matters. There is some variation within these three categories, but generally, not so much, and these three groupings are intuitively experienced among the classifications such that each white person should know viscerally into which category she or he falls.
These three categories of whites are reasonably easy to differentiate: healers, would-be healers, and never-healers. Healers have embraced racial healing and have participated eagerly and energetically, in their own ways, in relationships with Blacks; they adhere to that rubric, often without necessarily defining, in these identical words, their commitment to understand, empathize, heal, love, and co-inhere, but, in effect, that is what they do. They reject the domination of the filiopietism-damaged heritage axis and choose to eliminate it in their forthright and constant pursuit of racial healing.
Then, there are the never-healers, who are opposite in their dedication and practices to the healers. They embrace the filiopietism-damaged heritage axis and attempt to find ways to expand its credibility and its application to the general populace. In effect, they are racists, and though they may, on occasion, attempt to hide, for their own convenience, the negative way they view Blacks, racism against Blacks constitutes a key purpose in their lives and in their belief system.
Both of these groups are able to articulate respective views on racial matters, though with entirely different, anticipated results from their persuasive approaches. Even though both can routinely speak without much nuance to their intent, never-healers are regularly less straight-forward in their true desires than healers, and they will often employ obfuscation as a tool for arriving at a desired result, but the signs and purposes of never-healers are clear to most people, who are accustomed to the type of obfuscation that is normal with never-healers.
On the other hand, healers have less reason to drape their desires in slanted, unrevealing words. Pluralism and true equality for everyone represent an uncoded phrase for the whole world to see and appreciate or not appreciate – not much ambiguity there, and unrealized pluralism and equality are the arch enemies and anathema for the healers, and they have no reason to say otherwise. Pluralism and equality have largely become a slogan, and it is impossible for healers to couch their intent in a different language. Being straight-forward in their intent has become a foundational strength for healers.
Now, what of the would-be-healers. They are the silence-makers, for they are in the midst of an incomplete process, and they logically do not wish to be stymied within a no-escape posture or place. Silence is their metier, for they cannot be cornered or commandeered in silence, or at least, they think not. Even the smallest matter about race is hard for them to discuss. They say they are not racists, but they may sympathize with the possible disadvantages of pluralism and complete equality. At the same time, they feel their hearts are routinely poised toward racial healing, but they are not there. Even their wives or husbands find it difficult to know and express well the then current racial views of their spouses in entirety and certitude.
I have sensed over my life that this inability to speak openly about race, racism, and racial healing by the would-be-healer has its formation in a combination of regret and consternation – consternation that they would find themselves needing to regret the inheritance of damaged heritage when they had made no personal choice about inheritance at all. Yet, they may have a history that is damnable and now needing to be evaded at the same time – an albatross to escape, but no escape is available if they are realistic about the inheritance that does not allow an escape ever, for that could also mean betrayal of the past.
There are those, of course, still in process who are willing to endure the consequences of having committed the betrayal of that inheritance and the past, even when a betrayal of racism becomes a betrayal of every morsel, every ounce, every scintilla of it all – muddy water washing over their hands into a muddy creek with the past never to be regained again. Is the individual who exorcises herself or himself awash with nothing then to define or claim them?
Of course, this muddy water washing over them is, in truth, an ablution, even a form of baptism that creates a new person, able to observe oneself, found in a new, unfamiliar location or place where the novelty can be frightening or estranged from the previous ambiguity between the desire to stay and the desire to be fresh and washed through with a different kind of history and damaged heritage.
The would-be-healers find themselves living out their lives in this racial ambiguity – possibly indicating one thing reluctantly to those who have moved through that heritage and muddy water to a new place and reluctantly indicating something else to those unredeemed and unwashed agents of the past, those agents that rely on old stories and old standards and old behavior and unconfused placement; many would-be-healers are even willing to and desirous of acceptance, without admission, of the staunch and unconquered standards and history where life and race are not, in the least, confusing or unredeemed – it is and has been and may yet be. So, simple silence can avoid much of this dialectic struggle existing for the would-be-healers, held in lengthy suspension between healers and never-healers.
Finally, on a related subject, it is difficult for us to fathom a justifiable category of would-be-never-healers. Indeed, I left that potential category blank in this essay. For example, we cannot acknowledge from where they would evolve unless they rise to a higher practice of the filiopietism-damaged heritage axis. In my experience, there is not this kind of graduation from one notch to another for would-be-never-healers; by simply accepting the filiopietism-damaged heritage axis as a way of life, one is then, by definition, a never-healer – and not conceptually a would-be-never-healer.