One part of daily, white American life deals with the human models we adopt to help guide our own personal conduct – indeed, we typically look to those, who are normally older, more experienced, and often more successful in certain respects than other potential examples or models. Frequently, preferred models have distinction and followers that create additional incentives and reasons for adopting their lifestyles, attitudes, routines, etc. For the models and examples that we are inclined to follow, we routinely compare our current lives and how our own accomplishments or defeats compare with those we choose to follow. We rationalize the differences between those experiences we have known and accomplishments we have enjoyed and ones that have been realized and enjoyed by those we choose as models.
In a similar vein, we further tend to follow opportunities that exist through favorite models and that are also most comfortable for us to pursue. Frequently, these opportunities entail an identification with the personal beliefs and ethos that reside with the particular, appealing model. At this point, identification then becomes an easy path to the values and worldly perspectives that are held by such a model. Therein lies a process by which models instill filiopietistic racism into generations, one after another.
What white American hasn’t often had notions of some of these life-style models? In the current environment, many of the models that have carried white history for standards to be followed lie tattered or shattered, hardly available or ready to be employed by members of racially-sensitive groups or individuals.
With this casual backdrop for many white lives, is it any wonder then that the personal past for so many whites has constituted a major access to filiopietism via adoration and self-gratification?
In turn, our own focus on this particular aspect of filiopietism in this series is more than justified since filiopietism, that excessive veneration of the past, tradition, ancestors, and the like, more than any other concept, has been and continues to be the arch enemy of racial healing, for the new cannot come into being without an elimination of unredeemed loyalty to a past and to the inter-personal, racial and racist models we whites continue to inherit and have, in many respects, continued to practice to one degree or another.
White on white, Black on Black, separation desired and exercised – we would, if we truly want this mode to stop, replace the old model with a new, more dynamic transformation – Black and white, white and Black if we were to chance racial healing. White on white, Black on Black: why aren’t we driven to accept that we whites haven’t done nearly enough over these so many decades and centuries? Why don’t we acknowledge the simple fact that the old models keep us all antiquated and constricted in our behavior and conceptual history?
At the same time, there are still others who should be emulated, rejecting the quest for filiopietism that has been so present, and it is their purpose to persuade whites to eschew those traditional limitations and pursue a life-style that consists of an expression of Black-white allyships, including understanding, empathy, love, healing, and co-inherence.
We have described in this series how the Black to white and white to Black relationships and allyships confront and work to eradicate Black inequality in America. Black-white allyships begin with a common interest to alter the system that produced white on white and Black on Black isolation and separation with white subjugation of Blacks the result. As an alternative, individuals can now be brought together for the simple purpose of serving as an antidote to the division that has been so prevalent. The Black-white allyship is individually initiated – one Black, one white committed to each other to face racism in its various forms and tentacles, locally and beyond. The allyships are not hidden but open for view and emulation. Commitment to each other is as valuable, if not more so, as the commitment to undoing of any residual, separation apparatus surrounding two individuals then engaged in a personal, one-to-one relationship. This allyship can serve as an inspiration for replacing the discredited model without even articulating its purpose – its simple existence can be persuasive, and its multiplication has many, productive, sweeping ramifications.
While times have altered the status of racist models, the models still exist, though they be less effective than they were previously; in various ways, they continue to impair the progress of many whites to proceed with Black-white allyships. While the older and racist models stand in shadows when examined and judged in light of American racial history, they nonetheless influence the attitudes and ethos of a considerable number of American whites, and they still are indeed hard to resist for many whites: they have status; they often enjoy glory; they still have influence to alter thinking and judgment.
And yet, we have the capability to build an antidote to that system with Black on white, white on Black by being merely individual to individual, friend to friend with a fire spreading from one such allyship to another. But it will take initiative, constancy, and love; that is what allyship means to be – a simple process, a personal process, devoid of the complexities and complications that always exist in waiting for institutions, which display their mixed agendas and priorities. How much does it take? Will over comfort, love over indifference, promise over habit, individual over institution!
It has proven all too easy to understand why so many white folks have adhered to those older models without acknowledging the resultant damage to Black-white racial relations. We have casually pursued the comfort of seeing white on white in our midst – our kind for our purposes, whether for friendship, business, affection, protection, or satisfaction, our kind for our purposes. Can we not love and adore those who don’t meet “our kind for our purposes”? Of course, we can and do. The question becomes: can we now extend it to equality constantly in love and for change, for history, for an advent into a new place, a new presence, a new cohort, a new comprehension, new eloquence, new humanity, and a new fellowship and community?