The argument over what is called Critical Race Theory has brought an unspoken reality to light. In the harsh glare of that light, many have regressed to an attitude of not wanting to hear about it. White people have long known that they are favored by the legal system in the United States. Some have rationalized with anecdotal retorts to this idea. Everyone has a relative or friend who feels that he or she was the subject of reverse discrimination. These anecdotal renditions are often one-sided. They discount the innumerable injustices that have been foisted upon people of color with the cliché “two wrongs don’t make a right” or the oft used “I never owned slaves. Why should I be punished?”
Turning up the light to a glare, many on the other side have decided that unless the system that tilted the table against people of color be dismantled, it cannot be righted. This results in many rationalizations for behaviors that are unproductive and self-defeating. “The white man always protects his own and that will never change” is a refrain.
I look at my own life in this light and wonder if I have, by my very existence, supported this inequality. I am a white man who has aged to 72. I come from a long line of American families. I am a son of the American Revolution. I was born and raised in the multi-racial city of Newark, New Jersey. I grew up around racial slurs and attitudes. When I was very young, I no doubt adopted these views in order to be part of my tribe.
I was an inquisitive boy who was encouraged to learn. I took that to mean that I was encouraged to question. I began by questioning that which my family held dear: religion. I noticed that I was taught that belief was stronger than reason and faith more powerful than fact. I could not find a basis for this attitude and, slowly, it drove me away from Christianity. Then it drove me to look at all organized religions as methods of control. There was plenty of supportive evidence but was cultural control at the heart of religion or did it just develop into a means of control? Was it a function of the bureaucracy?
The romantic power of faith and belief does speak to us on a level deeper than reason. It does promote potential blind spots in who we are. For those who believe the moral scales can surely be tilted by the moral thumb of belief. However, belief may be at the center of the very construction of the scale. Its framework may be the creator of its own contradictions. When faced with this level of complexity, we search for solutions with simplicity.
I was in school at a time when the teaching of United States History was inculcated into my thinking from early primary education throughout my undergraduate studies. But there were noticeable gaps. While the Civil War was covered in some detail, what followed was reduced to a few scant chapters that were highlighted as “Radical Republicans and Waving the Bloody Shirt” to “Scalawags and Carpetbaggers” who took advantage of the dark period of American History that was glossed over in a race to get to expanding Industrialization and World War 1.
The South was depicted as romantic, beautifully gracious and reliant on an agrarian culture that depended on human labor that would have been wiped out by Industrialization anyway. They were shown as married to this original sin of slavery from their inception. But it was also pointed out that slavery was not unique to the United States. It was pointed out that slavery exists throughout history on most every part of the planet where humans have lived. It was pointed out that in the natural world species sometimes enslave smaller members of their own kind. This was taught as almost a natural division of labor. Was this a huge rationalization of American Slavery or was it an attempt to understand who we were and how we had met and not met the challenges of the past?
Examining the challenges of the past is not a smooth road for organized religion. The Judo-Christian-Islamic faiths are religions of the book, of the words. The words can be changed or interpreted. They have been but each claims divinity for its own interpretation, rendering the others unworthy.
The same is true for the proponents and opponents of Critical Race Theory. Just as Christianity once vilified Judaism and Islam dismisses both as lies at their very core, we face this challenge over race. I think of the many wars fought over religion. I think of the many wars fought over race. No matter what we do, we are the descendants of these conflicts. Of course they are woven into the fabric of our systems. If we cannot accept who we have been, how are we to know who we are and what will become of us? Even the highly praised advocate for social change Gandhi, a Hindu, believed in the retention of the caste system.
Some, like myself, decided on personal interpretation. But we would be just as much fools if we do not think and believe that we carry our past influences inside of us. For all of their flaws, our nation was founded on the idea that we could do better than we had done before. It is the aspirational notion of our union that carries this belief at its core.
Time and again we have failed in this struggle but we have continued it. We have, this point, endured. In this, one of our great writers, William Faulkner was and will continue to be, I fervently believe, correct.