Out of Egypt:

thought of the day: the academic-language version

(rough draft, to be revised)

One of the things we have learned this century is that no datum has meaning in itself; all take on meaning through their incorporation in a system of interpretation (which is, as Walker Percy writes an inevitable process for a symbol-making creature). Almost nowhere is this principle more important to remember than in thinking about race: color is not a salient fact by necessity; it is so because of our history, and the way that history perpetuates itself through culture. Culture is a system of meanings that are omnipresent and implicitly understood, a system which structures our world in such a way that only on extended reflection and with comparison to other cultures can one recognize its power - or even, for most, be consciously aware of its existence.

It's not as simple as a choice between "skin color means nothing; we're all brothers underneath" and "skin color means everything." The former was the option of a few, and has proven to be naive. The latter has been the option of most - mortal enemies though they may be, a white racist and a Black Power advocate agree in imputing meaning to color. The contrasting meanings they impute reflect their contrasting status - one, the privileged pole in our society, the "default"; the other, as the Other (capital letter) deliberately crafting a new identity for itself, and taking pride in its difference.

Knowing what we do, we can no longer embrace any of the attitudes toward race outlined above. The lecturer I heard yesterday argued that systemic change is necessary, and I agree - however, the change I advocate goes deeper than that which she suggested, which still sounded to me like the old way of race and class warfare. We must have pride both in that which makes us distinct and in that which binds us together. We cannot blame the past, or the others, or even ourselves.

Nietzsche was an enemy to the Christian faith, but he had some valuable insights; chief among them, perhaps, is his view on the past. Alphonso Lingus summarizes, "The condition for...nobility in a man is the...power to forget, to let the past pass, let the weakness of one's being dissipate, let one's dying self die, to break the chains of memory, of remorse, of regret, to face the man or the woman you have wronged as though you are meeting him or her for the first time. . . . to enter into each day as thought a new response will have to be invented for each event, to enter into each landscape as though everything is unexpected, full of promises, dreams, surprises." In the matter of race, I believe both the historically oppressed and the historical oppressor need to exercise this power.

That's not to say that I'm categorically opposed to all forms of reparations, affirmative action, etc. Such things must be evaluated on their individual merit. If I were stating Nietzsche's principle of forgetfulness simply to advance the traditional conservative agenda, then I would be either as naive as those with the "brothers under the skin" view or as malicious as the racists who wished to deny their past history of oppression in order to keep their current position of privilege.

I'm talking about something quite different. I'm talking about our own self-conception, and the way that is evidenced by our rhetoric and our everyday interactions with each other, across racial lines. To acknowledge that the lines are there now is not to say that they were inevitable, with the concomitant suggestion of a racial determinism; on the other hand, to acknowledge that our history has created those lines is not to render them meaningless, or even to make them wholly a thing to be lamented. If we are to change the system of interpretation by which we live our lives - that system of culture which generally goes unnoticed - we must recognize two things simultaneously, though these things seem to contradict. We must recognize both that "God made from one blood all the peoples of the earth" and that God's praise will not be complete until heaven is filled with people of "every tribe, tongue, and nation."

The kind of unity that we need is the unity of Pentecost: one body, many tongues. God did not eliminate the curse of Babel by giving His Church one divine language in which to proclaim the Gospel - He gave His Spirit to the people, so that they might speak in their own language, but not depart from His Word. Only in God can we reconcile the One and the Many: in life as well as thought.

Knowing this, what are we to do now, in the seemingly secular realm of culture at large? Only this: live out faithfully the tension that you feel between the things which God has reconciled. Strive at all times to affirm and uphold both our absolute equality and the irreplaceable value of our differences.

Now it is true, that, in a sense, equality has primacy over difference, even as sovereignty has over responsibility. But the two situations are not perhaps as analogous as they seem. In reality, the need to emphasize equality more than difference may also be a product of history, since equality has been the pole of the dialectic more regularly denied, and not all the differences that have been attributed to race (or its associated culture) are positive. Many of these differences are themselves dialectical, but of the bad, Derridean kind - the kind which polarizes, where the privileging of one must inevitably entail the depreciation of its opposite. They are part of the history we must discard, the false attitudes to which we can hold no longer.

I should go on here to make my point more clear, perhaps give some practical applications, but the fact is, I'm not there yet; I'm still learning. Yesterday I heard a lecture that shook me up a bit, mostly because I felt torn between my sympathy for the ultimate goals the lecturer advocated and my distaste for her rhetoric and her proposed strategies for achieving those goals. Today I heard the phrase "your color" addressed to me for the first time; on later reflection, I thought about how strange it is to be white and in Lancaster County compared to being African-American in Boston: they would have learned color's salience early on, and not just abstractly, but as part of their own process of self-definition. For them, it would have presented itself as an urgent strategic question: whether to oppose the stereotypes of others, to ignore them, or to conform with them? In my childhood, by contrast, race was a theoretical question at best: I knew it was important not to be racist, and that a lot of people (white people) had been in the past, but this had very little to do with me, especially in my everyday life. But I know now that one's true stance on all social questions is decided precisely there: in the realm of everyday life. The abstract is not the cultural, and thus is not part the system of meaning in which we really live. Or, in other words, "You got to go there to know there." Or, in still other words, and better, "And by this we know that He is true: that we keep His commandments."