The United States has an undeniably serious problem with racism. No doubt about that. We’ve seen this with more clarity since the election of Donald Trump, as the bigots among us have been more ever more willing to openly judge others based on physical appearance. It has been distressing to see this. We need to shame these people and prosecute them to the extent that they break the law. To the extent that governments and their agents act with bigotry, including police officers, we need to push back with even more vigor.
But the United States is an extremely complex case, so it would be wrong to judge the U.S. on any one of its many dimensions as a proxy for all of its many dimensions. Andrew Sullivan reminds us of both this reductionism and this complexity in “Is There Still Room For Debate?” Here is an excerpt:
That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start . . . This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies. It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression
. . .
This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.
And a country that actively seeks immigrants who are now 82 percent nonwhite is not primarily defined by white supremacy. Nor is a country that has seen the historic growth of a black middle and upper class, increasing gains for black women in education and the workplace, a revered two-term black president, a thriving black intelligentsia, successful black mayors and governors and members of Congress, and popular and high culture strongly defined by the African-American experience. Nor is a country where nonwhite immigrants are fast catching up with whites in income and where some minority groups now outearn whites.
And yet this crude hyperbole remains . . . The crudeness and certainty of this analysis is quite something. It’s an obvious rebuke to Barack Obama’s story of America as an imperfect but inspiring work-in-progress, gradually including everyone in opportunity, and binding races together, rather than polarizing them. In fact, there is more dogmatism in this ideology than in most of contemporary American Catholicism. And more intolerance. Question any significant part of this, and your moral integrity as a human being is called into question. There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration.
I think the author poses another false choice in the era of false choices, false conflations, false dichotomies, false equivalencies, appeals to both false authorities and false expertise.
Not freedom versus oppression but, perhaps more accurately just societal opportunity versus unjust systemic restraints, or obstacles to peace in our land. .
Then, as a tall medium build white guy, I have the opportunity to be driving my vehicle home after work on Skinker Boulevard at 2:00 a.m. and to be free of the systemic restraint of a Clayton cop stopping me in the City of St. Louis because I “was a Black man in that part of town at that time of night,(said at deposition!)” held at gunpoint while a terrified white woman is brought to the scene illuminated by the flashing lights of three or four Clayton cop cars and when she says “the slope of his shoulders looks like the guy who attacked me,” of being arrested, my parole revoked and charged with multiple felonies which could land me in more prison for 28 years or more without parole.
Now, I may drive my vehicle in almost all neighborhhoods at night and not be pulled over for nothing or go into stores and not be followed around by security, or have the opportunity to march in a peaceful, lawful protest relatively free of the restraints of being unprovokedly attacked with rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray, persons with fixed bayonets, persons on horseback, hovering or low flying military helicopters intended to disperse us with their prop wash, and to face federal “secret police” imported from COVID-19 ravaged federal prsions in Texas and without badges, identifying patches or nametags, as well as being right in my masked face with their own unmasked faces during a COVID-19 pandemic.
The author mentioned the Catholic faith and a look to that may provide some insight to a possible approach to achieving justice and peace in our land. I assert peace may not be achieved solely through justice but may only have integrity in the presence of true reconciliation. I think the Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation could be a model for a starter conversation concerning truth and reconciliation with a committment to peace as the ultimate goal.
The “penitent” must first make an internal forum discernment that what they have done or failed to do has harmed their relationship with God and temporarily separated them from God’s Grace. In the matter of American society, or by me as a privileged white male in society, there must be acknowledgement of what has been done or what has failed to be done which may have harmed my brothers and sisters.
Catholic priests, as successors to Peter and the Apostles “to bind or unbind,” act as intermediaries between God and ourselves and guide we Catholics through a process of restoring us to a more complete relationship with God and to restore our Grace. A process similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Committees in post-aparteid South Africa could be started. All would be welcome to make grievances known or to acknowledge whatever truths they have in acts or failures which may have caused them harms or harm to others.
The last piece of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is direct action by the penitent to acknowledge their past wrongs, accept absolution but also to remake their committment to restoring themselves to God’s Grace by doing a penance. We cannot know what ” penance” would look like inside of this conversation but after the first two processes I believe that justice may be more of a cooperative endeavor than mere “taking” from the “sinners” or “giving” some benefit to those harmed.
Each massive breakthrough in technology which changes the world has had a commeasurate breakthrough in human ethics and relations to temper our destructive creativity. I don’t believe we’ve done that since we developed weapons of mass destruction, and this process may begin that conversation, too.