Giving Up Innocence

Although Oakland, California, has pride in calling itself "the most integrated city in the United States," its neighborhoods can be identified largely along racial and socioeconomic lines. The Oakland hills is a virtual white suburbia (exceptions notwithstanding) with beautiful homes on wooded lots. To the east, on the other side of the low hill range bordering Oakland, are the even more lily white "bedroom communities."

"The flatlands," on the other hand, is a zone of color. The majority of its residents are African Americans, with an increasing population of Latino and Asian Americans, who live in considerably smaller homes and crowded apartment buildings in an urban sprawl. In Oakland socioeconomic status is determined by the slope of your street.

Acutely aware of that racial and class divide, I moved into the Oakland flatlands in the early 1980s as part of a small group of middle-class whites motivated by religious commitment and social conscience (and an unidentified dose of guilt?). One day three of us from this faith community were riding the bus through the flatlands of Oakland on into Berkeley. As white people, we were accustomed to being the racial minority on this urban jaunt. Since all of the seats were occupied when we boarded, we stood at the back of the bus. Several moments after we got on, there was a loud scream.

"Hey, this white mother f-er just stepped on my foot." A black male in his early 20s, seated nearly four feet away, was looking at me in a fit of rage.

While I looked back, confused, he rattled off a series of insulting expletives. Though I was sure that I wasn't near his foot, humility seemed wise. "I am really sorry that I stepped..." I began, but my words were cut short by another sizzling barrage; this time he peppered his insults with threats.

Other men joined in with their own taunting shouts, each contributing an idea of how all three of us might be taught a lesson. The remarks began to focus on the berets, acquired during work in Latin America, that two of us were wearing.

"Look at them, they look like terrorists or something!"

"I bet they're anti-American, trying to overthrow our government!"

"Man, they look like communists!"

Tension quickly engulfed the entire bus. Then the drama took a surprising turn. A middle-aged black woman, seated next to the young man who had started the melee, turned to him and said, "Why don't you just shut up. He hasn't done anything to you." The back of the bus went silent and all eyes fixed on the new protagonist.

"Oh, so look here, we have with us an Oreo who has come to help the white folks!" the young man jeered.

"It's not about color, young man; it has to do with respect for other people, something you obviously never learned in your home," she replied acidly.

"Who do you think you are, my mother? Listen, bitch, no one was ever at home for me so don't you come off trying to tell me how to act," he said bitterly, then quickly added, "Besides, I never learned to lick white folks shoes clean!"

"It's people like you who make white folks think we're nothing but failures," she said evenly.

The conversation degenerated into more name-calling and threats. The other passengers in the back of the bus now said nothing. The standoff came to an abrupt halt when the woman, realizing that the bus had reached her destination, quickly got off the bus.

Memory and the End of Innocence

This incident can be a window through which to view the larger conversation of race, class, and gender. The young males on the bus lashed out against us solely based on the color of our skin. My moral ideals, including the value that "all people are created equal," lead me to conclude that my human dignity and rights were unfairly violated. Viewed as an isolated moment of my personal existence, the incident suggests both my own innocence and the immoral racist behavior of a specific group of black males.

However, as Kirkegaard expressed in many different ways, "innocence is ignorance," a quite deliberate "unknowing" that is sustained for power via the guise of moral superiority. Every event is part of a deeper stream of meaning, however much examining particular events as if by "freeze frame" creates an illusion of their autonomy.

Though individuals and communities may be removed in terms of time or cultural space from the genesis of any given social dynamic, every event has a "career" to which it is bound. For that reason, it is necessary to explore whether there is more to the anger of the black males on the bus than first meets the eye.

In October 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed many poorly constructed apartment buildings and low-income hotels situated in the Oakland flatlands. Many families, predominantly black, were forced to leave their condemned apartment buildings. More than 2,000 rooms at hotels catering for the homeless were boarded up, leaving many of the residents, again predominantly black, with no money and few options for shelter.

Those fortunate enough to receive aid from the Federal Emergency Management Fund (FEMA) were forced to wait months. Even then, in order to qualify for housing assistance FEMA stipulated that victims show proof that they had lived at their address for at least 30 days, a requirement that eliminated scores of otherwise eligible tenants. Due to unstable income, many people cannot afford to pay an entire month's rent at a hotel and so spend the last week of the month on the streets until their welfare check arrives.

In October 1991, Oakland was again struck by tragedy when a large firestorm swept through its wooded highlands, destroying more than 3,000 homes. FEMA assistance began rolling in to the predominantly white victims of the fire within six days.

While only one-third of the earthquake victims received assistance from FEMA two years earlier, the agency this time granted help to more than two-thirds of the fire victims. Though FEMA claimed that it simply was not as prepared after the earthquake as it was in the aftermath of the firestorm, the fact remains that while many residents of the Oakland hills, aided by federal grants, were beginning reconstruction of their homes, many black victims of the earthquake were still without any secure shelter.

This is the face of racism in the post-civil rights era. As Dr. Julianne Malveaux, a San Francisco-based economist suggests, "You don't need five people in a room saying we're going to jam black people. But if you decide cities are last on your list, and 60 percent of African Americans live in cities, you have targeted African Americans." The dream of integration has turned into the nightmare of segregated social opportunity and curtailed economic advancement.

Despite these harsh realities, many white people in this country still assume that racism went out with the abolition of separate drinking fountains and the general societal disapproval of racial slurs like "nigger" and "boy." A larger black middle class, the legal desegregation of the public schools, the weighted opportunities offered by entitlement and affirmative action programs and, of course, the unparalleled success of the Michael Jordans and the Spike Lees of the entertainment world bolster this positive appraisal of the advances of integration. The assumption is that though we may not have reached the ideal of racial integration and equality, we are making real "progress."

"Progress" calls for an unbending faith in the future as the redeemer of the past and the present. Yet the casualties of the black community in the United States have piled up for nearly four centuries, giving lie to the evolutionary myth of an ever better future. The victims' voices reveal the bestial irrationality lurking behind an "enlightened reason" and signal the regressive human costs of those values that are triumphantly praised as progressive freedoms. While the winners of history celebrate, or at least tolerate, the social order of the present, the conquered ones never allow us to forget that we all have both a past and a future.

Of course, those who hold social and economic power are not willing to surrender their claims of innocence so easily. The dominant culture nearly always seeks to legitimate the existing social arrangements by weaving a complex quilt of defining myths, ideals, values, practical knowledge, and anticipations. These themes not only support the culture's own perception of innocence, but also aim to establish for one and all that the social world could not be otherwise. This genre of cultural storytelling is characterized in Arnold Toynbee's shocking assessment of pan-African culture in A Study of History: "When we classify [humankind] by color, the only one of the primary races...which has not made a single creative contribution to any of our 21 civilizations is the black race."

Tragically cut off from their own memories, those without meaningful social power regularly have their identities fashioned in reference to a cultural story that is not their own. That paradoxical twist was painfully evident on the Oakland bus when several black men, seeking a language and cause by which to express their free-floating rage, leveled accusations at the three of us regarding our own supposed "anti-American" position.

Invoking the national myth that addresses the danger to freedom and order posed by enemies--foreign and domestic--they perceived us as a threat to a social world that had, in reality, produced their own social marginality. While their memories informed them that white people were often an enemy to be hated and feared, having designated us as such elicited a host of associations of the "enemy" that were more characteristic of a ruling class--overthrowing the government, damage to public property, etc.

Though the men could likely only imagine the possibilities of what it would mean actually to participate in the "American Dream," their identity was nonetheless intimately linked to its survival.

Mourning, Guilt, and the Pursuit of Justice

Are these observations yet another case of collective white guilt gone too far?

Only if it is assumed that the practice of mourning should be equated with the notion of guilt. German psychoanalyst Alice Miller claims to the contrary that "mourning is the opposite of feeling guilt; it is an expression of pain that things happened as they did and that there is no way to change the past." Authentic sorrow is an appropriate response to injustice.

From cradle to grave, of course, we are told to feel good, expunge negative thoughts, liberate our shame, love ourselves, and build high self-esteem--all actions of the will that promise to help us reach our full potential as human beings. Certainly, these means to a healthy self-image are, in and of themselves, to be affirmed on our path to affirm life.

But they must never come at the price of denial. Guilt is the debilitating result of repressed memories. Anxiety, neuroses, and even more serious psychological dysfunctions do not derive from mourning, but arise from the fated attempt to hide from historical wounds and to be fed by their destructive power.

For that reason, actions born solely out of the motivation to rid oneself of guilt--the "activist" solution that still places the self and its need to control at the center of the world--do not bring healing to situations of injustice. The victims of oppression are once again merely treated as objects, manipulated for the sake of one's own redemption. They are not recognized as human beings to whom the powerful relate in quite unequal ways. Patterns of control are maintained to stave off the sacrifices of mutuality and justice.

There will be no authentic racial dialogue in the United States until the white community becomes deeply mournful that the majority of people of color in this country live in intolerable conditions of poverty, suffer from staggering unemployment, and are faced with limited social opportunities, due not to sloth or genetically inferior capacities, but because of structural racism that conditions the inevitability of their marginal cultural existence. Mourning has the potential to move a community toward an authentic repentance, beyond superficial solutions. But until a radical social reconstruction takes place, the white community will continue to be racked by guilt and fear and people of color will continue to be trapped in poverty, anger, and despair.

Uncovering these pathologies in the fabric of U.S. culture relies on a critical awareness, informed by the recuperating power of memories and reflection on present experience. However, deep liberation also requires a sustaining spiritual vision that arises from the practical values and concrete engagements which are fashioned in relation to a more just future.

In that respect, it must be questioned whether many have not given up too much in surrendering the quest for universals. At least since the '70s, "identity politics" has been the predominant mode of consciousness both within the social activist community and within those academic circles seeking to deconstruct a dominant umbrella of ideologies. The result is a self-referential basis for political vision that stems from one's own essential identity as a member of an ethnic group, a community of gender or sexual preference, a religious tradition, a narrowly defined political agenda, etc.

That happened at a conference on religious and social transformation held recently in Chicago. Halfway through the proceedings, a white female stood up and announced, "I want you to know that nearly everything that has been discussed here over the last few days has no validity because many of you were sons in the court of Pharaoh."

A black male stood up in another part of the hall and shouted, "And I want you to know that what you have just said also lacks validity because you were a daughter in the court of Pharaoh." Those gathered were still ruminating over this when a Asian female activist yelled, "And I want you to know that what you have just said lacks validity because you were a slave in the court of Pharaoh." On could go the litany until no one would have a "valid" place from which to speak.

The affirmation of identity as a member of a community, constituted by a past and a present, is an indispensable element to any liberation struggle. However, identity politics and, in more general terms, a strict identity ethos lose their transformative power once the goal becomes the elimination of the voice of the other solely because it has an outsider status relative to one's own experience.

CAN POLITICS, broadly understood, ever be rooted in anything but identity? How else might one conceivably arrive at a political consciousness?

An authentic struggle toward liberation is a pluralist collaboration, striving to include voices that have never had the opportunity to participate fully in cultural, economic, social, and political discourses, and to do so on equal terms and with an appreciation for difference. The goal is not necessarily consensus but an environment of creative tension that aims for mutual transformation.

Few theologians during the last century have formulated a vision binding human identity to the larger community as insightfully as Howard Thurman. He used the metaphor of imago dei to express the sacredness and inherent worth of each and every human being. Thurman was convinced that "community relatedness" must inexorably flow from an appreciation of our common universal ground. Each person then has the capacity to treat the other as if one is in the place where one ought to be, as a particular expression of the many faces of God. Moral responsibility, Thurman therefore concluded, is circumscribed within the practice of love as grounded in justice and the inter-relatedness of identity.

On that basis, it is essential to search for a language and practice of rights and virtues that move beyond self-referential definitions that set boundaries around my/our rights and my/our virtues. Despite the complexities inherent in the affirmation of such "metavalues," it is on that basis that duties and obligations also may be given their due consideration along with the identification of rights within the ethical arena. But in the same breath it must be recognized that a definitive interpretation of the character of metavalues is never self-disclosing. No identity group must be given the sole legitimacy to determine these values; no single story defines for us the complete matrix of our metavalues.

Interpretive priority, however, must reside in the stories of the poor, the marginalized, and the suffering ones who reveal the roots of our shared fragmentation and dehumanization. Their redemption is the essential gateway to social reconciliation and, therefore, to the redemption of us all.

Social conversation always takes place in a world of power imbalance. When conversants do not share even a minimal degree of mutual vulnerability within concrete relations of power, it is not really conversation that is unfolding but rather a subtle, or not so subtle, form of dictation. Authentic social conversation must be ongoing, broadly inclusive of a plethora of material interests and commitments, and self-consciously struggling both to sharpen and broaden the character and meaning of metavalues for any given social system. It must entail a process of mutual critique that constantly exposes and deconstructs the pretensions that the present social order is the actual embodiment of those values.

Liberating action demands a vision of the world which, though it is not yet a reality, is in the process of becoming one because it is alive in the social consciousness of a people. The pursuit of inalienable rights for all peoples, for instance, affirms the dignity of all human beings regardless of the heterogeneous identities within a social system.

It must be ruthlessly exposed that U.S. history reflects a monumental contradiction between the affirmation of that principle and its actual practice, both domestically and in foreign affairs. But it is also true that the responsibilities implicit in a commitment to the principle of inalienable rights provide a signpost--the contours of which are ever clarified and adjusted through communal interaction--by which to clarify and discern the injustices of every present moment.

"Race-Transcending Prophets"

Cornel West challenges social activists within grassroots communities to demonstrate the transformative moral power of the "race-transcending prophet," men and women who model the capacity to "get beyond the confines of race without ever forgetting the impact of racism on Black people in this society."

The courage demanded by that moral commitment is exemplified by the woman on the Oakland bus who challenged a raucous, threatening group of young males regarding the responsibility and truth of their actions, and did so on behalf of three people whose racial identity perhaps would not compel her naturally toward solidarity. In doing so she made herself vulnerable to the accusation of being a traitor (an "Oreo") to her own racial identity and suffered the painful humiliation which that treatment bears.

Of course, the hardened cynic might question her motivations for intervening, and perhaps even suggest that she was merely acting out of a dominated consciousness that is linked historically to the subjugation of black people to white culture. But the simple fact is that her intervention struck a blow against the pillars of accommodation that uphold the structural edifice of racism in U.S. society.

Racial solidarity is only manifest in specific acts of justice that address the root causes of social and economic marginalization and identify the brutal consequences of their destructive power. It demands a democraticization of the economic structures and the social order, an opening of those spaces where communities of color may participate in the society on the basis of their own identity. The goal of racial politics is not the progressive integration of the black culture into a majority, white culture; the transformation of racial relations in this country must go much deeper.

The primary challenge for the white community is to intervene where racism actually exists, namely, in those social institutions and economic structures within which they participate, so as to end their own accommodation and acquiescence to that system. Perhaps to many within the white community it will not be readily apparent how the mechanisms of exclusion and dehumanization covertly function within their own institutions.

For that reason, it is essential for whites to enter into a real dialogue of praxis with the black community so that they may hear and appreciate the memories and stories of those who experience racism. Interdependence with our sisters and brothers of color will surely challenge our attitudes, opinions, life styles, ideas, and viewpoints.

At the same time, it is high time for the white community to stop feigning ignorance to serve as a cover-up for moral reticence. Usually what is required to bring about meaningful social transformation is patently obvious, but the sacrifices are deemed too costly.

Where love, beauty, and human dignity are not embodied in social structures that condition human inter-relatedness, that social system will reek with decay. Long ago Malcolm X prophetically underscored the alternatives that would shape the social destiny of this country: "[Only] real, meaningful actions as those which are sincerely motivated from a deep sense of humanism and moral responsibility can get at the basic causes that produce the racial explosions in America today. Otherwise, the racial explosions are only going to grow worse."

As I was dramatically reminded on an Oakland bus, we have not yet heeded his warning.

David Batstone was founder and president of Central American Mission Partners (CAMP) in the San Francisco Bay Area when this article appeared. This article is excerpted from the his book, New Visions for the Americas (copyright Fortress Press, 1993). Used by permission of Augsburg Fortress.