When Roots first aired on television I was eleven years old. I remember, night after night, the horror I felt at the jaw-dropping injustices, the depravity and suffering depicted in the miniseries. I could not fathom how this barbarous system of slavery had ever been perpetuated and defended, and I was relieved and thankful to know it was more than a hundred years behind us; the abolitionists had won. It never occurred to me to identify myself with the slave-owners because my skin was the same shade as theirs. I stood squarely on the side of human dignity, of freedom and mercy, of justice. I stood with all the characters in that true-life story who opposed the evil atrocity of people-as-property. I believed skin color was a shallow and silly measurement for anything that matters about a person.
I still do.
Yet in today’s America we are increasingly prompted, even pressured as a moral obligation, to view our selves and our experiences through the lens of race. It is becoming de rigeur to consider immutable features such as skin pigmentation a meaningful facet of who we are — of why we are who we are. Even as it becomes widely understood that race itself is a socially rather than biologically constructed concept, we are being encouraged to focus on our racial history as one of, if not the defining elements of our place in this world as we journey through it.
On the one hand I see the obvious value in becoming aware of the ways in which individuals experience the world differently … quite unevenly … because of the circumstances into which they are born. That includes the color of their skin. Empathy is undeniably key to recognizing and advancing justice — socially, politically, and morally. It is a critical skill, fundamental for cultivating an ethic of help and healing. But on the other hand, I also think it’s vital to ask: How does filtering our awareness through a racial lens distort our experience of the world and each other?
Recently, I overheard a conversation about racial sensitivity between an older white man and a middle-aged African-American woman. It caught my attention because they were discussing on the one hand how much racism still persists in America and how white people need to stop dismissing it, but on the other hand she was pointing out that everyone needs to be more aware of their filters, to stop presuming racism where it doesn’t exist. She shared a personal story about waking up to this challenge when, years ago, she offered help to an elderly white woman stowing bags of groceries in her car. She described how insulted she felt as she finished the task and saw the woman fumble in her purse to pull out cash, her aggrieved sense that this woman was casting her into a role, reacting to her as a stereotype — the Poor Black Help — rather than simply seeing her as she was: a person being helpful. But then she discovered something that changed the entire picture. This elderly white woman had also pulled out a crucifix, said something about her life as a nun, and in that instant the insult vanished because her reflexive charity took on a completely different meaning. She wasn’t offering cash because she perceived a black person in need. Race was not a factor. She was expressing her thanks from the culture of graciousness in which she was rooted.
I was intrigued, listening to her recount this story. Then disappointed. She so clearly seemed to embrace the idea that race was not a helpful or correct lens through which to perceive the interaction, only to stop short of realizing how it was still limiting her vision. Not being part of their conversation I kept my mouth shut, but I really wanted to ask this woman: What if she had not been a nun but was just a white lady who offers cash to everyone as thanks for their help? Why can’t she be presumed innocent of racial stereotyping without vestments as “proof” of her neutral good intentions? I found it discouraging to discover a person can eschew a racial lens without even realizing they’re still using one.
In Between the World and Me, the author Ta Nahesi Coates pens an extended eloquent and powerful letter to his teenage son, wholly through the lens of race. As beautifully as he writes, it isn’t an easy read because it requires us to join him in his entrenched racial perspective, a catalogue of bitter grievances both real and imagined. One particular passage that I’ve pondered over, because it both resonates and repels, recounts his experience as a parent defending his little son:
You were almost five years old. The theater was crowded, and when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, “Come on!” Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child out on my part of Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense, if not know, that there would be a penalty for such an action. But I was not out on my part of Flatbush. … I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experienced this a his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said, “I could have you arrested!” I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to do much more was hot in my throat. This desire was only controllable because I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing witness to more fury than he had ever seen from me — you.
Being a mother, I viscerally comprehend his outrage seeing his precious child rudely pushed by an impatient stranger. By an adult! I am right there with him in his indignation, his instant anger, his reflex to protect … until he twists the encounter into a racial narrative. His immediate fixation on color, hers versus his, and the “rescuer’s,” and his fear, his insecurity about protecting his child’s “black body,” his hot response containing “all of the moment and all of my history,” his barely controllable fury, all of it speaks to me of a reactivity rooted in unaddressed trauma. Is it all from his own upbringing amidst the violence of West Baltimore? Or is some of it adopted from ancestors he never knew but whose pain he has fervently fostered, attached to himself as his birthright? I want to ask him what seems to me the glaring question: Why are you so certain your son’s skin color had anything to do with it, that the obnoxious woman wouldn’t also have pushed a dawdling white child in her way? And for that matter: Why do you assume the “rescuer” noticed and ignored her nasty behavior, that it wasn’t actually the heat of your words that drew his attention? Coates’s framing of this incident — his sense that she was “pulling rank” and had “invoked [her] right over the body of [his] son” — all of it seems profoundly unhealthy, pernicious and sad. It’s as though he perceives white people as incapable of seeing outside of skin color, as if such awareness defines and qualifies their every word and deed in their interactions with others. I suspect, however, based on the rest of the book, that he is simply projecting his own incapacity. And he is hardly alone in that.
And therein lies the problem.
Because we are all vulnerable to becoming racially hyper-sensitized in a way that breeds resentment. Sows division. I have my own experience which occurred a few years ago, at my local Whole Foods Market at the hot bar, the large rectangular self-service station where customers — in pre-pandemic days — could fill containers with freshly made dishes kept warm in serving trays each labeled with the dish’s name and ingredients. It was past lunch hour as I approached and I was in a hurry. I noticed a couple people circulating around it, as well as two youngish — early 30s? — professionally dressed black women standing on the far side chatting, unfilled containers dangling casually from their hands. I grabbed a take-out box from where they were stacked at one end and started making my way around the rectangle, leaning in close to read each of the small labels as I tried to determine the options. When I rounded the far side where the women were standing, still talking, I continued along the edge of the station, moving into the wide gap between the bar and them. Caught up as I was in decision-making, I’m not sure what tuned me into their conversation but I suddenly became aware that they were bonding aloud over a shared indignation, caustically critiquing some female nearby whose behavior they found pushy, entitled, and rude. Wondering who was provoking their commentary, I glanced back and was shocked to see them focused on me, to realize I was the subject of their disdain.
Confused and hot with chagrin, I quickly turned back to my task, pretending to ignore them, yet running a frantic review in my head trying to understand my offense. How had I misread the situation? Weren’t they just visiting? Had I really cut ahead of them? But there is no line! Did I owe them an apology? Even as I moved back around to the other side of the bar, wholly out of their way, they continued with their mocking critique making no move towards the food. Though I couldn’t catch every word, listening to them carry on I began to sense they were simply relishing their derision, seizing an opportunity to indulge some spite rather than airing a genuine grievance. And so I finished at the bar and walked away without acknowledging them, trying not to feel overly aggrieved at their inexplicable, mean-girl attack, and wondering to myself: Would they have done the same thing if I’d been black instead of white? I suspect not, and it bothers me how easy it is to perceive racial animus when conflict arises.
Indeed, watching the way race is being urged upon us as the default lens for American life, we should consider it cause for concern. Because even if the individual incidents I’ve mentioned don’t illustrate any significant harm, they reveal the Us versus Them viewpoint that, over time, builds up a storehouse of grievances. Society will splinter under the weight of cultivated resentments if we continue along this path of encouraging and defending a racially filtered interpretation of our encounters with one another. And no, I am not suggesting we turn a blind eye to unambiguously racist incidents, that we pretend such things no longer exist.
They do. That is not the issue here.
What is the issue … what is at stake … is goodwill, and everything that extends from it: community, sagacity, order, peace. In no way does society advance towards racial healing, much less justice, when we constantly err on the side of injury, of nurturing grievance, when we ever select the frame of racial offense each time an equivocal interaction (or even actual insult) occurs. People are flawed. Life is messy. We all provide each other plenty of painful moments and unexpected hurts, yet we seem in process of forgetting that a wound of any nature does not heal — cannot heal — with the constant picking of a scab, with clinging to a grudge, with refusing the benefit of the doubt, with the denial of grace. Communal bonds do not grow from a pit of rancor.
Yet, such counterproductive responses seem baked into the racial lens. And they are now being bolstered through an emerging insistence that “impact”rather than intent is what designates as “racist” any word or deed, any message or program — at least when the injured party is non-white. The idea, however, that all inter-racial transgressions, every unintended harm or hurtful mistake, should automatically carry the stain of ignorant bigotry to the (white) transgressor is preposterous. It flies in the face of everything we know about forgiveness and fairness, every instinct people have about justice and its cardinal qualifier: context. This color-coded re-writing of relational values cannot do other than propel society into the kind of division that ends in violence and destruction. We need to pull back, to figure out a way to elevate genuine empathy, to foster healing by building and guarding the rails of genuine, impartial justice for all, before it’s too late. We need to see one another clearly, not in black and white, not in color, but through a softer lens — the forgiving focus of friendship, of human kindness and goodwill.
