I sit here trying to remember where I was that Sunday. Probably I saw the news at my grandparents house after Sunday Mass. It was a typical Rochester March Sunday. High temperature 37º, low was 35º. Some mist and rain around 1:00 pm. “Another grey, dreary day in Rochester.” But a historic day in Selma. One that began to impact my life.
March of 1965 meant I was in Mrs. Greco’s 4th grade at St. Boniface. I was vaguely aware of Dr. King and his struggle to right the injustice done to Negroes. Seems funny having to write the word “Negro” today. As a 9 year old, I sensed finding the right word to describe people with darker skin was a problem area for adults, as I remember my grandparents referring to “colored people” and my parents preferring “Negroes.” There were also Indians, called Redskins, and most of my world, which just got lumped together as White. I remember thinking that the Indians (Native Americans) use of “Pale Faces” was more accurate. One thing for sure: it was a tricky subject, especially in front of adults, talking about the color of one’s skin.
At the time, I believe my experience of “Negroes” was Billy Griffin, a classmate of Ed’s at St. Boniface. I was vaguely aware, in a 9 year old way, of lots of Negroes living the other side of the Clarissa St. bridge. For some reason they were in a separate world, and people treated them and spoke about them in ways that seemed not quite right to me. That was about the extent of my awareness. I’d heard adults outside my immediate family use racists terms, like “boy,” and I’m sure I’d heard the N-bomb, but that was about it. Anything else came from TV or the newspaper. Back then breakfast meant reading the daily Democart and Chronicle, and even though my first priority was the comics, I did do some reading of the headlines that were bound to bring some information about Civil Rights and Dr. King into my world.
While my experience of race was minimal, I knew a lot about how the world treated the handicapped. Specifically about how the sighted world treated blind people. Robert A. Scott’s “The Making of Blind Men” describes what I felt watching the way many treated my grandfather and mother.
Blindness is a stigma, carrying with it a series of moral imputations about character and personality. The stereotypical beliefs I have discussed lead normal people to feel that the blind are different; the fact that blindness is a stigma leads them to regard blind men as their physical, psychological, moral, and emotional inferiors. Blindness is therefore a trait that discredits a man by spoiling both his identity and his respectability.
When a person with a stigma encounters a normal person, barriers are created between them. These barriers, though symbolic, are often impenetrable. They produce a kind of “moving away,” much like the action of two magnetized particles of metal whose similar poles have been matched. These avoidance reactions are often induced by a fear that direct contact with a blind person may be contaminating, or that the stigmatized person somehow inflict physical or psychic damage. Such reactions and fears are completely emotional and irrational in character.
Gradually, somewhere in my young soul, I saw that people with darker skin were treated the same way as blind people. As I got more information it became clear that their treatment was far worse. Normally the blind are not lynched, raped, beaten, etc. As I read the papers, watched Walter Cronkite, and moved out of a Catholic School into a public school, the same mechanism of watching one group of people, who considered themselves superior, project this stigma onto those they perceived as inferior, became clear.
My gut never let go of that conviction, but I also had a small problem… the mirror. First of all, I could see (as in I was not blind), and secondly, what I saw was some seriously white skin. People I loved and cared for were, in biblical terms, oppressed, or in 20th century terms, falsely stigmatized, and yet when I looked in the mirror, I saw someone who visually sure looked like the oppressor. In a strange sort of transference, I really wanted to be a victim, one of the oppressed heroically fighting for good, and not the oppressor. Of course I was sighted and I was white. Made getting comfortable in my own skin something of a challenge.
Returning to Scott’s comments, it is interesting to substitute “light skin” for normal and “dark skin” for blind. Here’s how it reads…
Dark skin is a stigma… When a person with dark skin encounters a person with light skin, barriers are created between them. These barriers, though symbolic, are often impenetrable. They produce a kind of “moving away,” much like the action of two magnetized particles of metal whose similar poles have been matched.
Fifty year after Selma we are still facing this dilemma. Science and formal education are making progress but as President Obama pointed out yesterday there’s still work to be done. It is easy to forget that many were actually “taught” racial superiority. Today further study of DNA, genetics, etc., make it clear that race has nothing to do with any physical, psychological, moral or emotional differences among people. In fact, all of our DNA goes back to 5,000 women in Africa. Race is no more significant than eye or hair color.
But Selma also reminds me that prejudice is multi-dimenional, often subconscious, and far from eliminated. Back in the day the discussion was around “overt” vs. “covert” racism. Today this hidden dimension is often described as “moral licensing.” Wikepedia defines it as follows:
the subconscious phenomenon whereby increased confidence and security in one’s self-image or self-concept tends to make that individual worry less about the consequences of subsequent immoralbehavior and, therefore, more likely to make immoral choices and act immorally.
Americans in general (and I honestly think almost everyone) want to feel that they are good people. Few hold today the traditional concept that we are all sinners or that fighting against sin is a 24/7 occupation. This means that today, rather than confronting immoral behavior in ourselves in a continual, disciplined way, there’s another option. If we do something that’s good, this can reinforce our positive self-image. This makes us less worried about immoral behavior because, after all, we’re “pretty good people.” Ironically, immoral choices are more likely in this scenario. A simple example follows
“I voted for Obama, showing I’m a good person and not a racist. But we’ve got to do something about those people who think they are entitled to Welfare, don’t have to work, etc. I’m not prejudiced, it’s just those people that look for entitlement rather than pulling themselves up by their bootstraps are gaming the system. I don’t like them.
Look carefully here for a minute. There is a case to be made that many “entitlement” programs actually harm participants by structurally reinforcing dependence rather than interdependence. But that’s not what happens above. Rather, the “good” (voting for Obama) is used as a license to justify the stigmatizing of “those people” rather than the program itself. Moreover, that stigma, the “those people” is also about making the “speaker” feel superior. Unfortunately, moral licensing and the subsequent subconscious immorality seems to be “going viral.”
Well, so here we are. Fifty years ago, as President Obama noted, there was “not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the meaning of America.” Rather than stigmatizing our society into superior and inferior races, people like John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian, Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, Dr. King, and so many more, acted to build a just America, a fair America, an inclusive America, a generous America. And me? Today, fifty years after a 9 year old might have seen Walter Cronkite talking about Selma on his grandmother’s black and white TV? What do I do about all of this today? What do I tell my son, nieces, nephews, the generation to come? Some thoughts…
- Engage rather than stigmatize. Tear those walls down! Follow my mother’s instructions and use the other four senses to cross over barriers and get to know the unique person or people that life puts in our path. Call people out that stigmatize rather than engage. Skin color only matters if or when we allow it to; handicaps are handicaps only when we make them that. Religion gets it right: in every human being we can find the image of God. Sometimes that image is surprising, but always it’s sacred.
- Continued work to transform institutions, organizations, groups, etc., so that people’s potential is enabled by them, not stigmatized.
- Laugh at what looks back from the mirror. It really is another image of God. Maybe God’s not that hung up on perfection after all 🙂
