Learning to be Not White Can Be Practiced Where You Are
Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 4.0
…you must know…personally, each one of us, [is guilty] for all people and for each person on this earth. This knowledge is the crown of the monk’s path and of every man’s path on earth…for all men on earth ought to be [like monks]. Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal and that knows no satiety.
–Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The white liberal differs from the white conservative in only one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor.
–Malcolm X, quoted in handout from the Peoples’ Classroom 1/27/26
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
–Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in handout from the Peoples Classroom
Watching on my computer Minneapolitans involved in the protests talk about their experiences – this was before the police shooting of Alex Pretti – I could almost envy their frontline experiences. How clearly they spoke about real dangers, alarming firsthand sightings, real fear. What a different question of involvement for them than for us in Utica! The news comes to us from a distance, from someone else’s town, like a flooding or a forest fire on the opposite coast, slightly unreal. It takes an act of imagination – remote as we (white people) are here from the raw sense of threat from rising fascism – not to merely relativize the incident, or worse, among some of us so inclined, to imagine negatively, along with the DOJ, if there was provocation (and thereby justification) for the brutality
Or is it a different question of involvement? If the effort to remain aware of the danger of rising gestopism is different here ( so far, we must add), it’s not irrelevant. Emails go back and forth among conscientious friends, terms like “ICE-stapo” and “gulags,” comments belittling ICE’s minimal job requirements, etc. I cannot join this chorus of opinion sharing. Each day’s newspaper strikes me as more of same, even though the local daily lets people print very long letters and some people are very well informed. Unfortunately the paper gives the same amount of space to the MAGA defenders, also with much to say; together they make a boring performance, back and forth, day after day.
But, then, what am I to do? The point that such opinionating misses, for me, has to do with those words of Elder Zosima’s in The Brothers Karamazov: “Each of us is undoubtedly guilty… personally… for all people and for each person on this earth” – words nearly incomprehensible to those of us existing in guilt-free, fundamentalist-progressive white liberal reality, but it is on the only frequency I can tune into! I believe the heart longs “to be moved to a love that is infinite and universal.” I believe ignorance of the longing for personal connection with transcendence is at the bottom of the white liberal’s moral blindness. Admittedly, the spiritual connection is a moral “trap” of a kind; within it,one’s choices matter absolutely. But that’s not the most important part – the spiritual truth of interdependence and thus of “each one of us is guilty,” is the same truth as the experience of joy. Avoidance of that “trap” keeps the joyless engines of capitalism and consumerism going.
I shrink from the opinionating not because I don’t see the catastrophe, and not that I don’t believe in the power of the written word, nor that one must take “a side.” I have had to work so hard to find what is true for me; I cannot easily affirm “easy” political opinions unless I can detect something in them hard-won, that somehow I can sense is deep critique, and deeply unpopular. My orientation makes me look to what is not said. I look at the soil in which fascism has taken root, that I, along with my ancestors, “good people,” – as Trump would say of a quality he betrays over and over – have built. That is where the focus can be switched to the personal. Why did it happen? How did it happen? Socialism explains it in part. “Luigi,” the young historian teaching his Peoples’ Classrooms at The Other Side here in Utica, sheds much light on America’s moral dilemma. For too long the white liberal has acted as if inequality were not intrinsic to our America. And the very fact of not seeing inequality blinds people, not just to the cruelty inherent in the structures of society doing business-as-usual, but to their own complicity (guilt). Is what is happening with ICE transgressions worse than “normal?” Yes, it feels so, but the answer surely would vary depending on one’s skin color.
Luigi’s clarifications remove the qualifying distance between ourselves and the shootings in Minneapolis, as well as the whole history of horrors perpetrated in order to protect wealth and power. I am pleased that we (The Other Side) provide a public platform for socialist ideas. I demur from joining not because I don’t agree with Socialist critique and with socialist goals, but because right and righteous as they are, an important imaginative component is missing from them without which I am excluded. If you’ll pardon me my dogmatism, it’s this: there is one way for people to remain reliably, integrally radicalized, such that the goal goes even beyond socialism’s worthy checklist – i.e., healthcare, housing, adequate food, education for all, peoples benefiting from their own national resources, as well as protecting them from rapacious capitalists, etc., and it is this.
The roots of radicalization are in the soul; thus souls and soul’s truth must be included, a spiritual movement which is “bottom up,” not “top down.” To be heard personally, the call to activism cannot be limited to “do justice” and fight oppression. One’s self must be included in that boundless love, as it is in the free act of taking up one’s creativity That is, by (non-passively) giving voice to one’s soul, one includes oneself in that love. A society built of individuals knowing themselves to be loved in that larger reality, would be one in which love – not some form of self-righteousness – is the motive for justice. They will know a deliberate practice of honesty is needed so as not to be “deceitful” like the white liberal whose good deeds are self-protective. This call to creativity, admittedly, puts the dream of the ‘better world’ on dangerously subjective ground, or religious ground if you will, but without it noble and necessary revolution degrades into repression. Revolution not coming from joy is dangerous.
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I do not disagree with Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, referred to in the most recent Peoples’ Classroom devoted to the history of the Civil Rights struggle, that taking up arms is justified in protecting the vulnerable against “those without conscience.” The evil of caste is too entrenched for one to responsibly say violence is “not the way.” But it’s important for me to remember their more militant conclusions were built upon the truth introduced earlier by Dr. King, by means of his pioneering breakthrough of soul truth into America’s caste system that inspired the Freedom Riders and whites-only rule defiers of the early 1960’s. It was based in the lone genius who received his sense of direction imaginatively, and powerfully, in vision.
Spiritual truth has traditionally been recognized and generally admired, even by the “non-religious – in those cases of the lone individuals, the creative geniuses – poets, prophets,and thinkers – who’ve followed their genius “religiously,” i.e., obediently, thus exemplifying the paradox of freedom. They lived consequently as outsiders to society but were insiders in a spiritual communion connected in imagination. The “compensation” for their sacrifice – creative freedom – was, apparently, adequate! In the sense that many of the geniuses did not consider themselves religious, in the sense also that many creative geniuses were not able to handle the loneliness and torments of outsiderhood, it is a religion that has largely not been tried, except in the exceptions. (Having just seen Richard Linklater’s wonderful film Blue Moon, precisely the tragedy of Lorenz Hart was his inability to let go of his craving for insider success, at the same time loathing what giving in to that demand meant in terms of art, i.e., Oklahoma!)
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Looking at such an “outsider” religion’s admired exemplars, who surely were obtaining some reward invisible to others, but undeniably real in their priceless gifts to society, might not the sacrifice of outsiderhood be worth the price? And might not it be possible there is a different kind of community based in acceptance of singular outsiderhood that might be better and stronger than the one based in agreement?
I completely agree with anyone who claims Jesus is the supreme historical exemplar of this “religion of outsiders.” But this religion will not be practiced in his name in “insider” churches, neither mainstream nor evangelical, where consciousnesses are limited to the “civilized reality” with its inherent inequalities and injustices. Nor will it be practiced in self-consciously free and independent liberal churches where religious outsiders and social critique are welcome, but where the first loyalty still is to capitalism, to never overturning the moneychangers’ tables upon which our market-conditioned delight depends.
I think of black peoples’ experience in America in this respect, as outsiders not by choice but because of a caste system that corrupts the soul’s truth of brotherhood. And who, in America, speaks louder for the truth of brotherhood, the joyful truth of all being “God’s children” than black people? That hard-won truth which socially excluded, ostracized and oppressed people know by historical, social experience of oppression, white liberals too can learn: In capitalism one’s inmost self – the most precious aspect of oneself, the capacity for joy – is excluded. It is meant to be recompensed for by material rewards, and mightily attractive as they may be, after one has basic needs provided for, they cannot compensate for the soul that is missing. Taking up the struggle to include one’s multivalent soul in creative expression is to take up the history of oppression personally, as outsider, and it is to be intrinsically pluralist.
However, the radical disobedience of taking the creative soul’s side is not arrived at simply or all at once! Listening to Martin Luther King, Jr., as a group of us did in early January during a Peoples’ Classroom devoted to the Civil Rights movement, one sees/hears a man who, tested over and over, continued to provide his soul with a voice and continued to make discernments as to the underlying causes of social evil. That is what gave his voice the power that is more than its famously thrilling timber; it is the authority coming from what is not ego, the “soul force” that had young people defying the laws that condone separate-but-equal and the enforcement that turns a blind eye to – and even participates in – lynchings. Without the soul being given a voice, without its being brought from “outside” to inside the existing social world, without its continually testing against the strength of the ego, the blinding, mesmerizing effects of banal liberal reality with its perpetual divisiveness and invisible inequalities locks back into place.
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Soul-destruction happens not only to those directly crushed by Fascism and Jim Crow and ICE, and in fact, it is often those so crushed who recover their strength of soul, as in the black churches in the South whose uprising and acts of civil disobedience led to the Civil Rights act of 1964. ‘Soullessness’ is a normal condition for white liberals in the capitalist society in which these evils take root. It happens to those of us who’ve been effectively “warned off” from identifying deeply not only with George Floyd, Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, nor only with Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi, two prisoners beaten to death by correction officers in NYS prisons, nor with the sad people whose mugshots are regularly featured in our local paper having been arrested for various base crimes. But we’re also meant to be clear where such identification with the most vulnerable will end. The lessons from the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the assassination of Fred Hampton, from the real ignominy of Jesus’s abandonment and cruelest of executions, the message intended by the “washed hands” of the executioners is RESISTANCE on behalf of the most vulnerable LEADS TO DEATH!
Is the moral task, then, to refuse the normal, “insider” existence, to choose a monk-like way of life, to go on strike for the duration, to decline the lure of success on capitalist terms, to struggle over one’s lifetime with what that means? Is it monk-like to do what one conceives to be obedience to the relatedness and relationships that feel right to one’s soul – from family-centeredness and shared meals, to localism, local economy, to Luddhism, to refusing enmeshment with “social” media that relentlessly diminishes cultural and social space? That is, taking responsibility for being an outsider is doing something.
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