“My White Friend Sue”
By Tom Reiber
February 25, 2001
was at a retreat
recently with theologian Walter Wink and his wife, June Wink. In one of our exercises, Walter had us think
about someone who really bugged us. “Think of the person who can really get under your skin,” he said. Then he had us list eight or ten attributes
of that person that bugged us the most. We jotted them down. Then he
said, “Now will someone please read Matthew 7:1-5?” That passage, which is our
Gospel text for today, reads:
Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the
measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the
log in your own eye? Or how can you say
to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in
your own eye? You hypocrite, first take
the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck
out of your neighbor's eye.
He didn't have to explain
where he was going with that passage. Half way into it we were all laughing nervously, glancing at our lists
and seeing them in a new light. All of
a sudden we saw ourselves in the person we described. Not the conscious image we have of ourselves, but the unconscious
image. What depth psychologists call
the shadow.
My goal today is to tell you
the story of my own confrontation with my shadow, particularly as it pertains
to racism. To do that I need to go back to the time when I was making plans to
attend Union while still living in the northwest. Even at that time, I was
ambivalent about Union's location on the border of 125th, which is
where Harlem officially begins. On the
one hand it was part of what made me want to go there. At the same time its proximity to Harlem
scared me. I had vague, unarticulated
concerns about wondering into the “wrong” part of town….
During my first few
months in New York City, I mostly stayed clear of Harlem. Though early on I went for run and got
turned around in Morningside Park so that I ended up going about fifteen or
twenty blocks uptown. I remember
panicking momentarily when I first realized what I had done. Just then I saw a couple of elderly African
American men playing checkers. All of a
sudden I felt really stupid. “Ooh,
watch out, you're in Harlem now.” So
the first step in my journey was the dawning realization that things were
different than I had made them out to be in my mind. That cracked the door a few inches, giving me a glimpse of my
shadow.
During my second semester I signed up for a class with
Black Liberation Theologian Dr. James Cone, who literally wrote the book on Martin & Malcolm. His class by that title compares and
contrasts King and Malcolm X from a number of different angles, and serves as a
springboard for an analysis of present day racism. Dr. Cone used actual television footage and taped speeches in his
class. And while I loved listening to
King, it was Malcolm who really got me. I heard him say things like this:
“Yes I will pull off that liberal's halo that he spends such efforts
cultivating! The North's liberals have
been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with
it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world's worst hypocrites….
“…The white Southerner, you can say one thing—he is
honest. He bares his teeth to the black
man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will
accept phony ‘integration.' The
Southern white goes further to tell the black man that he means to fight him
every inch of the way…. The advantage
of this is the Southern black man never has been under any illusions about the
opposition he is dealing with.
“…But the Northern white man, he grins with his teeth, and his mouth
has always been full of tricks and lies of ‘equality' and ‘integration.' When one day all over America, a black hand
touched the white man's shoulder, and the white man turned, and there stood the
Negro saying ‘Me, too…' why, that Northern liberal shrank from that black man
with as much guilt and dread as any Southern white man,” (p. 272).
The force of Malcolm's
words pushed the door to my shadow wide open.
Around the same time I
got a job at the Hale House in Harlem. So all of a sudden I was walking into
Harlem on a daily basis. On those
morning walks I saw more scary, inner city sights. Like kids being dropped off for school; collars getting
straightened; cheeks being kissed; a father holding his daughter's hand,
walking her to school. Once again I
felt ashamed at myself for buying into the oversimplified view of: inner city =
war zone.
On one particular day I
left Union in alight drizzle, listening to U-2 on my walkman, lost in
thought. Suddenly I came up short, an
elderly African American woman had stepped directly in front of me. “What's the
matter, you think you're made of sugar? You aint gonna melt.” I looked
around and saw that, though the rain had stopped, I was still holding my
umbrella. It was a funny, good natured
comment, but somehow I felt there was more to the interaction than what met the
eye.
My
daily walks into Harlem and my course with Dr. Cone served like two sides of a
vice, which tightened up over the course of the semester until my shiny
good-guy self perception began to crack. The first major crack in my façade came in the form of a dream. In the dream:
I'm running down a sidewalk
and see an African American man standing with his back to me and his hands in
his pockets. I realize I might startle
him as I pass, so I raise my hands in the air to show that I'm harmless. Then the dream jumps to me arriving
home. I've got a gun in my hand and
have just killed someone.
It didn't take me long to grasp the meaning of that
dream. I wanted to assure the Black man
that I was harmless, when in fact I was very dangerous.
Countless
other experiences at the time applied more and more pressure to the dam
blocking me from a direct encounter with my shadow. Then I had an experience which caused the damn to burst. I was sitting in Dr. Cone's class taking
notes. Someone mentioned the book Race Traitors, which is a science
fiction story in which a group of aliens come to earth and offer to take all
the Black people off the earth. Later
on in the discussion I looked to make sure that I had written down the title of
the book and what it was about. Looking
at my notes, I saw that I had written the title and then I had written: “aliens
offer to take all the rats off the earth.” My God, I thought. Oh my
God. I had written “rats” where I
had meant to write “Blacks.” My first
impulse was to place my hand over my notes for fear that the woman sitting next
to me might see it. But I knew there
was no covering that over, because I had seen it.
That
experience plunged me into white shame, something I knew nothing about at the
time. In fact, it wasn't until I came
across a book entitled Learning to Be
White by Thandeka that I began to learn about white shame.
Thandeka has studied racism
at length and is one of those writers who has gotten inside the truth of the
experience. She found that the price we
whites pay for the glaring disparities in education, employment, health care
and the criminal justice system is white shame. She asserts that we've created a system in which the basic fact
of our prejudice has been successfully mystified, so that we can look at those
disparities and honestly wonder, “How can these things still be going on in the
world today?” But deep down we feel
responsible and we feel ashamed.
Most
of what Thandeka writes about is so deeply buried amidst the various
sedimentary levels of social discourse that she had to invent a ways to bring
the subject matter to conscious awareness.
One method she came up with
is what she calls the Race Game. To
play the Race Game you simply include the word white whenever you refer to a
friend or acquaintance in conversation. So for example, if I were to ask you over at coffee hour, “So how was
your weekend?” You'd say, “Oh, it was
great. I went to the movies with my
white friend, Lex.” You can tell just
in that casual explanation that there's something odd about identifying someone
as white.
Thandeka observes that we don't have the same reaction when we
identify people as minority. Say, for
example if you were to ask how my weekend went and I were to say, “Oh it was
great, I went out to dinner with my African American friend, Chris. That doesn't have the same jarring oddness
about it to our ears. Here's what Thandeka
says by way of explanation:
“…The use of the term white as a racial category in speech by one Euro-American to another
Euro-American presumes that important information about the person being spoken
of…is being relayed….
This presumption…countermands a general assumption held by
Euro-Americans for whom being white is not a conscious part of their personal
identity structure…. …Most of the
Euro-Americans I interviewed did not think of themselves as white. The category has little conscious personal meaning for them [because] …they reserve racial
descriptions for persons who are not
white. Such descriptions say, in
effect, that the person described is not one of us, not part of our white
community but, rather, an outsider (i.e., black). But the claim ‘our white community' is hidden. …The Race Game breaks this coded way of framing
reality.”
Thandeka goes on to say
that after having issued the challenge to people to play the race game in
countless speaking engagements, she has never had anyone come back to her and
say they were able to keep it up for a week straight. The closest anyone got that she is aware of was a seminary
student named Douglas who heard her speak and vowed to himself that he'd play
the race game for a week. In a letter
to Thandeka, Douglas writes:
“Every time I decided to
play the game with someone new, I felt that I was about to be rejected, that
the person would turn away, and that I would be shunned. I felt terrible. As soon as I met someone and started talking, invariably I would
have to mention someone's name, which meant that I would have to say the word
[white]. Before I said it, I'd hesitate
as if I were about to stutter, and I don't even stutter—ever! I am never at a loss for words. But now I couldn't pronounce the word. I'd made a commitment to play the game so I
steeled myself and by sheer force of will I said it: white. As soon as I said the word, the other
person's face would pickle. Right away,
very defensively, I'd say, ‘Oh, I'm playing the Race Game' and try to explain
what it was all about. The other person
found an excuse to leave as quickly as possible. Each experience was so awful that for two days I forgot that I
was supposed to do it. It was a
miserable experience.”
After
telling lots of people about the Race Game myself, I'm not aware of anyone
being able to do it either. Though once
after I had told my story at Judson Church we got to the point in the service
for joys and concerns, which they do by inviting people up from the
congregation to the microphone. A Stalwart Social Justice activist in her
seventies, Sue Harwig, made an announcement about an upcoming protest. Stephen
McLeod was next in line and when he got up to the mike he said, “That was my
white friend, Sue.” And you should have
heard the explosion of laughter. Talk
about a release of tension! So it's not
all doom and gloom doing this Shadow work. I have to plug Christine, here, too. When she was working on the bulletin she asked me for the title of the
sermon and I told her, “My White Friend Sue.”
“What?”
she said.
I
explained the Race Game to her and she said, “Hm, interesting.” Then Joy Bland walked into the office and
Christine says, “Hey, it's my white friend, Joy.” Causing Joy to say, “What?!” Christine kept it up with everyone who walked into the office until I
started to get uncomfortable!
So
it's not all doom and gloom, facing the shadow. But it is a serious challenge. I quickly discovered that I became conscious of white shame, it became
simply one more assault on my sense of self. I began to wonder who I was if I
wasn't the non-racist person I'd always thought myself to be.
But this is where the gospel
reading comes in. Jesus was trying to
say that we can't see ourselves or the world clearly unless we confront our
shadows. We must come to terms with all
that we are. If we don't, we'll project
our faults and shortcomings onto others, feeling perfectly justified in our
animosity toward them. And there's a
flip side to the passage that we rarely get to in our reflection on it. Once we take the log out of our eyes, we can
see more clearly.
This is what religion is all
about. The word itself means to bind
together. Jesus understood that
people's denial of their own shortcomings was fueling their hatred for each other. Two thousand years later we're still just
beginning to apply that insight. It's
explanatory power reaches from the arms race of Cold War days to family
dynamics to interpersonal relationships.
It even comes to us in the
form of pop-psychology, which tells us we have to love ourselves before we can
love someone else. And that's all well
and good, but how are we to do that after having been socialized into a system
that sustains such inhumane disparities? Today's inserts like the inserts each Sunday this month tell us a story
that most of us are aware of: African Americans are still a persecuted group in
our country.
On
some level we know that. On some level
we feel shame. So where do we go from
here?
I'll tell you what helped me. It came to me in a lecture by feminist theologian Beverly
Harrison. I took her last class at Union which came at the end of a long and
distinguished career as a feminist ethicist. She knew all about attacks on one's identity. She said, “I've come to believe that the whole concept of
identity is overrated.” Explaining that
she went on to say that “It's when you commit yourself fully to a cause, to
something that you believe in deeply, that you move beyond identity to deep
subjectivity.” That's a dimension
beneath ego, beneath the persona that we present to the world, beneath even our
conscious sense of ego-identity. It's
the core of who we are, running beneath our petty prejudices. It's
the dimension of our humanity that is equal.
I think Jesus
was trying to tell us that it's this
dimension of us that God sees. And
it's how we can see each other, if we dare step into the Kingdom of God, into
the revolutionary consciousness that Jesus birthed into the world.
Not
long ago I walked into a store out of a pouring rain and the clerk said to me,
“Nasty weather out there, huh?”
I said,
“Well, I'm not made of sugar. I'm not
going to melt.” And she gave me such a
wonderful double-take as if to say, “Where did you learn that?” And in that moment, there was no Black and
white, there was no separateness. There
was only humanity, dignified and unified. The way God sees it.
Amen
© 2001 .
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