CHAPTER 6:
RACE AND REPENTANCE: OUT OF MANY, ONE
From a spiritual perspective, if our life is in crisis, we can repair it only by getting straight with God. And we cannot get straight with God without getting straight with each other. It is our God-given purpose on earth to love one another, and no serious spiritual path gives any of us a pass on making the effort.
No one always gets everything right, and neither does any country. Sometimes people and countries can do bad things. But the atonement principle, universal to all serious spiritual systems, posits the power of repentance. We can atone for our mistakes, make meaningful amends, and behave differently going forward. No life, and no country, can redeem itself otherwise.
The law of cause and effect, or what in the East is called karma, is the spiritual principle that organizes the universe. It is an unalterable law that every cause will create an effect; love calls forth love, and lovelessness calls forth lovelessness. Only through atonement and amends can this law be overridden. We can change things on the level of effect over and over, but only when we change things on the level of cause are they fundamentally altered. We must change our thinking as well as our behavior in order to change our lives.
A politics of love recognizes that the same spiritual, emotional, and psychological principles that prevail in an individual’s life also prevail in a nation’s. There is no opening our hearts to God without opening our hearts to each other, for our God-given purpose on the earth is to love one another. We feel blessed when we choose to bless others, and we cannot feel blessed when we withhold our blessing from others. We cannot find God outside our relationship to each other. It’s our sacred task as citizens to take a deeper look at America’s “relationship issues.” That means not only our relationships with other nations but also our relationships with each other.
The United States, like many other countries, has relationship conflicts that literally go back hundreds of years. In addition to the relationship between white Americans of European ancestry and Native Americans, whose ancestors inhabited this land for thousands of years before white settlers got here, our primary domestic relationship is the relationship between white Americans and black descendants of slaves who were brought to this continent from Africa.
I do not believe the average American is racist, but I do believe the average American is woefully undereducated about our racial history, particularly since the Civil War. Have we taken strides forward since the days of slavery? Yes. But have we completed the task of reconciliation between the races? Not anywhere near. In fact, in some ways over the last fifty years we have been sliding backwards. Our generation needs to educate ourselves more deeply, and act more nobly, in order to realize not only where we’ve been but also where we should be going.
A politics of love is a whole-person pursuit that traces the psychological as well as political history of a relationship between peoples. Only when we know that history can we understand an issue deeply enough to adequately address it.
Slavery existed in slave-owning states in America beginning in the 1600s, and it increased significantly with the expansion of the cotton industry in the early 1800s. It did not end until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. When finally freed, the slave population in America was somewhere around four million.
On April 9, 1865, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union general Ulysses S. Grant at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia. Thus, the Civil War ended. The stroke of a presidential signature on the Emancipation Proclamation, even an amendment to the Constitution, could abolish an institution but not the pathology that produced it. For external remedies do not of themselves eradicate internal causes. Racist thought burrowed even more deeply into the fabric of Southern society after the Civil War. For most Americans today, it is our racial history since the Civil War that remains misunderstood.
During the Reconstruction Era from 1865 to 1877, with federal troops stationed throughout the region, a vanquished South was forced to come to terms with having lost the war. Lincoln’s voice proclaiming malice towards none, and charity for all” had been silenced “orever, and Northern attitudes were far from compassionate toward the defeated South. Bitterness over having had to fight the war was the main emotional tone of the North, and humiliation over having lost it was the main emotional tone of the South.
Upon the removal of federal troops at the end of the Reconstruction Era, many Southerners created forms of institutionalized oppression to express their hatred toward former slaves. The postwar period saw the rise of an era of white supremacy in the American South that was almost as ugly as slavery itself. Violence against blacks did not end so much as morph into other forms, both personal and institutional. Many former slave owners had simply held their breath during the period of Reconstruction, waiting until federal troops were gone before seeking their revenge. They had not awakened to the deep humanity of African Americans; they simply could no longer own them.
Although the field of psychology did not exist in the nineteenth century, we can now look back at this time with a much deeper understanding of the emotional as well as political forces that were at work at the time. That former slaves were now fellow citizens represented not only a change in circumstances but a fundamental change in social relationships. We used to be rich and you were slaves on our plantations; now we are poor, we have nothing, and you are free living here among us. History doesn’t unfold only according to what happens on the outside, but every bit as much according to what happens on the inside.
The South hadn’t given up slavery voluntarily; it gave it up for one reason only—that it lost the war. They thus surrendered their slaves but not their anger. The last thing the former slave-owner class of Southerners was ready to do for a population they had kicked to the ground for hundreds of years was to say, “Great, now let’s be friends.” A cold and cruel dehumanization of black people before the war was replaced with hot and violent rage after it ended.
Had Lincoln lived, things might have unfolded very differently. But in the absence of enlightened leadership, the ugliest faces of both the North and the South prevailed after the Civil War. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in the 1860s, began a wave of terror in which lynchings—hangings of black Americans as well as of whites seeking to help them, carried out by angry mobs of white Americans—became common. Once federal troops were withdrawn from the Southern states in 1877 and white supremacists regained control of Southern state legislatures, blacks were routinely intimidated and attacked to prevent their voting in state and federal elections.
Even as early as 1865 and 1866, laws called the Black Codes were passed in Southern states to restrict the freedom of African Americans and keep them tied to a subpar labor economy. During the period between 1890 and 1908, Southern legislatures also passed constitutions and electoral rules guaranteed to disenfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. Racist legislatures enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to enforce the second-class citizenship status of black Americans. Lynching and election violence became normal, reaching a peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
While most people realize the evils of slavery, many may not realize the extent to which social, economic, and political barriers prevented the integration into free society of the formerly enslaved population after the Civil War.
If you’ve kicked someone to the ground, you need to do more than just stop kicking; you have a moral responsibility to help them get back up. You can’t just say to four million people who have had no experience other than that of forced labor, “Glad you’re free! Now good luck to ya! Hope you find a good job!” What they were freed to was a violent prejudice, white supremacy, and segregation that would go unchallenged in any fundamental way for another hundred years. Thousands of black Americans fled to Northern cities in search of jobs and freedom denied them where they came from, yet racial prejudice routinely met them even there.
It was not until the mid-1950s and the 1960s that the horrors of segregation were met, challenged, and resisted by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The struggle of the civil rights movement was a heroic repudiation of racist oppression, and Dr. King became the target, both professionally and personally, of the full force of supremacist rage. From the lynching of integration rights workers to police brutality to church bombings and ultimately the murder of Dr. King, the white supremacist movement did not go down quietly.
Yet the movement prevailed. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher whose moral authority matched his towering intellect and political acumen. He realized that the movement’s political strategy had to be matched by its spiritual authority in order to awaken the conscience of a nation. Having gone to India and studied the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, King applied the principles of nonviolence to the struggle for civil rights back in the United States. As a minister and then as a movement leader, King had the Gandhian “soul force” necessary to lead his people to the promised land of racial justice. It was not only the things he said but the things he did that parted the waters of racial hatred. Not only did he believe that love is the only force powerful enough to overcome hate; Dr. King displayed that love with the full force of his being. His combination of nonviolence and political courage stirred a nation that had long acquiesced to the ugliness of white supremacy, and under his leadership the civil rights movement created the political will to pass federal civil rights legislation.
After so much horror and bloodshed, Dr. King and others who struggled so valiantly beside him achieved a historic political victory. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
As someone who grew up in Texas, I can remember many of the outward signs of segregation in America. I’m aware of the vast strides that have been taken toward the creation of racial justice. But as a student of history, I also know how much remains to be done and how in some ways we’re even sliding backwards. Mass incarceration means we’re sliding backwards. Racial disparity in criminal sentencing means we’re sliding backwards. Voter suppression efforts aimed primarily at disenfranchised populations means we’re sliding backwards. While we shouldn’t minimize the struggle, sacrifices, and victories of our ancestors, neither should we pretend that we’ve come further than we have. For reasons external as well as internal, the establishment of full justice for African Americans remains a task not yet completed.
AN UNFINISHED TASK
The hot violence of slavery was replaced by the burrowing violence of white supremacy, which was finally vanquished by the victories of the civil rights movement. The mistake many white Americans make is to think the story ended there. Indeed, after the civil rights movement America’s complicated racial history continued. And for all the talk about trauma these days, we would do well to consider the psychological trauma of hundreds of years of oppression.
What came next—after a nation exhausted by the social and political tumult of the 1960s elected Richard Nixon president in 1968—was a cold but insidious violence called “benign neglect.” Benign neglect is a phrase first articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Nixon’s urban affairs adviser. Moynihan argued that the drama of the civil rights movement should be followed by a period of social quiet in the relationship between blacks and whites. It was not necessarily a proactively racist sentiment on Moynihan’s part, or even on Nixon’s. But it legitimized an abandonment of any effort to continue the pursuit of racial justice, and in that sense at least it was a passive betrayal of the relationship on the part of white America. Benign neglect sent the message that the government wasn’t going to intentionally hurt you, but that if you were being hurt by someone else, it was not going to proactively help you either. And in too many ways, that is where we remain.
While it was one generation’s job to end slavery, and another generation’s job to pass civil rights legislation, it is our generation’s job to address the fact that today, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War, social and economic legacies of institutionalized white supremacy still exist in our society. A fundamental effort at economic restitution has never yet been made. Our country has not paid its debt to a formerly enslaved people, nor have we addressed the deeper issues of their full economic integration into American society.
The moral challenge posed by Martin Luther King Jr. to the America people was this: having freed the slaves, what were they then freed to? The lack of a fundamental plan of economic repayment to a formerly enslaved population, and the denial of access to full economic recovery to generations that came after them, is at the root of many racial issues still existing to this day.
A pattern of greater poverty among black Americans remains unbroken, along with a pattern of less access to education and statistically less access to criminal justice. Those who see America today as a postracial society ignore certain underlying dynamics. “Blacks go to Harvard,” they point out. “There are extremely wealthy black people now, and a black man became president!” Those comments are true, yet they are used like a mantra to gloss over continuing racial disparities in America. The fact that geniuses can make it in America doesn’t in and of itself mean that full social justice exists in America. It doesn’t mean that much work doesn’t remain to be done.
Although it is true—and very much to be celebrated—that blacks have opportunities in America today unheard of even fifty years ago, those opportunities do not constitute full economic justice. One in five American children, 20 percent, live in poverty today, which ranks us as the country with the second-highest child poverty rate in the advanced world. Among black children, however, the poverty rate hovers at 40 percent. Being poor in America comes with lower-quality education, which leads to less economic opportunity; less economic opportunity often results in greater despair, which in turn produces greater dysfunction. These problems are not discrete and newly formed; they are the legacy of a situation that began in the 1600s and still plagues us today. Some instances of racism and white privilege within political, economic, and social policy have been drastically reduced over the last few decades. But in other arenas—particularly those related to criminal sentencing and incarceration—it could be argued that racism and white privilege have actually increased.
In 2013, the US Supreme Court took steps to gut the Voting Rights Act, making voter suppression—particularly among populations of color—a real and present danger to our democracy. This is unfortunately only one of the ways in which our commitment to racial justice has been dwindling rather than deepening over the last fifty years.
It is time for a new chapter in the history of racial reconciliation in America, involving a spiritual purification of the American heart, a deep national atonement, and willingness on the part of our country to make appropriate amends.
It’s not as though racial tension finally erupted into violence on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after a white police officer killed a black teenager. The situation continually erupts into violence in the hearts of black parents all over America each day, as they teach their children how to behave—particularly their sons—to avoid the unequal application of criminal justice in America. Most white Americans cannot imagine the layer of fear that runs through the psychic bloodstream of black Americans due to the killings of unarmed black men by police. And this problem isn’t going to just magically disappear.
A politics of love is one in which we address the psychological and emotional wounds underlying our political realities and seek to heal them in meaningful ways. One such issue, when it comes to race in America, is our need for what is called in the Catholic Church a “purification of memory.
Until we fully appreciate the extent of a wrong done in the past, we cannot fully appreciate the ways in which we continue to repeat it. Educational and economic disparities in neighborhoods of color and racial disparities in criminal sentencing persist. And given that the current Department of Justice is seeking to roll back Obama-era efforts to improve these disparities, it is up to us, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, to rise up and to speak out.
Racial healing is a journey through time. It would be a dishonor to our ancestors to minimize the struggles, sacrifices, and successes of past generations; but it would be similarly dishonoring to our descendants to fail to take the necessary steps, in our generation, to continue moving forward.
We know we have a race problem in America—manifested in the injustices of mass incarceration, the racial disparity in our criminal justice system, the lack of diversity in education and employment, instances of police brutality, rising white supremacy, and more. A greater sensitivity has emerged to the psychological and emotional nuances of white privilege, as well as its economic advantages. Yet the problem persists, poisoning the blood of our collective psyche. Just as an individual needs to identify and admit his or her character defects, so America has to identify our character defects as a nation. There is a strain of racist thought and feeling that has been with us from the beginning and is with us still. It is time for us to face it, atone for it, make amends for it, and end it. People can transform, and so can countries.
The question at the heart of our racial tension can also be found in immigration issues and other ethnic and religious prejudices: is the consciousness of America ready to evolve beyond the myth of Anglo-Saxon ownership? For many, the idea of a genuinely multiracial, multiethnic America represents the fulfillment of our national promise, while for others it represents a threat to some divine right granted to white people. And that is our psychic divide, the crooked place that must be made straight in our hearts. This country was “established on the principle of e pluribus unum—“out of many, one”—yet the actualization of that principle remains a continuing work. And until we realize our spiritual oneness, the deeper work cannot be done.
Underneath the level of our bodies, we are spirits united in a holy oneness. Nothing short of that realization—not only grasped as an abstract concept, but experienced as an emotional reality carrying with it political imperatives—will save this country from our most self-destructive tendencies.
It was the task of a previous generation to abolish slavery, and it is the task of our generation to abolish racism. As a whole-person response to the problems of our time, a politics of love recognizes that both internal and external healing is necessary if we’re to transform our country. Our sense of citizenship must include the purification of our hearts if we are to solve the problems of the world. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “The desegregation of the American South is the externalization of the goal of the civil rights movement, but its ultimate goal is the establishment of the beloved community.
Dr. King knew that if all we do is address the externals of a problem, then the internal causes can still do damage. While the South has been desegregated, the American heart has not yet been totally purified of the scourge of racist thought and feeling. Just as a little bit of cancer can metastasize, the scourge of racism grows when left unchecked. And in many ways over the last few years, it has done just that. We have gone from a heady celebration of the successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s to the injustices of mass incarceration, voter suppression, and white supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
We need to do more than feel bad about that. We need to do something.
A politics of love stands for more than incremental changes. It is a fundamental disruption, a revolutionary stance, and a proactive movement in the direction of a greater good. Whites can listen more to black Americans, and we should. Whites can do more to recognize the depths of white privilege, and we should. We can oppose voter suppression and disparities in our criminal justice system, and we should. We must do all those things. But we should also pay up.
TIME TO PAY UP
If you steal a lot of money from someone—and more than two hundred years of unpaid labor certainly amounts to a lot of it—then you owe them more than an apology. You owe them money.
After the South’s defeat in the Civil War, the plan for Reconstruction included economic restitution to a formerly enslaved people. Yet many who worked hard to see such restitution occur were met with strong resistance by forces in both the North and South.
On January 16, 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman promised forty acres and a mule to black farmers who had been enslaved. This compensation was extremely important because formerly enslaved agricultural workers had no way of entering an economy as free agents without the means to do so. Forty acres and a mule could provide the opportunity to establish themselves as free and economically independent citizens of the United States. A few former slaves were given that acreage, most of them only to see it returned to its former owners after the departure of federal troops from the South in 1877.
From then until today, there has been no serious, concerted effort to repay the economic debt created by over two centuries of slavery.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton suggested that we have a “national conversation about race.” But it’s difficult to have an authentic conversation when half of the people involved in the dialogue have over two hundred years of understandable rage to express. There are situations in life—and race in America is one of them—where talk without action does not heal a wound but only exacerbates it. Whites and blacks have a relationship in America, but it is an unequal one. One side owes something to the other, and until the debt is paid—or at the very least acknowledged—the relationship will remain unhealed.
By the twentieth century, the concept of reparations was widely recognized as a reasonable payment to a formerly wronged people. Germany has paid $89 billion in war reparations to Jewish organizations since World War II, and the United States should pay reparations for slavery. Germany could not undo the Holocaust, but reparations were part of its reconciliation with the Jews of Germany and the rest of Europe. America cannot undo hundreds of years of slavery either, but reparations can go far toward establishing a new frontier in racial reconciliation. Until then, each generation of Americans will continue to pass on to our children the toxicity of a psychological and economic debt.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The legislation included a formal apology and a payment of $20,000 to each surviving victim. Why should America not pay reparations to the descendants of slaves who were brought to America against their will, used as slaves to build the Southern economy into a huge economic force, and then freed into a culture of further violence perpetrated against them? The fact that slavery ended in 1865 doesn’t mean the debt should be considered null and void. It certainly hasn’t been nullified in the ethers.
The problem of racism is hardly behind us; when handled in one area, it has morphed into new symptoms in another. It is time for our generation to rise to the challenge and take a fundamental step closer to national atonement and amends.
While there is no one solution that solves every aspect of the problem, a plan of reparations would have significant psychic as well as economic effects. The United States should appoint a Reparations Commission comprising a council of black leaders from across the spectrum of American culture, academia, and politics. A payment of $100 billion—probably more—paid over a period of ten years, would then be disbursed to projects of economic and educational renewal in the black community as determined by the Reparations Council. This plan would be rendered as payment for a long overdue debt.
The argument, of course, will always be that we “can’t afford it.” Yet it is time to push back against such hypocrisy. America will spend over $718 billion on defense this year alone. Over $2 trillion has been spent on the Iraq War, seen now to have been a massive foreign policy blunder. Two trillion dollars were given away in the 2017 tax cuts. Yet no one ever asked if we “could afford” such things. When it comes to paying reparations for slavery, on an emotional, psychological, and spiritual level we cannot afford not to. Until we do, the cycle of violence that began in the 1600s and continues to this day will continue to haunt our psyche and disrupt our good.
Chapter 7 will be emailed tomorrow!
Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love
Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot
Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love
Politics plays the race card.
Race identification, gender identification, political party identification... all part of the divide and conquer, egoic problem , total mind identification .