Thinking about things: Comfort over truth

I am adding a new category to my posts about social justice - in addition to sharing about the things I am learning and doing, I want to occasionally share things I am thinking about and struggling with. I want to share more instances where I fall short of where I need and want to be, because just sharing the things (I think/hope) I am doing right is dishonest. It also perpetuates the idea that you either "get it" or you don't, instead of the reality that we must all constantly push ourselves to get better, knowing that there is no point at which you have "arrived" and can stop pushing.

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A few weeks ago, I was spending some time reading up on President Obama's remarks at the national prayer breakfast and the ensuing backlash and I stumbled across an article on Christian motivations for lynchings in the Jim Crow South. I expected to learn a few things from the article, but I did not expect this:

What shook me wasn't the image itself, since (unfortunately) it's so familiar. What shook me was the caption: this picture was taken in my hometown, six years before I was born.

My first series of thoughts were horror and revulsion that I probably know some of the people in that picture. They could be my teachers, my neighbors, my friends' parents. They could be people I've passed on the street or in the grocery store, and exchanged smiles and pleasantries with. I know racism is ever present, but it's one thing to know institutional racism exists, and it's another thing to be confronted with people you actually know harboring such deep-seated racial hatred.

Next I became very self-righteous. I wanted to know who these people were and confront them! I wanted to print out the picture and take it home and show it to everyone I encountered, and demand if they knew who those people were! I wanted to weed them out of my life if they were in it, and - regardless of whether I personally knew them - I wanted to confront them, and publicize who they were, and make them atone for their sins!

While I was letting myself race down that mental path, and feeling bathed in the comfort of my own righteous indignation, another thought popped into my brain. Not from the conscious place where I have self-aware inner dialogue, but from the unconscious place where things I don't want to think about sometimes manage to break the surface. And that thought was: I don't want to know who these people are.

I don't want to find out my beloved teacher, or my friendly neighbor, or my childhood friend's parent, is under one of those robes. I don't want to find out that someone I have trusted and loved, someone who was kind to me and mattered to me, is also this other, horrible thing. It would be so much easier for me to just never have to find that out, and to keep believing that there are "good white people" and "bad white people" and myself and my own are all firmly in the "good" camp. And then my horror and revulsion turned inward, and I felt deep shame for even entertaining those thoughts. It would be easier for me to not know? Easier?? Since when was this work supposed to be easy? Since when was my own comfort worth not challenging the outright oppression and murder of my fellow human beings? Since when am I so quick to back away as soon as this work requires the slightest amount of risk to myself?

I tend not to wallow in guilt, and to get frustrated when other people get stuck there, because guilt doesn't accomplish anything. It feels almost self-indulgent to spend time mired in white guilt instead of actually doing something about it. But I want to actually sit in these feelings of shame and revulsion for a while, because right now sitting here is actually doing something - it is teaching me, painfully and not for the first time, that white supremacy affects all of us. It hurts all of us. Knowing that I am ready to consider, even fleetingly, prioritizing my own comfort over my sense of justice - that says something about what is in my heart as a result of growing up and living in a society that tells me, every way and every day, that my comfort IS worth more than the suffering of people of color. In fact, one of the tenets of white supremacy culture is the belief that those in the dominant group have a right to emotional comfort, at the expense of the truth for those in the oppressed group. The shard of that belief is lodged deep inside of me, no matter how much I don't want it to be there. That is what racism does to white people - as James Baldwin said, "one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." This picture is of my hometown - it's a part of me and I'm a part of it. My desire to not confront that uncomfortable truth is forcing me to instead confront the diminishing of my own humanity - it feels awful, but at the same time I am thankful because feeling how racism directly damages me makes me feel that much more urgency to dismantle it, starting with myself.