From “The Great Need of the Hour” by Barack Obama
Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.
I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.
We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children get sick.
We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.
We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.
And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.
So we have a deficit to close. We have walls - barriers to justice and equality - that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.
You can read the speech here.
But much of my reading over the past few months has led me to think that I actually understated the underlying reasons for a pervasive system of white supremacy. More specifically, it’s become clear that to truly understand one of the most profligate and profitable slave society ever erected in the history of man, you have to understand the presumptions of the society itself. Weighing the Old South against the presumptions that undergird modern America tells you something about the war of ideas. But I don’t know how much it helps you understand that original question—How could anyone own a slave? More tantalizing—How could I have owned a slave?
For those purposes, I’ve found it enlightening to contrast the Old South with our modern presumptions of individual rights. From what I gather, by the 19th century there was a Lincolnite view of the world that held that people were entitled to go as far as their individual efforts would take them. And then there was a somewhat conflicting view that people were, by nature, born into certain slots and it was their God-authored duty to play their position. I think that while both of these views existed in the North and the South, and the definition of “people” was often problematic, in the South the latter was more deeply entrenched. Indeed the notion of playing your position was the whole point of the society.
So in the Old South, all white men were expected to aspire to be gentlemen, and all white women were expected to aspire to be ladies. Black people were expected to aspire to give all their labor to their masters, and to stay right with God. (The two were very often linked.) A gentleman was expected to lord over an estate, supervise his slaves and superintend their Christian enlightenment, and—from the battlefield to the horse track—bring honor to his family name. A lady, as the historian Steven Stowe writes, was expected to be “ornamental,” to be “mild, loving and beautiful.”
This was the society as God had ordered it, and as sure as the natural kingdom is ordered, so too was the kingdom of people. Science is embryonic in this era—everything from personal beauty, to the shape of one’s head is believed to indicate intelligence. The term “good breeding” was used as interchangeable for “good manners.” What I’m driving at is the notion of individuality, that you could be both a woman and an individual person, with equal and individual ambitions, hadn’t really been absorbed. Your birth marked your estate, and your lot in life was to till that estate to the best of your abilities.
[…]
Whereas the North put forth black sailors immediately, and black troops within two years of the War, the South couldn’t bring itself to even attempt to match such an effort. It’s not that the North was an enlightened racial Utopia. It’s that the North was more malleable, and ultimately wasn’t built on the notion that the proper place for blacks is as property. To call the South a “slave society,” almost understates the matter—it was a petrified society, a world whose glory was built on individuals being jammed into pre-ordained roles, regardless of whether they fit or not.
As a progressive, it’s rather natural for me to think about the South in terms of power and oppression. But I don’t think a power-based analysis really allows you to see the whole horror of the thing, to understand how you, in a different time, could have been as evil as anyone else. When you do see the whole of, you almost marvel at the sick beauty of the thing—like, as Magic once said, watching Jordan run up and down the court and forgetting you play for the Lakers.
I was reading a piece on vacation resorts in Louisiana at Lake Ponchartrain earlier this week. These joints were outfitted with spas, baths, race tracks, fishing, hunting, river-boats—the whole nine. And much of it was destroyed during the War. It’s like the entire Confederacy was a land-bound Titanic.
It’s obviously important to understand who truly built the great ship, and why it was doomed. But once you understand that, you have to push deeper. You almost have to forget who you are and start thinking about what you might have been. But if you’re going to go there, you have to go there. If this feels safe, comfortable, or affirming, you’ve done something wrong.
Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dullness of the conception.
“A Radical Experiment in Empathy” by Sam Richards
“A More Perfect Union” by Barack Obama
It would seem to me … that the definition of people in terms of color is humanly impossible. ‘Humanly’ does not refer to the virtues but the possibilities, or limits, of the human being. People can be defined by their color only by their beholder, who, in order to arrive at this definition, must will himself/herself blind. And this is absolutely true: there is not a racist alive who is not a liar and a coward, the proof being that they imagine reality to be at the mercy of their will— or, rather, of their terror.
