Not so Random feelings On Race

Earlier this week I was in Princeton, New Jersey, spending a few days with my good friend Nancy after the Anti-Racism Analysis Development Conference in Paramus. I took it easy after the rush of the conference. I read Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and watched The Color Purple (1st time), The New World (2nd time), Cronicás, and the documentary on Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

I also watched The Thin Red Line again - this time with Nancy. She’d never seen it before, whereas I’ve lost count of my viewings. The Thin Red Line is the one film I like to say “changed my life.” It led me over the threshold of fear into an opening realm of self-trust. When I watch it now it is just an excellent movie, but six years ago, it symbolized my right as a human being to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book” (Walt Whitman). The Thin Red Line was about questioning. Probably not a day goes by that an image or quote from it doesn’t come to mind.

Earlier today I was reading a discussion about racism at the ChaliceBlog, and I felt that familiar heaviness over my whole self: dull shock. I was reminded of a scene in The Thin Red Line during which Storm (John C Reilly) sits with Welsh (Sean Penn) in a tent at base camp. Storm is telling Welsh that death in war is random; survival is purely a matter of luck. “I look at that boy dying,” he says. “I don’t feel nothing. I don’t care about nothing anymore.” Welsh looks at Storm with envy. “Sounds like bliss.” He hasn’t acquired that numbness yet. He still feels so much.

I feel that way about racism often. Some days I wish for numbness, too. Recently I read an article about black patriotism. That is, the tension that exists in black folks who desire to be patriotic. Not much in that article is new to me, but it captures the distrust many of us have for a duplicitous government. And yet, this country – “America” – is the only country I know. How am I supposed to admire or love the founding fathers, many of whom would not have seen me as fully human had I lived in their time? Do I have to give up some part of myself to do so? How do I take what is useful in what they said, and yet learn from the evil they committed? Why is it still considered radical to call their participation in slavery and the legalized plundering of Indian lands evil - or even racist? And why do people turn a blind eye to the hundreds of laws put in place since those early years - laws enacted specifically to take away the gains that people of color managed to make in this country, despite all odds?

Bliss would be nice, but like Welsh, I’m stuck with feeling. Like him, it’s probably because “I knew what to expect.”

It takes about a day to absorb a new impact to my sensibilities. I don’t tend to react emotionally, so generally it just sort of sits there, sinking and softening into some inner soup. And it becomes a part of me.

(photo by HSA, May 2006. 20 Years Later. Part of a timeline of the region showing the “decline” of a people. At Cape Perpetua visitor’s center in Yachats, Oregon.)

Comments

3 Responses to “Not so Random feelings On Race”

Radical Hapa on May 20th, 2006 8:37 am

hey hafidha
welcome back
having hope when hope is hard to find, is a mantra for me in this work, particulary within unitarian universalism. sounds like you had some trip, how is the sig-o?
Liz Schwartz on May 26th, 2006 12:15 pm

How am I supposed to admire or love the founding fathers, many of whom would not have seen me as fully human had I lived in their time?

I highly recommend Democracy Matters by Cornel West. Here’s a related excerpt:

“In examining the deep roots of imperialism in American history, it is important to know that most of the grand democratic projects in human history -from Athens to America- have xenophobic and imperial roots. The most famous of all speeches in democratic Athens -Pericles’ great funeral oration rendered in Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War -celebrated democracy at home while glorifying Athens’s imperial domination of other people abroad… Even the democracy at home he lauded was seriously compromised, rooted as it was in slavery and the economic advantage of the cheap labor of resident aliens (like the great Aristotle) who could not vote…

The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire -and aided by the French and Dutch empires- even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against. The Declaration of Independence, primipally written by the thirty-three-year old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson -who himself embodied this paradox, being both a couragous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia- offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.”
Thoughts on Jena Six and Growing Up Black | Never Say Never to Your Traveling Self on September 21st, 2007 7:05 pm

[...] posts: Not So Random Feelings on Race What is the Value of Young Black Men in Our Society? Share This Popularity: unranked [...]