Some Thoughts on Charlottesville:
A
Teacher's Reflection
Like many thoughtful North Americans, I
have spent a lot of time over the last several days considering
recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia and their social and
political fallout. And like any socially engaged person with a
Facebook account, I've posted a fair number of memes, articles, and
news clips on the subject. But one thing I haven't done yet is to
address these events substantially in my own words, specifically as
an educated white Canadian currently preparing to teach a new course
in my university's Human Rights Program.
To start, I might refer to the claims,
which I've encountered from numerous sources over the past week, that
it is incumbent upon white people to denounce the actions and values
of the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates both at the riot in
Charlotteville and wherever else they manifest. These claims are
reasonable. Their logic is the same as that invoked by many white
public figures in response to acts of Islamic terrorism, namely that
if I do not explicitly denounce these acts and arguments, committed
by people who claim to represent me by virtue of a shared low count
of melanin in our epidermises, I am implicitly condoning them. I
would add that no white person who has publicly imposed this
reasoning on the Muslim community in response to the actions of a
violent minority of Muslims has any moral grounds for remaining
silent now in the face of white terrorism.
The force of the demand, though, is not
merely for denunciation: for any thoughtful person, it also extends
into honest reflection. What set of historical, political, economic,
and emotional circumstances has led to this sudden upsurge in angry
white people, mostly men, openly brandishing symbols—the swastika
and the Confederate battle flag—of two of the most dehumanizing
ideologies ever to be excreted by the modern Western world? Regarding
the appeal and effect of Donald Trump, many people with more
knowledge than me have already identified the implicit permission for
racial hatred and violence embodied in his campaign and presidency.
Also well attested is the appeal of violent ideologies to people,
particularly men, who feel disenfranchised by their own societies.
And I use the word “feel” advisedly as there has been no real
disenfranchisement but rather attempts by both activists and people
of conscience over the last many decades to remove the systemic
mechanisms that give one group of people privileged access to the
social goods that are the right, equally, of every citizen where
civil rights are concerned, and every person where human rights are
concerned. One essential mistake common to neo-Nazis and
neo-Confederates, I think, is that they have confused privileges with
rights. And while there are legitimate moral grounds for outrage at
the denial of a right, no such grounds exist with the removal of a
privilege, no matter how one may feel about it.
As for the claims of the neo-Nazis and
neo-Confederates, they tend toward one or both of the following: that
white people are genetically superior to other human beings, and that
the culture of white people is superior to the cultures of other
human beings. A recent documentary by Vice News shows examples of
both these claims spoken by white supremacists in Charlottesville:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/videos/a57009/charlottesville-vice-documentary/.
As for the genetic claim, it has been
thoroughly debunked by modern science, so I need not go into it here.
The cultural claim, though, is worth addressing as in this sense the
white supremacists are actually extreme or radical proponents of a
Western system of domination whose other symptoms include
colonialism, neo-colonialism, both attempted and successful
genocides, and both attempted and successful erasures of non-Western
cultures and worldviews on multiple continents. As much of my own
teaching involves bringing non-Western worldviews into contexts from
which they might otherwise be absent—the new course referred to
above is titled “Non-Western Approaches to Human Rights”—I am
particularly attuned to the latter elements on this list.
There are many possible sources for
this spurious claim of cultural superiority, which for the sake of
space I address only briefly. Most obvious is the fact that many of
the achievements of Western culture, rhetorically associated with
whiteness in supremacist discourse, are genuinely impressive both
technologically and politically. That is, there is much in the
culture whom these terrorists claim to represent that is worthy of
respect. Problem is, they themselves don't embody the good stuff, so
their claims to cultural superiority are hollow the minute they make
them. But even allowing, for a moment, the possibility that some of
the swastika-wearing battle-flag-waving thugs who came out in force
in Charlottesville actually understand Western culture as anything
beyond militant posturing and jingoistic racial nationalism, a
further problem arises, namely the ubiquity of subjective bias: just
as we see our own achievements more clearly than we see the
achievements of others, we rate the importance of our own
achievements more highly than we rate the importance of the
achievements of others. This is true both individually and
culturally.
People raised solely within the Western
tradition are taught from early childhood, and in some cases right up
through grad school, that the tradition within which they live is the
best tradition available. As the logic also holds with other
traditions, I hope it is clear that I'm not singling out the West for
special treatment in this regard. One of the problems in the current
context, though, arises from the fact that in their conquest of much
of the world, the Western powers historically did their best to erase
other cultures and their achievements. Witness the residential school
system in Canada, and the deliberate destruction of African culture
and religion among imported slaves by organizing them into groups
comprised of people with mutually incomprehensible languages. That
is, historically in North America, people descending from non-white
ancestors have been taught either that their historic culture was
inferior or that they did not in fact have a historic culture. And
many whites have been taught largely the same lessons about their
non-Euro fellow citizens. The most egregious form of this bias was on
display in Charlottesville last week. A more respectable form of it
is the Western triumphalism that pervades much of our public and
political discourse—the position that sees such terms as
“developed” and “Westernized” as more or less synonymous.
Here is where my little personal
reflection gets contentious. As a life-long student of worldviews
other than my own, I've come to see people's interactions with other
thought worlds, and other ways of being, as falling on a spectrum
with a genuinely universal perspective at one end—someone who
engages multiple cultures and worldviews on their own terms in a
spirit of understanding—and a violent supremacist on the other. I
would place the political, religious, or academic cultural
triumphalist, Western or otherwise, in the middle of this spectrum,
roughly equidistant between a figure such as my personal hero Joseph
Campbell, who tried with absolute sincerity and some success to not
only approach and understand multiple cultures on their own terms but
also publicly cultivated that understanding in his society, and the
Confederate yahoos who recently congregated in Charlottesville. And
yes, to be clear, this does mean that the person who knows only their
own worldview, and even embodies the best of it, is arguably
equidistant between a Campbell and a neo-Nazi, as is the person who
engages an “other” worldview merely for the sake of dismantling
it even with the clearest of consciences, as for example the
missionaries of any religion engage the religions they seek to
displace.
What I am not saying here is that
cultural triumphalists are the same as neo-Nazis. I am suggesting,
rather, that the resurgence of white nationalism in a number of
countries in the West is not the disease itself but rather a symptom
of a broader ailment that has been incubating for a long time. Just
as white heterosexual Americans, Brits, or Canadians, long accustomed
to viewing ourselves as the standard by which others are to be
measured, are confronting the realization that others want the rights
and privileges we have long taken for granted, so the rising nations
in the world, rooted in traditions largely other than our own, are
forcing us to question the long held assumption of the superiority of
our own traditions and ways of being. I mean, the Cold War was one
thing, but the current geopolitical scenario is something entirely
different: While the Russians were often portrayed as the great
Eastern threat confronting the free West (just look at the hype
around the big US-USSR or Canada-USSR hockey games from the period),
the simple fact is that Moscow is a European capital, and the
ideologies slugging it out between the late 1940s and the early 1990s
were Western ideologies. And the guys running the Kremlin looked more
or less like “us.”
With the currently rising powers of
China and India, the situation is different. While China is a
communist country that has recently opened itself up to capitalist
enterprise—both Western modes of thought—its religious and
philosophic roots are different from those of Russia: largely
Confucian with a mix of Taoism and Buddhism as opposed to the
Orthodox Christianity of the Russian Church. And while India has
English as one of its official languages and models its government on
British antecedents, the majority of Indians are Hindu, and Hindu
thought occupies a vital role in Indian public discourse. Moreover,
both of these countries have historically been dominated and
humiliated by the West—China during the Opium wars of the 19th
Century and India during centuries of colonial occupation. That these
former objects of domination are now asserting themselves as viable
rivals to a West in political decline might easily register as an
affront to some nostalgic good-ole-days version of white pride. Oh,
and the leaders of India and China look a lot less like “us” than
did Comrades Stalin or Brezhnev. Add to these factors the political
and cultural renaissance among many of the world's indigenous
communities, and the demands that the economic, political, physical,
and religious evils of colonialism be first acknowledged and then
atoned for, and you have a situation where anyone with a vested
interest in the greatness of “white” culture has a lot of bobbing
and weaving to do.
So … Back to Charlottesville.
Most North Americans recognize the
backwardness and moral vacuity of the human refuse who gathered
there. But this recognition is not enough. White North Americans need
to be able to look at those angry hate-filled people and recognize
some reflection of themselves: we have all, at some point, evaluated
another human being on some standard other than what Dr. King
referred to as the “content of their character.” All of us. And
if we turn from those white supremacists in moral revulsion, as we
should, then we need to take the next step and ask not just “How
did that happen” but “How can I make sure that doesn't happen
again?” And we need to ask that question not just as lone
individuals but as exemplars of whatever social roles we happen to
fill—parent, partner, friend, business person, teacher, social or
religious leader, elected official: in short, citizen. We need to
recognize that the system that produced us—the system that has
until recently denigrated and excluded all ways of being not arising
from itself—is also the system that produced them. We need to learn
to look outside of our biases and assumptions and upbringings, to set
all triumphalism aside, and realize with a full robust humility that
no one culture, no matter its achievements, is a suitable measure for
the rest of the world. The result will be a perpetual state of
uncertainty, an ever-extending mesh of negotiations and
re-negotiations. But I think we can have some constructive
conversations along the way. And everyone is invited.
