Just Church (12)

Chapter 4: What Social Justice Does to the Fellowship

I once knew a woman who was raised in a very abusive home.

Her father was so violent and unpredictable in his temper that she never knew when she would be bullied and struck, or for what. Life was a continual “walking on eggshells”, and as she grew up she began to adopt various strategies for survival. As time passed these strategies became ingrained in her personality.

Her father died in her early adult years, and she escaped. Eventually she married a large, kind-hearted man with a particularly generous and even disposition. Never in their years of married life would he raise a hand to her in violence. Nevertheless, the scars of the past ran deep. How deep they ran she did not even know.

Early in their marriage they were driving in the car; and her husband, entirely unaware of her susceptibility, raised his hand to adjust the rear-view mirror. Instantly, she recoiled to the far side of the passenger seat in a defensive position.

He was puzzled. He would never have conceived of hitting a woman, and certainly not his wife. That she could even have that kind of fear confused him. In light of her husband’s track record of gentleness, the woman herself could not really explain why she had felt the old terrors leap up in her so suddenly — especially when the cause of her anxiety was now long dead.

She sought out counsel. She unburdened herself to a psychologist, who listened with great patience to her recounting of the events and her feelings, as well as to her history with her father. Then he calmly informed her that what she was experiencing was a well-known psychological phenomenon called “hyper-vigilance”.

Hyper-Vigilance

Hyper-vigilance is an effect that happens when a person becomes conditioned to abuse. Even after the danger is long gone, the victim may well experience terror at anything that sets off memories of the abuse. Her survival instincts have been conditioned to expect and react to a threat even before the blows land. Nothing but time, patience and emotional processing of the abuse can relieve the hyper-vigilance sufferer from the symptom.

The woman told me this, though: just knowing that word “hyper-vigilance” — just hearing that it had a name — was enough to give her some instant relief. That it was normal, that it was real, that it was understandable, that she could label and recognize it thereafter, imparted to her the first measure of power to combat it. It would take years for her to work through the traumas of the past, and perhaps she’ll always struggle. But she said that naming is the first step in gaining control of the situation.

It’s remarkable how a good thing like a natural survival instinct can become a debilitating condition. Abuse in particular can produce long-term damage that cannot merely be shaken off, even after the circumstances warranting the fear reaction are long gone. Knowing the facts doesn’t always cure the feelings.

On the other hand, having strong feelings does not necessarily signal that those feelings are based in fact.

White Guilt

I’m reminded of this when I observe today’s rhetoric over “whiteness”. To call somebody “white” today goes almost totally unchallenged in public discourse: we just take it for granted that the term means something, and nothing worth contesting. In fact, many universities have now established formal programs in “Critical Whiteness Studies”, along with the various other Social Justice offerings — “Women’s Studies”, “Postcolonial Studies”, “Queer Theory” …

A good example of this is Robin DiAngelo’s recent bestseller White Fragility, which has the subscript “Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism”. The book has sold over 100,000 copies to date, in addition to being introduced in all sorts of strange contexts, such as personnel training in businesses and professional development programs for teachers. It’s even been embraced by some churches.

The thesis of the book is as simplistic and unscholarly as it is absurd: DiAngelo’s trick is what we used to call a “Catch-22”, meaning a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” kind of dilemma. Simply put, she offers her readers a choice: agree with her claim that racism is at the root of everything “white” people are and think, or be accused of being too “fragile”, too cowardly and dishonest to admit she’s right. Either way, she forces her readers to feel guilty, and to look to her remedy to pacify their artificially-inflamed consciences.

DiAngelo hits all the conventional Social Justice talking points: all humans are prejudiced; the US was “constructed” as racist; “whiteness” is a system of domination in which everybody’s complicit; the Civil Rights movement didn’t really fix things; “whites” are always privileged; if you don’t admit you’re a racist and actively fight racism, you’re an ignorant racist; “whites” are all condescending; and if you don’t see yourself as a racist, it’s only because you are …

Really, it’s a stunningly abusive set of propositions. It’s a bit of a marvel that she can garner so much money as she does, allegedly upward of $700,000 a year, with a message that tells people how horrible they are. It’s not that DiAngelo offers them a way out, either: there is really no cure for “whiteness” in her view: and if one wishes to obtain any absolution, then nothing short of an unrelenting, lifelong process of self-criticism, “recognizing complicity” and “interrupting” it is required.

The Irony

Yet the irony is overwhelming. There is not, and has never been, a “white race”. Certainly, there are people with white skin who come from the US, which has a past of slavery but abolished it long ago, but also from Canada, which had very little slavery and provided the far end of the famed “underground railroad” for abolitionists. There are white-skinned people in South Africa and Germany, but also in the Australia, Sweden and Israel. There are white Circassians in Turkey, and white Hondurans in Central America. Nothing unifies this group at all save skin color. That there is now a neo-Marxist cottage industry in “Whiteness Studies” would seem quite absurd and not a little racist as well.

Moreover, there has never been a society in history more tolerant, open-minded and unprejudiced toward race as current North American society is; just look around the world, and there’s scarcely a country anywhere that can compete. Historically, even the past North America can’t compare with it today. The very term “racism” is one of the most hated concepts in our public discourse — so loathed that to even use it makes everybody jump.

At the same time, we’ve never had such a climate of shame, guilt, obsessive self-criticism and self-loathing in regard to racism as we have today. How do we reconcile these two things?

Again, we see that the facts don’t have to be in place for the feelings to follow. Perceptions themselves are sufficient to generate feelings, entirely apart from the reality those feelings are assumed to reflect. “White guilt” seems to be a kind of abuse experience, in which people become conditioned to feel guilt and shame for things the facts simply will not bear out. Conditioning someone to perceive themselves as racist, exclusionary, tyrannical and guilty will induce people to feel exactly the same as if they really were those things. In fact, most people are not even aware of the complicated Social Justice arguments about how merely being in a “white system” they say has been “constructed” along racist lines makes one morally “complicit”: they just know they feel bad when people suggest they might be racist, and they overreact with hyper-vigilant nervousness.