Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(51)
Beloved, all of what I have said should lead you to empathy. It sounds simple, but its benefits are profound. Whiteness must shed its posture of competence, its will to omniscience, its belief in its goodness and purity, and then walk a mile or two in the boots of blackness. The siege of hate will not end until white folk imagine themselves as black folk—vulnerable despite our virtues. If enough of you, one by one, exercises your civic imagination, and puts yourself in the shoes of your black brothers and sisters, you might develop a democratic impatience for injustice, for the cruel disregard of black life, for the careless indifference to our plight.
Empathy must be cultivated. The practice of empathy means taking a moment to imagine how you might behave if you were in our positions. Do not tell us how we should act if we were you; imagine how you would act if you were us. Imagine living in a society where your white skin marks you for disgust, hate, and fear. Imagine that for many moments. Only when you see black folk as we are, and imagine yourselves as we have to live our lives, only then will the suffering stop, the hurt cease, the pain go away.
VII.
Offering Plate
Besides the crime which consists in violating the law . . . there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation from him that has done it: and any other person, who finds it just, may also join with him that is injured, and assist him in recovering from the offender so much as may make satisfaction for the harm he has suffered.
—John Locke
Beloved, I was proud to be a member of the Georgetown University faculty in September 2016. Nearly two centuries after the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests sold 272 enslaved human beings to salvage their university’s financial future, I sat in Gaston Hall as Georgetown president John DeGioia announced plans to atone for the past. DeGioia said that day that he would offer a formal apology on behalf of the university, establish an institute to study slavery, and erect a public memorial to the slaves who labored to sustain Georgetown, including those men, women, and children—the youngest a two-month-old baby—whose sale in 1838 saved the school. And now, nearly two centuries later, I, an ordained Baptist minister, was the highest-ranking black professor at a Catholic institution that once trafficked in human flesh.
My friends, my pride was tempered by profound grief and anger that any school should rest on the uncompensated labor of folk whose only sin was their skin. It violates every tenet of serious scholarship. It offends every fiber of my being as a black man, as a descendant of enslaved folk in this country.
After DeGioia made his announcement that day, a remarkable thing occurred: history spoke up for itself. Several direct descendants of “the 272,” as the enslaved were called, rose to greet the audience and make a statement. They had not been invited to attend, much less expected to speak. But, beloved, the Spirit sometimes moves in mysterious ways.
One of the group members read a prepared document that eloquently expressed their appreciation for Georgetown’s efforts to address slavery and its consequences in the present. There was huge applause. And then came off-the-cuff remarks from one of the descendants that were just as powerful, just as affecting. His group, he said, was the face of the suffering endured by their enslaved ancestors. “And our attitude is, ‘nothing about us without us.’” He argued that reconciliation couldn’t possibly start off by alienating the very descendants of the 272 enslaved the school was honoring. He said they were not seeking reparations, but a partnership to heal the nation’s racism.
Beloved, truth is rarely neat. It is often messy. Black truth in white America is especially inconvenient, often not on the program, yet insisting to be heard. To his credit DeGioia showed no hint of defensiveness. He embraced the spirit of partnership that had been extended. DeGioia knows this gesture of atonement is only a start. He knows that offering preferential status in the admissions process to the descendants of the enslaved is just a beginning. Next comes more substantive reckoning with the moral and political consequences of what was done on our hallowed academic ground two centuries ago. The descendant said he wasn’t asking for reparations. But, beloved, if we in this nation are to live up to the demands of justice, we should.
VIII.
Prelude to Service
In the early hours of Nov. 9, 2016, the winner of the presidential election was declared . . . All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion . . . Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.
—Teju Cole
What gives me so much pause, and makes me feel so badly, [is] that the country is willing to be that intolerant and not understand the empathy that’s necessary to understand other groups’ situations. I’m a rich, white guy. And I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it. I couldn’t imagine being a Muslim right now, or a woman, or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person, and how disenfranchised they might feel. And for anyone in those groups that voted for [Trump], it’s just beyond my comprehension how they ignored all that.