Drilling for Truth
There are at least three very different ways of seeing the issue of race and racism—all of them true. There is the lens of our personal experience: the messages we got as children, the people we have known, the experiences we’ve had, the things that have stretched and moved us, and the things that have been hard.
Then there is the lens of history and society: the impact on African Americans of slavery followed by over a century of government-sanctioned discrimination, the current reality of segregation and inequality, the growing barriers to immigration, and attitudes about race that range from passive unawareness to active hostility in many Americans.
Then there is the third lens, the lens of the Spirit: the understanding that, ultimately, we are all children of God, that in the most profound sense race is an artificial construct that serves to divide people who belong together.
If we think of these as three layers, one on top of the other, most of us tend to relate to one of them more than the others. With the top layer, we see race personally. Our own experience is our primary reality, and everything else seems too far away, too abstract. With the middle layer, we are acutely conscious of the enormous damage of institutional racism and feel that the main job has to be exposing that reality. With the bottom layer, we cling to, and hope to rest in, the knowledge that we are all one, and can’t imagine anything more fundamental.
I think much of our difficulty in addressing issues of race and racism comes from trying to communicate with the folks who are relating to a different layer than we. We get so frustrated. Those other folks seem so insular and shortsighted, so grim and guilt mongering, so simplistic and other-worldly.
I think there’s a solution though: it lies in moving from the horizontal to the vertical, inviting everybody to get together on top of the whole thing and start drilling.
Drill into that layer of personal experience. Remember what we were told when we were little, who we had access to and who we didn’t, who we loved, what was hard. Tell our stories to each other. Drill a little deeper. Reflect on how our experience has shaped our attitudes toward race. Dare to celebrate our loves and our deep connections. Dare to imagine how naïve unawareness can be experienced as hurtful and seen as racist. Nobody is bad here—it’s just a rich opportunity to uncover more and more truth. It’s an important layer where we could spend a lot of time, but there’s more below.
Drill into that hard layer of institutional racism. Learn about slavery, about the tragic long-term impact of a corrupted and aborted Reconstruction, about how discriminatory lending policies made it almost impossible for Black Americans to build wealth through home equity till well after World War II, about how structural racism continues to segregate and bar equal access to education, jobs and health care. We have to share what we learn, and be willing to grieve. There’s way more here than any of us want to know. But until we get through this layer, until we interact with this truth, we don’t have full access to what’s below. We can imagine the good clean water down there. We can talk about it. But we can’t drink it.
Only when we’ve done the hard work of drilling through the cloudy water of personal experience, through the bitter water of institutional racism, only then will we be able to drink the life-giving water of oneness in the Spirit that is the deepest truth of all.
Pamela HainesPamela Haines, a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, has lived, raised a family and parented an African American son in a mixed race neighborhood of Philadelphia. She has participated in and led workshops on race and racism in a variety of contexts, including co-leading a recent weekend at Pendle Hill. She works with child care workers in Philadelphia, helping to build leadership to improve respect, compensation and quality in the field.
