Guilt and Learning How to Have Real Relationships
By Bob Harris
I was moved to write this piece when I read Robert Jensen’s chapter on guilt from his excellent book, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege. In the chapter, he describes how he sees the role of guilt for the white person wanting to fight and end white racism. He says: “But our [white people’s] task is to live on the edge of the guilt [over the harm of white racism], to use it to challenge ourselves and each other to do better.” But, almost all of my experience as a black person is that when I am relating to whites, especially within what I call a gap relationship – or a relationship where a direct privilege gap exists between its members – whenever they are feeling guilty, there is a very high probability that they will engage in some kind of destructively racist behavior. In my experience over the 60 years of my life, the emotion of white guilt may be part of the solution, but the result in a gap relationship is to exacerbate the problem decisively.
You can’t do good if you are oriented towards your feelings of guilt when you are trying to build a friendship. In truth, I am more likely to do good to help a friend than I am to act in service of a cause that I rarely experience in my day to day life, and I believe this is probably true for many others.
The pain of white guilt related to race and/or class privilege will force you, sooner rather than later, to behave in seriously racist ways in any friendship or other intimate relationship that you try to create with someone across the oppression gap. I recently discovered that even many of my most trusted white friends (and Friends!) experienced some degree of guilt and/or shame, as described by Jensen, when interacting with me. As I imagined myself in their shoes, I could easily see how they would occasionally trip in their internal dance of feeling guilt, but hiding it from me so that they could be my friend. The results of those stumbles would be racist assumptions, stereotyping and miscommunications which would hurt me and make me question my belief in their goodness and trustworthiness.
All good friendships are intimate relationships because friendships are spaces where you can be yourself, safely tell your truth and share the details of your life with someone who cares about you. And, some of the fabric of an oppressed person’s life is the detailed experiences of being oppressed by the dominating group you may be associated with. Be mindful that hearing the pain, fear and anger experienced by an oppressed person will be an intimate experience for someone associated with the oppressor, even if it’s not for them.
***
To truly understand gap relationships and how to navigate them, we need a quick definition of the terms oppression, oppressor and oppressed, as I use them in this article.
We’re all human, but we belong to different groups, in different situations, depending on the interpersonal context in which we are enmeshed at a given moment. Oppression is when one group acts to dominate another group by killing, beating, stealing, raping, enslaving, exploiting, stereotyping or imposing a double standard on the dominated group simply because the dominated group is different and the dominating group has the power to impose their domination on the target group.
If you are a member of the dominating group, you are an oppressor, with the rights, recognition, status and material, emotional and spiritual benefits that come from being a member of the oppressor group. You may not have asked to belong to either group, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t change the social order. When a member of the oppressor group is in an intimate relationship, such as a good friendship, a dating or spousal relationship or Quaker meeting for worship, with someone who is a member of the oppressed group, I use the term gap relationship to describe this kind of relationship.
I’ve been in a number of successful gap relationships with whites where I didn’t use a double standard and treated and interacted with them the same or nearly the same as I would with my black friends. I felt they were on my side and wanted the best for me, even when they disagreed with me. They never questioned my reality or my authority as a black person. They always seemed to know that they were part of the solution, no matter how badly I would castigate white people in my conversations with them; they knew I wasn’t talking about them, at those moments. They had good personal boundaries with me, with respect to race. They were good friends. So, being in a gap relationship doesn’t allow guilt or require perfection or super human effort; it just requires being yourself and a willingness to let the other be themselves and a commitment by all to work through problems as they arise.
I see constructive models and solutions in cultural anthropology, partnership and in focusing on doing good as an imperfect oppressor. Firstly, the tools, methods and traditions of cultural anthropology allow us to define race as a culture, rather than something genetic in nature, and racism as a dynamic between cultures in the context of a gap friendship. Cultural anthropology offers ways to understand while being involved. Secondly, I suggest assuming the perspective that in a gap relationship you are partners, and both people have something to gain and both are at risk of being hurt, intentionally or otherwise, by the other. Finally and most importantly, take the internal position that you are really listening: really taking the oppressed person seriously, really holding good personal boundaries, always accepting that the oppressed person knows more about the experience of their oppression than you can know. If someone who is oppressed tells you that you make a real, positive difference for them, then you may regard yourself as part of the solution and must wrap yourself in that position, so that the oppressed person can be themselves and not have to worry about your feelings when they are expressing their true feelings and reactions to being the target of oppression by your race, class or other group.
Use the shield of knowing – that you are doing something to defeat oppression just by being someone’s friend and letting them be themselves – to remove the pain of guilt and shame you are likely to feel when they are talking about some of the things most important to them in their lives. At those moments, they need you not to be perfect, guilty or shamed. Instead, they need you to be their friend, to help them heal and grow from their experiences of oppression in their lives.
Knowing how to have real relationships allows us to create welcoming institutional environments for those on the other side of a gap, so that the institution can belong to all who have a stake in that institution. Meeting for worship is an intimate act; we share the deepest part of ourselves, the Light, publicly with each other. Thus, Friends have to know to create and maintain intimate relationships in the public context of meeting for worship, as well as meeting for business if these are to be welcoming activities for those across the gap.
Historically, Friends have been about changing the world to create Heaven on Earth. Alan Deutschman in his book Change or Die says that major change requires the three elements of relate, repeat and reframe. We must reframe or understand our situation in a new way. Then we must repeat the desired behavior consistent with our new understanding. But, these can only work, according to Deutschman, if we relate, i.e., form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that models the behavior we want for ourselves, thus inspiring and sustaining hope. If white Friends can shift their focus in the context of gap friendship onto the good they are doing by being a good friend, I believe Friends can create inspiring models for themselves and create worship communities that are truly able to listen and respond to voices on either side of the gap for voice of the Light.
Bob HarrisBob Harris is a biostatistician and a long-time, black attender of Vine Street Meeting of Berkeley, California, in Pacific Yearly Meeting. He has been actively involved with that meeting’s work towards racial inclusion for the last sixteen years. He has also served on the Pacific Mountain Region AFSC Affirmative Action Committee.
