Saturday, July 11, 2020

Fear of Humiliation as the Root of Racism

An excellent article. 
Molly

"In this way the movement for Black lives is also a movement for our own lives as social beings longing to transcend a world in which we and our communities are imprisoned in the residual fear of the other that continues to produce such horrific, anti-human consequences. To become free of the carapace of fear that everywhere encloses us in the normal patterns of an alienated world, we identify with all of our might, and go out into public to join, the movement for Black liberation that has become the historically specific manifestation today of the struggle for universal justice, or to again quote King’s words, the struggle of love to correct that which revolts against love."



No one is born a racist. The question is what happens to the newborn child as he or she is introduced to the world that leads him or her to develop this terrible affliction that causes so much harm and social violence.

At the moment of birth, every child longs for loving connection with the other—with mother, father, every social being whom he or she encounters through the blessing of holding, through the sentience of the body, eventually through the eyes. Because we are inherently social beings, the other is the source of our completion, and our relation with him or her is the basic unit, so to speak, of our very existence.

But although the other may be able to partly be available to us through holding and other manifestations of love, the other may also be afraid to become fully present to us, to surrender completely to the bond of love. We have not yet created a society in which the full extension of love, one to the other, has been realized as the very basis of our social life. Instead, we have felt compelled to pass on to each new generation the legacy of fear of the other that we have inherited from prior generations, which as we know have engaged in one after another catastrophic form of war, domination, and cruelty.

Alongside the experience of love, we therefore inevitably come to experience also a residue of fear. This fear is manifested as a kind of universal holding back or non-presence that from our earliest days haunts the otherwise openhearted impulse that we each have to extend ourselves toward the other, to seek the true and full mutuality of presence that would manifest the bond of love-without-fear that each of us aspires to.

We experience the missing part of what the other extends toward us, the withdrawn part, or the holding-back part, as an original humiliation.  If I originally extend myself entirely and with a whole heart towards you, but you respond by in part holding back, I cannot avoid the shame of non-reciprocation. And if this is my original experience of social existence itself, the pain of that original humiliation cannot but be a kind of trauma, as essential vulnerability encounters the legacy of social alienation. And so I vow, unconsciously, to never repeat that original experience of humiliation of my very social essence if I can avoid it.   

But how can I avoid it, if the longing for the other’s full presence, the other’s love itself, is at the heart of who I am as a social person? By becoming the self that the other recognizes. In response to the other’s non-recognition of who I am most fully in my heart, I begin to become the self that the other does recognize by adjusting my social manifestation of my self to the way I sense the other sees me, is willing to see me, is willing to love me as best he or she can.

In this way, I begin to develop an “inside,” in which my deepest desire for fully reciprocated love subsides unrecognized, and an “outside,” in which I become visible as the social person whom the other is able to partially embrace, haunted nevertheless by the fear that that other has also felt compelled to pass on to me. In this mixed nature of the earliest social encounter, the outside is a denial of the inside, and in this way makes the inside unconscious. Seen as a single social unit, self and other form a kind of partnership of outer selves which both affirm each other’s socially visible self and thus allow each other to enter social existence, and deny each other’s deeper longing for the completion of, and the full vulnerability attendant to, unmediated love and unguarded mutual presence.  That deeper denied longing never ceases to pulse toward the surface of each person’s being-towards-the-other, but the fully loving impulse is always short-circuited by the memory of the original humiliation, and the fear of re-experiencing that earliest rejection and the trauma associated with it.

Much of our social life and social world is reflective of the beauty of our effort, as a collective humanity bound together by our inherently social nature, to make manifest this longing in our hearts in spite of the legacy of fear that we have inherited from prior generations (though it was of course not their fault). The reason that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice is that this invincible longing in each of us remains the very foundation of our social being and presses ineluctably against the alienated surface of the world toward eventually fully realizing itself in the social body, in the social world that we actually manifest. As Martin Luther King Jr., said, justice is love correcting that which revolts against love, and this corrective work of love exerts an upward pressure on the visible surface of our world that tends, in spite of the counterforce exerted by fear, toward our fully, and with grace, entering into each other’s presence.   

But on our way towards that promised land of which King spoke, the power of fear seeking to prevent us from re-experiencing that original trauma of humiliation is very great, and one form that this fear takes is actual violence by the outside self against the inside self that would seek to dissolve and transcend its boundaries. Here we come to the kernel of racism.

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