Black American Resilience: Transcending the Victim-Rescuer Dynamic
This is Part One of a two-part excerpt from Reimagining American Identity, a free ebook about Albert Murray’s Omni-American vision that I coauthored a year ago with Greg Thomas and Jewel Kinch-Thomas.
Get the free ebook here.
Greg Thomas: You told me that a good friend of yours mentioned that the story of Black American resilience makes systemic racism harder to see and can deter resources from flowing to resolve it. Based on your reading of Murray, how do you think he might respond?
Amiel Handelsman: I didn’t have a chance to meet Murray personally, but I imagine him responding with an “Are you kidding me?” look and then proceeding to puncture straight through the assumptions behind the claim.
First, he might remind us that public policy decisions are investments, so if you want to get support for them, it doesn’t do much good to hide the positive qualities of who you’re investing in. As he writes in The Omni-Americans:“Sometimes Americans are disposed to fair play and sometimes they are not. But they almost always invest their time, money, and enthusiasm in assets with promise, not liabilities. Even those who become involved in salvage operations have been sold on inherent potential.” Notice how this contrasts with the assumption that people’s commitment to solving a problem goes up the more they see how bad the problem — like systemic racism — is. It’s a vastly different interpretation.
And it’s interesting, because if you follow the arguments of many leading antiracists, they focus 95 percent of the time on documenting the problem. This is absolutely sincere. Yet for Murray, it leaves out a big part of human motivation: investing in something or someone promising. Now, Murray was up front about the political and economic exclusions that Black Americans faced. You can’t read more than a few pages of The Omni-Americans without bumping into examples.
And for good reason. I mean, the man grew up in the Deep South and lived for most of the twentieth century. He saw a lot and experienced a lot. But he took a strong stand for separating these political and economic dimensions from the cultural sphere and the character of a people. Not only can you talk about both, but you should talk about both. Because if you ignore resilience, you’re setting up a dynamic in which some people feel pity for other people. On the surface, it looks moral and like genuine compassion. And there is real and sincere compassion present, no doubt. But sometimes, also present is a subtle and sometimes not so subtle patronizing condescension.
In the psychological language of the drama triangle — which I don’t believe Murray used — it’s rescuers stepping in to help victims. If there was one thing Murray didn’t want Black Americans to be seen as, it was as victims. Because they weren’t and aren’t. Heroes aren’t victims. They’re heroes. They have agency. When they encounter painful circumstances, they make choices about how to respond. And if they’re American, and particularly Black American, the choices they make are to persist, to be creative, to improvise, to use every bit of ingenuity they can muster to better their circumstances.
Of course, I’m generalizing about a collective cultural trait, but even if we’re only talking about thirty or sixty percent of a group, who wouldn’t want to invest in this?
Greg: One idea I’ve stated for a while now is that you can be victimized in a situation without adopting the identity of a victim.
Amiel: Yes, we have the ability — within some limits, of course, like where we are developmentally in our lives — to choose how we interpret what happens to us. Now, we can flip that around a bit and raise another question I could imagine Murray asking my friend: who do you think loses from systemic racism? Is it only Black Americans?
Not at all. Everyone loses. So-called white people lose. Isabel Wilkerson has countless examples of this in her book Caste, like the journalist who loses a great story because he doesn’t believe that this dark-complexioned interviewee is the prominent reporter she says she is. Or white-identified folks who die in a bombing after police ignore the threat of a bomber because his earlier victims were darker skinned.
There’s also a great example in the latest book by the historian Timothy Snyder which is called Our Malady. Snyder, lighter-skinned man, is incredibly sick, on death’s door, and has just flown back to the United States. A physician friend of his, who is African American, picks him up at the airport and drops him off at a hospital. She tells doctors his condition is critical, and he needs immediate attention. The doctors ask, “Who was she? She said she was a doctor?”
They’re mocking her.
As Snyder writes,“They were talking about my friend. They laughed. I couldn’t write this down then, but did later: racism hurt my life chances that night; it hurts others’ life chances every moment of their lives.”
This is mind-blowing stuff, because it’s so counter to the way that many liberals and progressives view things, and I count myself in this group. For Murray, revealing this complexity is another way of puncturing the rescuer-victim dynamic and avoiding the trap of benevolent condescension.
Greg: A year ago, the brutal murder of George Floyd being captured on tape sparked mass worldwide protests. Many nominally white people became aware of the continued maltreatment of Black people by police, and felt called to take action. How do you think Murray’s Omni-American vision can support them in their journey to answer the call?
Amiel: Let’s talk first about mood, because this is a crucial acupuncture point or source of leverage for all of us answering the call. When I say the word “mood,” I’m talking not about a short-lived emotion but instead about a predisposition for action. If emotions are the weather, then moods are the climate. They’re strong. They persist over time. And they shape what’s possible — and what’s not. Murray’s vision invites us into several moods that are positive and constructive, yet all too rare among nominally white folks combating racism. But before we get to Murray, let me set some context by speaking about what’s present today.
One mood I observe in many people combating racism is resignation. This is the assessment that nothing I do will make a difference, so why bother trying? This can arise when you immerse yourself in American history in a very particular way: by focusing on the disasters but not the dignities, the horrors but not the progress. If you follow writers who are purely deconstructing history — showing how it was all a cynical power game where some people won and others got screwed, you can get caught here. If you constantly talk about how we are in a white supremacist society that’s really no different than the 1960s or 1860s, you’re likely caught here. So much of this is hidden in language that we’re not aware of unless we pay close attention to it. That’s one reason it persists. Now, you’d think that people committed to making things better wouldn’t get caught in resignation because it’s so unhelpful to the cause, but they do. We do.
Another common mood is guilt. This is the assessment that I’ve done something wrong and there’s nothing I can do to make it better. If I read about lynching and look at the horrible photos andhold myself responsible for this, I’m entering the territory of guilt. The fact that it happened before I was born doesn’t matter. I take the weight onto my shoulders. It becomes my burden.
Now, it may be that I was in a mood of guilt before looking at these photos, and they serve as confirmation for my existing assessment that I’ve done something wrong. Either way, it’s not a pleasant or helpful place to inhabit, but it’s powerful and common. And, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that anyone avoid learning about lynching. That’s part of our history.
The point — and this feels almost blasphemous to say — is that you’re not responsible for what happened before you’re born. You weren’t there. You didn’t do it. Even if your grandparents or great-great grandparents were there, you’re not responsible for them, and it’s certainly not your fault for loving them. Now, if this sounds like whitewashing, think again. Because these things happened. People were responsible for them — but not you and not me.
What we are responsible for is what we do in our own lives, and one place to start is to take responsibility for our moods. Here’s where Murray is so valuable.
Greg: Break it down, man.
To be continued in Part Two
