ON THE COMPLICATIONS OF OUR COMPLICITY WITH RACISM

Philadelphia protest over George Floyd death. Photo by Joe Piette via Filckr.

In recent weeks, as the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis has brought about a widespread reckoning with police brutality and racism in the United States, I have felt a disorganized cloud of emotions. 

First came righteous indignation and sorrow in thinking about the many victims of state violence. Then solidarity and hope in seeing the protests, so often led by young people. A new wave of anger, as political and media figures showed greater concern for property than for lives, greater interest in capital than in justice. A new jolt of optimism when activists’ demands began to burst into the halls of power.

Through it all I have also felt a profound sense of puzzlement. Perhaps it is because we become strange to ourselves in times of upheaval and awakening and renewal. Perhaps it is because the contradictions we daily live with become more glaring.

After all, I have spent my adult life mainly in two cities, in two university neighborhoods whose borders are patrolled by private security and can plainly be seen in demographic maps of race and class. As a non-white person in America, as an immigrant, it would be easy – it has been all too easy – to comfort myself with the thought: I am not the oppressor. 

Perhaps, in some small and quotidian ways, I have even been subject to the forces of racial oppression. Every once in a while, especially in wealthier neighborhoods in Manhattan, I come under the gaze of others in ways that make my non-white racial identity salient. A few weeks ago, on one of our earliest ventures back out into a pandemic-stricken city, my wife and I got lost while cycling in a park and encountered a police officer who gave us directions back to the path. She noticed how I stiffened and spoke differently when the officer addressed us and asked me about it later. I explained that I tend to be deferential to police officers because I fear them. My fear is not unreasonable. I know that. 

But I am also aware that I am hardly the primary target of anyone’s racial animus. This country’s system of racist oppression may bring me some minor discomfort from time to time, but it is extremely unlikely to strip me of my rights, let alone my life. I am too well protected by my ambiguous position in racial hierarchies as an American of Indian origin, my class status, my profession as an academic, indeed, the simple fact of the spaces in which I exist, in which I am authorized to be. I know that, too.

That is how such systems work – they touch us all, regardless of anyone’s specific intentions as oppressor or target or bystander. As I have come to think, the main way in which I partake in the system of American racism is my complicity with it. 

Like other observers, I have found distasteful the recent trend of self-identified allies, corporations, or public figures performing ritual obeisance, whether at protests or on social media. Really to acknowledge one’s complicity in racism is not to ask anyone (well, any merely human person) for forgiveness or to confess one’s impurity in the expectation of absolution from the oppressed.

Such complicity is not a stain to be washed out. The very word (a post-classical derivative of the Latin verb complico, meaning ‘to fold together’) can teach us this: we are woven together with racism, spooled around it. It is part of the fabric of our social life, not on its surface. More importantly, we are its accomplices, its fellow-workers. 

Here, then, is a further role, beyond being the agent of oppression or its target or even a bystander to it. Our actions, witting or not, are in furtherance of the ends of a racist system that we assuredly did not create, but that we cannot simply disavow either. That is the essential complication of complicity.

Like accomplices to a crime, we are responsible for what happens and more responsible the more pernicious are the effects. As the scholastic maxim tells us, we are responsible for all the bad effects of our bad actions, intended and otherwise. And in our circumstance very nearly everything we do of a social or economic character is (in part) bad, in the sense of being defective or disordered and reliably conducing to the production of evils. 

Intentions, of course, matter, and it is a grave ill to hold racist beliefs or engage in outright discrimination or bigotry. The old story that racial grievance and hostility died with the success of the civil rights movement of the last century has been conclusively refuted in the past few years by the evidence of the public actions and words of many.

But what the current protest movement has sought to help us understand is that the racism of our society far outstrips individual racists, whether the so-called bad apples on police forces or openly white supremacist members of the alt-right. We are uncomfortably reminded of this fact about ourselves when we see the mugshots of the police officers who are being held to account thanks in large part to the protests. Side-by-side on newspapers with Derek Chauvin, just as he was when they crushed the life out of George Floyd, was James Kueng, an African-American like Floyd. Standing watch was Tou Thau, an Asian-American like me. 

Unfortunately, our understanding of responsibility is so highly tied to individualistic notions of control and retributive conceptions of punishment that even the simple thought that we are all complicit in the ills of a racist society can be not only unbearable to face in practice but impossible to admit in thought. Confronted by the sheer magnitude of the injustice, we retreat to the safe knowledge that we have not intentionally done wrong in our lives or held evil in our hearts. 

From a purely philosophical perspective, there is much to critique in this individualist and legalistic conception of responsibility. Simply put: too much residue of injustice remains when we take away bad intentions. Moreover, by focusing on control, this view of responsibility vastly overestimates what we are able to change, either about ourselves or our circumstances. 

For some, it will be beyond conceptual imagination to take up a notion of responsibility that makes us responsible for more than what we directly cause. (Of course, even the individualist notion must make sense of culpable omission, negligence, and so on.) If that is so, my recommendation is to make less of responsibility in the individual sense. 

But if the thought that we are, in an important sense, on the hook for the injustice of our world and our society makes sense to you, I encourage you to expand your understanding of responsibility to allow for the kind of complicity I have described, one that creeps in no matter the purity of one’s heart.

While it has become fashionable recently, I have avoided talk of ‘structural racism’ in order to capture the social evils I am describing, not because I think this notion is misguided, but because it is too easily heard as an alternative to individual racism. It is all too easy to think that the structure is to blame, not us. And we might wonder how any of us could do anything to change something as implacable as a whole societal structure. Fatigue and even despair loom close behind these thoughts.

Fortunately, through the wisdom of a theological tradition going back to Augustine, Christian readers have an alternative framing of our responsibility for social evil, namely, the vocabulary of sin and grace. 

As Jesse Couenhoven shows in the monograph Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ, this Augustinian tradition has considerably more radical potential for us than has been recognized, because of how thoroughly it overturns the individualist conception of fault. For the Augustinian, sins in the more familiar cast of intentional evils stem from an underlying state of disorder in our capacities over which we do not have control and which we simply inherit – the original sin shared by the entirety of humankind after the Fall.

As Couenhoven notes, the commonplace that racism is American’s original sin has been domesticated to mean simply that racism is ubiquitous or that is deeply ingrained. While both of these claims are true, taking racism – along with other forms of systemic oppression – as a manifestation of original sin in the Augustinian sense would require us to accept something much more radical: that, regardless of their intentions, our actions are such that they contribute to racial injustice and that this injustice is rightly imputed to us as something for which we are directly responsible. 

In what follows, I would like to say something in favor of this Augustinian framework and its transformative potential. There are two main insights we can gain.

First, by placing less emphasis on inward intention and more on the reality of our actions in a fallen world, this picture of human life directs us to the ways in which our actions inherit the character of the social structures that shape them and give them meaning. 

To return to an earlier example – the landscapes of our cities are shaped by racist policies and decisions: the redlining of Black neighborhoods, White flight to the suburbs, the ghettoization of immigrant groups through the unavailability of safe, affordable housing. As well-intentioned people with limited power, we may think of choosing where to live – if we have the economic and social power to choose – as a matter of responding to the options open to us here and now, but in fact such a choice is always also a reinscription of the underlying reality. 

If we belong to relatively powerful groups, as I do, such a reinscription is itself an exercise of power. Yet the alternative might be no better: a move to a racially diverse neighborhood might counteract segregation but promote gentrification and the steady displacement of those with less wealth. 

Despite the appearance of such double binds, we do have power beyond the narrow frame of individual choice against the background of hardened social structures, especially the power to forge bonds of solidarity across race and class divides even when doing so is inconvenient or uncomfortable. 

The difference between the ways of thinking I have described is reflected in the differing motives of those who have come to think of themselves as allies in the antiracist fight. Some, no doubt, joined the protests because of their guilt and the hope that doing something would relieve them of it. Others were motivated simply because they felt called to cry out against injustice. It is the second group that more truly saw their neighbors.

By leaving behind an obsessive scrutiny of our own – and others’ – purity, we can instead acknowledge that the injustice around us is ours no matter its cause. We can rededicate ourselves to addressing these injustices forcefully through the means we have, from marching in the streets to demanding more of our elected officials to reshaping our workplaces, our churches, and our social groups to better resemble the radical vision of justice and the common good that the kingdom of God signifies. Who is our colleague? Who kneels beside us in worship? Who eats at our table? These are questions too few of us have asked.

Most importantly, instead of hoping to cleanse the hearts of those who stand in the way of racial and economic justice, we can work toward a more egalitarian world where no one’s ill intent can damage the welfare of another, where employers cannot dominate at-will workers for the demands of rapacious capital, where police officers cannot harm or intimidate the citizens they have sworn to protect, where the rich cannot hoard their advantages through usury and legalized theft from the common good.

Second, we can take from the Augustinian framework its vision of radical hope that extends beyond the endurance of any individual campaign for social justice. I have suggested that we retreat to the individualist vision of responsibility for injustice in part because of the sheer magnitude of the suffering of the world. If this suffering is not somehow refigured as deserved – the fault of others, perhaps, or of bad luck that needs no remedy – then its weight on our conscience can easily bring about soul-weariness. 

I find myself moved by the continued presence and passion of the Black Lives Matters protests in my city and others, even after the national news media has moved on to other subjects. Like every protest movement, however, this one will have to grapple eventually with the sclerosis of our political system, its inability to reflect popular demands, and the entrenchment of power in our social and economic systems. Indeed, no amount of consciousness-raising will suffice to reorient the essentially racist character of our society. (I am tempted to mention the resurgence of interest in the book White Fragility, but others have dealt with the topic sufficiently, so I will pass it by.)

What is needed to sustain this movement in the face of such formidable obstacles is radical hope. I find such hope in the Augustinian doctrine of grace, the unmerited response by God to our sinful nature and its inevitably sinful manifestation in our individual and social lives. Reconciliation remains possible for us despite our brokenness and the brokenness of the world. We are reassured, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”.

Together these two insights about sin and grace direct us to a transformative politics, one that asks us to look beyond the standard of inward purity to a vision of social responsibility in which our complicity with racism and all forms of oppression can not only be acknowledge but also form a basis for solidarity. We are woven together with injustice, but also with one another.