Day 79- Irresponsible White People, the "Noble Savage," and Thoughts about Privilege

Total Mileage: 9,379

Song of the Day:
“Matters of Blood and Connections”
 (Dashboard Confessional, which I never listen to ever-- the song was recommended by a friend, and the lyrics seemed appropriate, so I’m using it, but I cannot and do not endorse the music of Dashboard Confessional.)

One week ago in Austin, TX . . .

“Okay, to be honest, starting this piece now is kind of a dumb idea since I’ve got so much on my plate for the next few weeks (visits to both Austin Stone and Hill Country Bible, not to mention all the upcoming stuff in Houston in the days following), but I feel like I’ve been on a roll today, so I might as well keep on going.  This is an idea I’m still fleshing out, and I already know it might get me into trouble, but I really feel like it needs to be brought to the table for discussion so that we can figure out whether it’s good, bad, racist, trendsetting or what.”

Present Day . . .

Yep, it was a bad idea to start writing this right before such a busy weekend.  I didn’t get a chance to finish this post, and, looking back at it, I see that some of the ideas still aren’t quite as fully developed as they need to be, but since I’ve already done so much Lakewood research in preparation for tomorrow, I figure I can take an afternoon off to look back over this piece and see what’s worth salvaging.  Let the editing commence . . .

Uninformed Romance

I was listening to the song “Elias” by Dispatch today while working on my denominations post, and the lyrics of that song always make me so excited:

Dai Jesu achoinekwa, ndaizofara naye.

(If I could meet my Jesus, I would be very happy with Him.)

Dai Jesu achoinekwa, ndaizofara naye.

(If I could meet my Jesus, I would be very happy with Him.)

Taizofara naye. (We would be happy with Him.)

Taizofara naye. (We would be happy with Him.)

Kwaziwai.  Kwaziwai. (Hello.  Hello.)

Makasimba here? (Are you strong?)

Ndakasimba kana makasimbawo. (I’m strong if you’re strong.)

Ndakasimba.  Ndakasimba. (I’m strong.  I’m strong.)

Ndakasimba kana makasimbawo.  (I’m strong if you’re strong.)

These words are in Shona, a language from Zimbabwe, and these first verses are actually a standard Zimbabwean greeting.  Sure the tribal drum beat is really cool, and the singer’s voice is so wonderfully melodic, but I would be fooling myself if I didn’t also admit that one of the main draws of the song is that it’s African.  It’s got that exotic African flavor to it, and since I actually looked up the translation, I get to revel in my hidden knowledge every time the song gets played.  There’s just something about Africa.  I don’t know why I do this, but I get aggravated in class when I have to memorize theological terms in Latin, but if Desmond Tutu presents similar concepts to me with a little Ubuntu tossed in, it’s exhilarating.  There’s something so tired and stodgy about the white-dominated academy and so exciting about cultures and philosophies I don’t understand.  Africa, Central America, even underprivileged neighborhoods right here in America-- I am an outsider to all of these worlds, so they all hold a strange exotic romance to me, and any wisdom that comes from them seems remarkably profound.  Lately I’ve been wondering though:

Can we take this too far?  Is there also a dark side to this phenomenon?  Alright, that was a pointless rhetorical question.  The answer is an obvious resounding YES, and here’s how . . .

The problem is that it’s possible to feel a romance toward something we don’t understand without ever really making an effort to get to know it, and we learn just enough to seem well versed in other cultures without really building relationships with them.  I won’t name specific examples, but I feel like I’ve been seeing this more and more lately, especially in the safety of the academy.  In fact, an episode of the brilliant and controversial TV show The Boondocks featured a character that addressed this very issue.  In “A Huey Freeman Christmas,” the show’s protagonist (Huey, a ten-year-old black revolutionary forced to live with his grandfather in the generic predominantly-white suburb of Woodcrest), encounters a teacher named Harold Kennedy Uberwitz who is obsessed with learning about other cultures in order to appear “culturally sensitive.”  Though the teacher clearly means well, the wise-beyond-his-years Huey quickly labels Uberwitz an “irresponsible white person” and assures him that he will someday be fired for this offense.  Here’s a clip to give you an idea, and while I’ve used this clip a few times before, I don’t think it’s made it onto the blog yet.

As Huey has predicted, the episode culminates with Uberwitz being fired after allowing Huey to direct his own Christmas play (“The Adventures of Black Jesus, a Quincy Jones production”), but the epilogue shows Uberwitz again leading the Harambee salute, this time with a very enthusiastic, entirely white group of college students, many of whom are attired in dashikis and sporting dreadlocks.  Uberwitz has not learned a thing.  He continues to study and glorify the traditions of Africa and of American black culture without any real context, learning from books and documentaries rather than actual relationships, and we should see this as a cautionary tale.  While the enthusiasm to embrace and learn from another culture is a beautiful thing that should be encouraged and fostered, if it is not accompanied with real and genuine relationships, we wind up with a strange reverence that evolves into a subtle racism, and I think it’s a behavior that we see far too often among . . . well . . . irresponsible white people, irresponsible black people, and just irresponsible people in general.

Return of the “Noble Savage”

What concerns me most is the notion that theologies from outside the European/North American intellectual tradition tend to be romanticized because we perceive them as “simple.”  Because they sometimes lack the same Western cultural baggage, we imagine that they’re wise in their simplicity, but they still wind up being “simple” in our eyes, and that’s pretty patronizing.  Truth be told, this trend has been around for a long time, and it finds its roots in an Enlightenment era literary trope known as the “noble savage.”  I first encountered this concept back in high school when we were assigned the book Candide by Voltaire, and our teacher explained that the scene where the title character is nearly killed and eaten by stereotyped “natives” was actually Voltaire making fun of the noble savage concept.  The basic theory was that European explorers would arrive in unsettled lands to discover a group of indigenous people who were tribal but also oddly sophisticated, governed by a simple code of honor not unlike that of Feudal Europe.  These noble savages would exude a sort of practical wisdom, loyalty, and dignity unequalled in the West, and they would be willing partners in colonization.  Voltaire was saying that such a notion was ludicrous, and while I agree with him, it is for very different reasons.  Voltaire was making a pretty insulting statement that indigenous peoples would be more likely to kill the idealistic explorers; I just think that we’re all underestimating the complexities of cultures we don’t understand.

I find the noble savage concept to be dangerous because romanticizing a culture with which you are unfamiliar is really just kind of insulting, especially if that lens of simplicity is falsely applied.  Dude, indigenous American cultures weren’t simple.  They were remarkably and beautifully complex with well-thought-out internal structures of religious and political governance, often with wide-ranging alliances with other indigenous groups that formed nation-states far more efficient and powerful than the European colonies.  The same assumptions get applied to Africa, Central America, and far too much of the rest of the world.  I don’t want to pick on individuals, but every time I hear a pastor talk about what a spiritual experience his trip to Africa was, I just can’t help but wonder, “Who did you really connect with while you were there?  Did you really get a feel for these people’s lives, or did you get distracted by the poverty that you mistook for simplicity?”

A picture of a child I didn't meet in a country I didn't visit.

We’ve actually gone so far over the edge that there’s a trend in our culture which researchers have labeled “poverty pornography,” in which well-meaning irresponsible white people travel to countries in abject poverty and document what they see and then do nothing about it except publish photos-- no fundraising, no donations, no relationships, just pictures of “beautiful simplicity” amid human suffering.  There are photos like this all over social media sites like facebook and flickr, and it’s twisted, but it comes from an honest mistake about how we should view the world.  Looking at the world with an open shutter is not the same as looking at the world with an open heart.  This is very much what Erin was getting at with her comment about banning cameras on mission trips.  A photo takes a situation out of its cultural context, and while it’s good to raise awareness about the need for international aid and relief efforts, we can’t think for a minute that we’re the great white hope coming in to save these “simple” people.  Only Jesus saves.  All we can do is allow God to open our hearts and eyes to one another and see how we can benefit each other.

If we simply observe a culture from a classroom or from a church sanctuary or in a textbook or TV screen, we run the risk of forming an improper and distanced relationship with it.  We might put it on a pedestal or assume a false and patronizing simplicity, so we need to tread cautiously in these situations.  I fully realize that not everyone in a church pew has the means or time to take an international mission trip of suitable duration to build such relationships.  In fact, shorter-term trips are much more about exposure than relationships (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing-- we just need to be aware of the difference).  You don’t really go on a short-term mission trip to make a life-altering difference in people’s lives; you go to learn so that you can come back home more informed about a culture and help the people around you break their assumptions about those “simple” people in other nations.  We must always keep in mind that simple is really just a construction, but there are still very real differences between people in this world.

Deconstructing Privilege

In thinking about our differences, we need to be careful just because, when it comes down to it, we’re all people, and it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, black or white, American or African, male or female, gay or straight-- your opinion matters just as much, and your theology can be just as profound.  As an irresponsible white person myself, I often feel like my opinion should somehow count for less because I haven’t experienced the oppression that so many others have.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is actually a form of consensual prejudice.  Whenever someone tells me that I’m misunderstanding something because of my background, the proper response is not a sheepish “okay” with hung head and shuffling feet.  The proper response is, “Well, enlighten me.  I’m here to listen and learn.”  Yes, I acknowledge that my race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and socioeconomic status pretty much put me at the top of the “privilege” food chain, but there is one thing that such privilege denies me: firsthand experience.

I know that this is rocky ground, but we need to keep in mind that every person’s background carries with it a set of intellectual privileges-- a set of insights that only they can have.  I don’t know what it’s like to grow up black, and I can’t understand the oppression that has been brought against the black community for centuries, but I know many of my friends who do understand because they’ve lived it.  I can’t fully comprehend how women, immigrants, and people of different sexual orientations have been victimized throughout history, but you’d better believe that these groups understand it.  I don’t understand the suffering of apartheid that Desmond Tutu endured, but Desmond Tutu does.  I’m going to call this idea “privilege of information,” and that term doesn’t exist on Wikipedia, so I’m willing to go ahead and take credit for it (even though I secretly suspect the Freakonomics guys might have already beaten me to the punch).  Essentially, everyone who has experienced a difficult circumstance has unique insights into it, and people on the outside cannot fully understand this.  If you have privilege of information about a subject, you must be patient when the people around you fall short in their understandings of it.  I grew up Baptist, but a lot of my classmates didn’t; when they cannot understand something, I have to be patient as I talk them through it.  I am not black, but I have friends who are, and they are patient with me when I ask stupid questions (which I do quite often).

Please, if you have privilege of information on a subject, show the people around you patience and understanding.  Be slow to anger.  Don’t look for chances to take offense and lash out at a perceived oppressor.  Other people are not automatically prejudiced.  They’re just a little ignorant sometimes.  You have a privilege that they do not, and you have a duty to share your unique insights with the world.

I want to see the term “privilege” thought of differently in our discourse.  At this point, I see it treated as a slander to enforce the false dichotomy between haves and have-nots.  It is a wedge used to generate feelings of guilt in people born in circumstances beyond their control.  It furthers the gap, when we should really be working harder to reach a point where all are on an equal footing (as God intended us to be).  The body has many components.  The hand knows what the eye does not.  The ear perceives in a way that the stomach can’t.  We are diverse, not just in the functions we fulfill, but in how we perceive the world.  It is when we come together in the head, which is Christ, that all knowledge may be shared with respect and compassion.

If someone ever accuses you of speaking from a place of privilege, remind them that our experiences grant us all different privileges and that every human possesses unique information that can lead us to cooperation and community if shared with a loving and patient heart.  It was once said of Socrates that he “knew what he did not know,” and that is a spirit which we should all take to heart.  We need to take comfort in admitting to one another:

Not only do I not get it;

I also get that I do not get it.

I will never fully get it.

That is a situation beyond my control,

And though I might not ever overcome it,

I seek to work around it,

And I hope you will work with me.

Though understanding might perpetually elude me,

Through relationships, I get a glimpse,

And just maybe, you might learn something from me too.

No one can help the circumstances into which they are born.  You might as well blame people for the ordering of the stars.  We can, however, work to understand those circumstances, to understand our unique perspectives on the world, and to build an understanding of one another through open dialogue.  People are going to say stupid things from time to time.  People will inadvertently misinterpret.  People will inadvertently offend.  There are a lot of well-meaning irresponsible people like myself out there in the world.  We just need to remember to be open, to listen, and not to make assumptions.  The world is always more complicated than it seems, and we all come to the table with different privileges and experiences, but love for a neighbor is one of the simplest tenants of the Christian life.  Take responsibility for who you are.  Know that there are gaps in everyone’s knowledge and that you are not exempt from that.  We all have privileges.  We all have biases.  We all have misunderstandings.  Let’s acknowledge it openly and learn from one another in a spirit of love.

Peace and Blessings,

Tom