Like any problem or any idea, you can choose to look at it
from a perspective that will solve it or improve it, or you can look at it in a
way that keeps it around longer or makes it worse. You can see this throughout history—a very
simple example is Lavoisier’s little experiment in which he ‘discovered’
oxygen, as if before this experiment people didn’t know that they were
breathing, or that if they called stuff they were inhaling ‘air’ they were less
intelligent. I remember reading his
scientific paper, and as he compiled his data, he had a choice. We aren’t taught this choice, that helps the
myth of science continue, that the data interprets itself, but there was a
choice. He could have taken this data
and tinkered with the old theory to make the data fit within it, or he could start a
whole new theory. He chose the latter,
and began an era where humans began to create the world we live in, rather than
be at the mercy of a nature that can be cruel at times. From our present world, no one would argue
that Lavoisier should have bolstered the theory of phlogiston. Phlogiston just didn’t have the potential for
the creation of new materials. The
periodic table gave us such leverage and power.
This is simple, it is not controversial.

But what about social problems? We do the same thing. I try, here, to write essays that are
parallel to current events, that is, they are relevant but outside of the
static of contemporary debates. Can’t do
it today. Yesterday John McCain visited
an area of Appalachia last visited by Lyndon
Johnson, the area where Johnson announced his war on poverty. McCain visited because the area was
just as poor as it was 40 years ago.
Let’s just say, the ideas Johnson and Co.
brought to the table to solve poverty didn’t work. And this is an example, the plans and
conceptions of Johnson and Co., of approaching a problem with a perspective
that will keep the problem around longer, or in some cases, make it worse. This essay, though, isn’t about poverty and
the solutions. (Although we still know what poverty is, and I believe we now
know what will not work to solve it.)

This essay is about racism, about the problem of racism and
its history in the US. Here is the wrong way to think about racism,
this method, for instance:

Since the beginning writing of the Constitution Blacks have
been systematically…blah, blah, blah…and then in the Missouri Compromise…blah
blah…Civil War…Emancipation Proclamation…blah blah…share croppers…KKK…Jim
Crow…Brown vs Board…Civil Rights Movement…blah blah…and so on.

This narrative is the exact way to keep racism as a problem
in the US. The history of racism in the US is actually
millions and millions on ‘tiny’ histories, histories of individuals and how
they learned to—and here is our first choice—did they learn to hate or did they
lose their ability to feel compassion?
Here’s my choice—the opposite of racist feelings are compassionate
feelings. And so the question shifts to
the many ways in which people lose their ability to feel compassion for others. When there is no compassion in a person’s
heart, there is racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry, and cruelty. There doesn’t even have to be hatred. That’s one of the myths of racism, that there
has to be hatred.

Let’s go back to 1962, to the Millgram experiments, where
people in a laboratory setting had no trouble pushing a button that would have
theoretically killed another person—because throughout these psychological
experiments, the idea of the importance of following the instructions of an
authority figure displaced feelings of compassion in the subject. So, hatred is not necessary for racism. The ‘killers’ in the Millgram Experiments
worked themselves to point where they didn’t care one way or the other about
their ‘victims’. If there were pangs of
guilt in those who would eventually kill, if the staged screams of pain from
their victims began to bother the button pushers, they were told in a tone
lacking emotion that the victims also volunteered for this exercise. They were willing participants, please
continue administering the procedure—which was eventually a simulated lethal
electric shock.

The lack of compassion was crucial to the design of the Nazi
gas chambers. Before the gas chambers
were invented, German soldiers and officers had to personally kill their
victims, the old women and old men, the children—they would see their
faces. And at the end of the day, in the
dark of night, the Germans would go back to their tents or barracks and kill
themselves. The gas chambers were a
dispassionate way to murder, simply by pushing a button in the most
dispassionate way, thousands were killed at one time. No hatred necessary, no compassion was
necessary. That is why prisoners didn’t
have names, they became numbers.

It is possible, without compassion, for a human heart to be
replaced with a less than human heart. Here
is our second choice—is this a metaphor, human heart/nonhuman heart, or is
there something within us that is real and that something we shall call a literal metaphor is the best way to describe
it. For, if the heart is no more than a
blood pump, have we lost some compassion?

The process of becoming a racist is one of slow, gradual
abstraction. That is, slowly,
imperceptibly, people transform their gaze, they look at another person and no
longer see a person. They see
stereotypes, they see superficiality, they see their own thoughts and feelings
rather than seeing another person. Racism,
anti-Semitism, nowadays called anti-Zionism, is using another person as a
Rorshach test—that is, one sees in another person the very qualities about
themselves that they detest. I remember
years ago when teaching English in a high school that a student stated very simply that
he didn’t like black people—in a class where there were a few black kids. I asked the student why he didn’t like black
people, and he stated the reasons very clearly, and I wrote the reasons on the
board. Blacks, he said, were lazy,
dishonest, and stupid. I asked these
three questions—what grades did you get on your last report card (Ds and Fs),
why did I give you a D (because I don’t do my homework, I watch TV instead),
and what did you get on your last test (you tore it up because I cheated). And then I put a check mark next to each reason
after each answer. And he understood, as
did the class—the point, besides showing the Rorshachian way of racism, is that
sometimes the most compassionate thing to do is to draw a clear line as to what
is acceptable and what is not, and not always take the pathway of comfort.

How this 15 year-old developed this particular thought
process, that is one of the micro histories.
Micro history is one way to think in patterns that are the opposite of
racist thought patterns, to see each person as an individual, no abstractions,
no groupings—which is the opposite of what social scientists do all of the
time. The basis of their scientific
method is to devise new ways of grouping people, new ways of abstracting
individuals—and because of this, every method and technique of which they
conceive to combat racism and hatred will fail, just like Johnson’s War on
Poverty failed—because the one thing all of these methods have in common is
that they want us to ignore qualities of other people, rather than paying close
attention to all of another person’s
qualities, to listen to everything they say, to truly hear them and try to understand everything they mean until all
abstractions melt away, until you are not talking to a Black man or a Jew but
you are talking to Joe or Lou, and it doesn’t go beyond that. Not one step beyond that. Not one step.