Letters: The Shaping of our Beliefs II

K. Worthen and Bradley Burt continue their conversation...

Dear Bradley,

Thank you for taking the time to write your letter. It was fun to read. I think it is interesting that politics was so infused with your upbringing. I see that in a lot of my students, but it was not that way for me at all.

For the most part, my family’s allegiance to Democrats had more to do with the passing of Civil Rights legislation by Lyndon Byrd Johnson — right around the time that the parties made dramatic philosophical shifts mostly because of the controversy surrounding integration and civil rights. It has always been important for me to align myself with candidates who promoted equal access to opportunity. I’ll tell you why this is important to me.

If you go to schools that are in predominantly wealthy white neighborhoods, these schools have the latest equipment, latest books, and the best accouterments to guarantee success. On the other hand — on the other side of the railroad tracks if you will — students are in rat-infested schools with out-of-date textbooks, no access to computers, and some are even sitting in classrooms with mold growing on the walls. Their road to success is much more difficult.

I don’t think everyone should have the same things. People need the space to grow as they will, but I think people should have the same access to opportunities for growth. America is still trying to wrestle with this. So much of the psychology of America has to do with who belongs and who does not. Obviously, this is not exclusive to America, but it is an enduring problem.

This is why I have a problem with modern Republicans. Everyone cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps, especially those who have no boots. Further, the emphasis on a small government assumes that neighbors will help neighbors, churches will reach out to the community, and non-profit organizations will fill the gaps. Human nature is not so benevolent, and I do not say this as a cynic. If you walk into any high school cafeteria, you will see what I mean: people self-segregate based on race, class, sexuality, disability, and much, much more. As such, we really don’t care about what is happening to people who don’t look like us, walk like us, or talk like us and we especially don’t care about the people we cannot see. Because of this, I think some government intervention is necessary. If one kid is eating and another is starving, we should have something in place to make sure the starving kid eats.

As for liberals, let me say this: I quibble with the term “liberal elites”. It is a rhetorical ploy, a divisive strategy, used by some conservatives to diminish the power and potential for dialogue. I also dislike the insinuations of intellectual inferiority directed at conservatives by liberals. Both positions are repugnant. Are there snobbish people who call themselves liberals? Absolutely, but there are arrogant conservatives too. Nevertheless, I like the idea of liberalism because the philosophy is the driving force behind America — it certainly was during the Revolution. The point is that we are all inherently humans, created by God; as such, we have some inalienable rights. We crafted our founding documents based on this principle.

The issue that America has always had is trying to live up to those ideals. Most of the founding fathers were slave owners and horrible class elitists who talked about lower class White people (at the time the Irish, Scottish, and German) Blacks, and Indigenous people as if they were animals. We have spent centuries trying to correct that.

But the wonderful thing is that through the press and print culture of the day, the ideals of liberty, freedom, those inalienable rights, were spread, and they took root in us. This is why we fight, fight, fight for that portion of freedom and liberty, for they are the nectar of God. And conservatism is fine as an idea. Ideally, one idea would check the power of the other.

The problem, I think, lies with the two parties that claim to protect and advocate their respective ideas. Democrats give lip service to equality, but they have advanced many neoliberal agendas that have proved devastating to the most vulnerable. Republicans seem to be trying to consolidate power in such a way that can hardly be called patriotic. We had a revolution to fight and remove a monolithic power structure, the same kind of structure Republicans are building through their gerrymandering, court appointments, and bully tactics in Congress. Theirs is an attempt to have one idea and way of life govern the many, and that is not very democratic. That is not America.

I also don’t have an issue with identity politics; much of what defines America centers on identity, i.e., “those people are slaves, those people over there are red savages, these people are Irish dogs and those people are Scottish hounds, and these people have the yellow pox”. More importantly, “WE, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA are unlike ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.” It is American exceptionalism, sure, but as a nation, we understand ourselves through this lens, for good or ill. Our greatest export will always be American rhetoric and culture. It spreads around the globe in an almost atmospheric-like fashion, sometimes inspiring people and sometimes choking them.

What we need to do, though, is think about White people and white experience as an identity; the same way we think about Indigenous people, Black people, Asian Americans, and Latinx. We need to have an honest conversation about the political nature of all of our identities because in a place like America, our identities are social and political all the time. Here is a how this plays out at least from the perspective of Black and White

Immediately before and during the Civil War, there were some White people in the south who were small-time landowners. They didn’t have much, but they had land, and they worked, ate, and lived off that land. After the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau was established to help millions of former slaves and poor Whites. Through rampant corruption, Blacks were cheated out of what was promised (40 acres and a mule), and poor Whites had their land forever confiscated by rich, elite southern Whites and northern Whites (Carpetbaggers).

We saw this during the Great Depression. Large corporations and banks, headed by rich White people, took lands and homes from poor Whites who owned land and were mostly farmers, forcing them to relocate westward. You’ve probably read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Well, it is based on a real event. As a result, these poor Whites blamed migrant Mexicans and Chinese people saying that if those people were not here, there would be enough help to go around, but those people were being exploited too. In America, we cannot discuss relations or even politics without having a conversation about wealth and capital. It is certainly something we need to talk about because there is something we can do about it.

I want to share with you a quote from one James Henry Hammond. He was a virulent racist and classist as well as a Senator representing South Carolina in Congress. He says,

In all systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

He gave this speech to Congress during the admission of Kansas in 1858. Now this was when the arguments and antagonisms between North and South were on the rise, so his comments were certainly in defense of slavery and he says as much, but it is also about class. In those days, as it is today, people like Senator Hammond often talked of poor Whites as being one rung above Blacks on the socio-economic scale and in some cases, they were worse than Blacks because Blacks were thought to be too intellectually inferior to help themselves, but poor Whites should know better.

If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners’ and could be combined, where would you be?

Hammond believed that having this menial class, what he called mud-sill, was necessary because the work, and he claimed it was all about the work, elevated slaves and poor whites. There was honor in labor unless, of course, you could pay someone to labor for you. That was said to be the most honorable. He goes on to say this:

Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours vote [ here he is talking about freedmen and poor whites], and, being the majority, they are depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners’ and could be combined, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…

This is a most revealing comment because as a nation, we have horrible voter participation. Many of our problems are ones we, those of us who have been voting for some time now, have created. I understand that you’ve only recently been eligible to vote. I am sorry that we, those of us who have been voting for some time, have left you this mess, and I hope we can clean it up before all is completely lost. These letters, your beautiful letter, is a promising start.

Sincerely,

Kea

Professor Worthen,

Long before reading your letter for the fifth time, I knew that I was presented with a unique challenge; not just to the technical aspects of my writing skill, but also to the way I normally formulate my ideas. I think it highlights both an important shortcoming in the human thought process and the reason this initiative to encourage communication is so vital to the future of both our country and the world as a whole.

As you previously stated, belief systems are extremely tricky, and the root basis for our beliefs is a topic widely discussed but not something I’m sure can be wholly understood yet, at least in a general sense. The “nature vs nurture” debate as it relates to philosophy and psychology has been a squabble that goes back to Kant, or even further, but I think people as a whole are starting to realize that it takes a fair bit of both. There’s plenty of nuance to affect it and that is no less true for my part. I mentioned before that I was raised in politics but that is only part of the story. I was also home-schooled, and the nature of that environment developed the way I think in a very tangible way with both positives and negatives that reflect my mom’s incredible fortitude and skill as a teacher, but also the limitations of such a secure learning environment and the boundaries of our own individual conscious experiences.

You talk about the complexity of processes that manifest our belief systems and my early learning was no exception, and as such it was subject to many of the same limitations as those of other perspectives, but with some slight- and not so slight- variations. I am the second eldest of twelve children. When I was born, my mother was teaching at an urban elementary school with a heavy population of both minority and underprivileged kids. She saw firsthand what happens when society gives certain identity groups, and especially their children, the short end of the stick. She may have halted her profession to raise her growing family, but to this day she hasn’t stopped being a teacher and she took much of what she learned from her time as a teacher of other people’s children and applied it to her own.

Part of what that included was a clear and distinct awareness of the history of injustices dealt by this country to those who would call it home. My reading list throughout my teenage years, like a lot of teens in the US, included biographies of the big names in civil rights: Martin Luther King Jr, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, even Jackie Robinson highlighted the undeniable history of white oppression in my favorite sport; but one of the mistakes in my education that I believe extended to a lot of white students of my generation is that I was almost exclusively aware of true racial injustice as a phenomenon of the past. Like many white Americans, I grew up realizing that we had been very wrong but thinking that the institution of Civil Rights legislation had put those terrible practices behind us and everything was suddenly a level playing field. I watched my social circles closely and never observed the kinds of overt racism and discrimination that you and so many others have talked about as being a serious issue; not that I didn’t take the subject seriously, but my perspective on the struggle as a whole was inevitably, but not irreparably, skewed. In fact, being raised in a well-intentioned southern Baptist home myself, I was taught that to hate was wrong in any circumstance, but to not love someone over something as trivial as their skin was to fail to be like Christ in one of the most shameful ways possible.

Now, my parents didn’t sugarcoat things either. Being such a large family didn’t help the fact that socially, we were not the pinnacle of middle, or even low class to begin with. They taught us that the world is only fair in that it’s equally unfair to all of us and making things better requires hard work and a devoted effort to endure things that were unpleasant to say the least. They taught us that not everyone is trying to be “Christ-like” and some will, through twisted irony, use their Christianity as a basis to discriminate. They never tried to pull the wool over my eyes; they simply fell prey to the unavoidable flaw of human consciousness that is its limited perspective.

It’s something I’m sure my friends are tired of hearing from me but the personal discovery of this impediment to the way we think was and continues to be fundamental to my own improvement. That we recognize just how small our perspectives can be and almost always are; and what kind of constraints those a priori influences can play in a world of constantly developing ideas, is necessary to understanding our own beliefs, as well as those of others and especially those whose belief systems place them in opposition to our own points of view. It’s simply a fact that because our conscious experiences are defined by a combination of our narrow genetic makeup and the relatively small environment we are born and raised in, we often think of the things we stand to gain from those contributors, but rarely do we try to investigate what we might be missing. We are each of us inevitably neglecting part of the whole picture but what I also learned is that while our perspectives may start small, they are very malleable. There is always room to grow and the only way I have found to expand our perceptions of subjective experience is to engage and communicate with other creatures of limited consciousness who undeniably have a perspective unique to our own. This is where so many of us seem to stall out and with our country as divided as ever along any line imaginable, it appears to be becoming more and more of an issue.

The combination of factors like the human beings that contributed to my own genetic makeup and the environment I was raised in meant my perspective was limited to one where the concept of race had little to no impact on the day-to-day operations of the world, and therefore in my development of ideas, it’s something I often overlook. In re-reading my original letter, I noted a few times where the limits of my own thought process left some rather large gaps. You graciously extended the principle of charity to me in those instances, but I think it reflects a flaw in my subjectively narrow perspective that I desperately want to rectify.

Like many of my conservative forebears, I love to rant about what America was founded on: equality, justice, freedom, all the buzzwords, but also like my conservative forebears, I rarely stop and think about whether those attributes can be considered unilaterally accurate, either today or in the light of American history. It certainly has been that way for me and my family. Despite our struggles, I have never had to march for the right to vote, or get a job, or sit at a restaurant bar. Through extensive research I know that a good portion of my Scottish and Irish ancestors came to this country before it was even a country. They were active fighters and officers in the southern colonies directly under the revolutionary Major-General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee. One of my ancestors in particular would eventually serve as a lieutenant under his son, Robert E. Lee in a time of serious tension and division, much like the one we find ourselves in today. Through the decades, it has been passed down in my family that we must stand and fight to protect those values that define the nation we helped to build, but all along the way, the perception of how those ideals are put in practice has been bounded by the limited nature and nurture that a white protestant American will receive and that was just as true in 1861 as it is today.

While I have no doubt in my mind that my confederate predecessors did what they thought was right at the time, it doesn’t change the fact that the side they were defending was very wrong in the grand scheme of things, but how could they have known? If they had tried to sit down and communicate, to understand the hearts and minds of not only those they were fighting, but also those they were oppressing; I can’t help but feel that many southerners, and Americans in general, would have exponentially increased the bounds of their perceptions and allowed them to see that the ideals they chose to take a stand for, were not very American at all.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

That is the only way we can hope to bridge this disparity that seems to be tearing the country I love apart at the seams. When Dr. King marched to expand the notion of true freedom and equality in this country, he did it through the power of communication and developing understanding in the hearts of all Americans, black or white, and he did it in the face of indescribable pressure. His house was firebombed twice but instead of responding in kind, he showed how even the best of us can be deceived by our perceptions but if we open our hearts to judging each other by the contents of our character, we can see each other not as a race, or religion or political party, but as fellow Americans who are in this world beside us, not against us. On the street in front of the Capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama, in front of more than 25,000 people, Dr. King gave one of the greatest speeches in history, and in it was one of my favorite quotes: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

That parting line is a reference to a longer sermon by 19th century Abolitionist and Unitarian Minister, Theodore Parker who said what I have been trying to say, much more clearly and concisely:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

In my attempt to “study and show thyself approved,” I have determined that those values we idolize as Americans are not previous states we must return to, but evolving goals to strive for in every instance. The idea of a “utopia” is a term with definitions hemmed in by our narrow perspectives; but I side with renowned author, professor and skeptic Michael Shermer in that instead, a “protopia” should be our ambition. A world where we haven’t set our standards for success based on ideas constrained by the bounds of subjectivity but have free and open communication between all identity groups to ensure that we are never satisfied with the levels of freedom, justice and equality in this world, and are constantly progressing and expanding our own perceptions of the arc of morality so that no one group ever has to feel that they are being left behind or oppressed by any other, and no one group can use ignorance as an excuse to believe that our divisive problems are solved. Our eyes may reach but little ways but by feeling uninhibited in our ability to discuss whatever points of contention may arise, we can recognize that whether Democrat, Republican or anything in between, we are more than Americans, we are human beings with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails.

I revel in the thought of delving deeper into understanding controversial subjects and this opportunity to think and study and write about a controversial subject I rarely explore has been a truly enlightening experience but it would have been impossible if I had not first been engaged with someone with a drastically different perspective that I had not fully considered before and while that in itself is a sign of progress to me, I believe the true advancements have been even more substantial and the lessons you’ve taught me in just this brief exchange have unquestionably altered how I want to approach my own thought process going forward. I plan on going even further with my research and discussion of this very relevant issue, and I would be honored to continue this correspondence in the future and be able to draw on the subjective conscious experience of someone so unique to my worldview. The rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that we uphold as endowed by our creator are not given to us without hard work but as far as I can tell, this kind of open inquiry is the only way any of us can ever realize the true American Dream.

-Bradley

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