Published March 6, 2009 | 
Remember what I wrote about shame a few weeks ago? This is the relevant bit:
But shame, at least for some of us, makes it hard to face anything but itself. Shame turns your energy inward, circling all attention around the horror. Like a tornado, it drags everything into its self-centered vortex–and destroys it.
There have been times I’ve carried around so much shame in myself that even tiny problems could evoke destructive levels of shame. Where the single match of a small mistake could consume whole mountainsides, until the shame became a self-sustaining firestorm that nothing could stop. There have been plenty of times when the major damage was done not by my original error but by the shame it evoked.
In that sense, shame is like an allergy. Celery in itself is not going to kill me. My body’s all-out reaction to celery could well do so.
That was about my personal reaction to shame, which tends to go inward. In similar situations, other people project their shame outward, where it becomes denial, anger, rage. A voice shouting, “I am not that!” until everyone else is silenced, deaf–or gone.
I think a lot of the defensive behavior in RaceFail09 is because people are so desperate to escape from feeling ashamed. Which in one sense is a good sign — it means that people take racism seriously and do not have nasty intentions. But good intentions are no guarantee that you won’t hurt someone else. And shame can make people less likely to recognize their own racially insensitive behavior. It can occasionally result in doing dreadful things in order to prove that one has not done a different dreadful thing.
Part of the problem is that in terms of shame and self-image, many of us think of what we *are*, rather than what we *do*. (That’s one difference between the utterly destructive toxic shame, which feels innate, and the useful situational shame.) But Platonic ideals can be misleading.
Let’s say J. Doe has an internalized image labeled Racist — maybe a KKK member setting fire to an agonized lynching victim. J. Doe knows zie is not that person. Therefore zie is not a racist. When told that zie has performed a racially insensitive action, J. Doe hears this as an accusation of the vilest possible sort and responds accordingly.
You can be a decent human being with the best of intentions, and still hurt someone else inadvertently.
It took me a long time to learn this. I was so overloaded with shame and guilt and failure over things I didn’t have any responsibility for that there was no room for me to admit my errors in the things I could have done something about. Paradoxically, I also ended up wallowing in shame and doing things that would keep me trapped in it, because I knew I deserved it.
I was brittle and defensive. Sometimes I still go there. God knows I still do things I am ashamed of. And there are still deep, ugly places in me where I *am* the shame.
But we’re all works in progress.
If you hurt someone, if you do wrong, if you make mistakes or fuck up, you can apologize and try to make it right. You can do better next time. It’s not easy. You may not be forgiven. But you still need to try.
C. S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce:
“Don’t you remember on earth — there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it — if you will drink the cup to the bottom — you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.”
Here are some links for positive ways to use this RaceFail-go-round.
bossymarmalade wrote a wry, eloquent, great-hearted post, and it makes a number of good points:
I realized that how pseudonymous people act on the internet to each other is an excellent marker of their good conscience.
Read it all. It’s brilliant.
bcholmes on Race Agency:
I think it’s my job to own my skanky race issues and part of that being my job involves writing my own job description and figuring out just how to own those issues. And that’s not just armchair pondering; that’s work.
ETA oursin mentioned the new fight_derailing community, which is designed as a way to keep the focus on the topic itself, rather than getting stuck in side issues.
*hugs you hard* And thank you for the link to bcholmes’ post – I hadn’t seen that, and I like it a lot.
This is excellent. I would say, however, that “If you live in the world, you will hurt people inadvertently, no matter how decent a human being you are.” I would actually go a step further and say that running your life so as to never hurt people inadvertently is a negative-gain strategy. A person who does that will end up hurting more people because of the inevitable twisting of their behavior. Much better to learn some strategies for dealing with having hurt people.
If you hurt someone, if you do wrong, if you make mistakes or fuck up, you can apologize and try to make it right. You can do better next time. It’s not easy. You may not be forgiven. But you still need to try.
The above section set off the following idea in my brain:
The purpose of an apology is to help the offended party, not to absolve the offender. Forgiveness may come but it can’t be the reason for the apology.
yes, this. (i use “we” very rarely, feeling more comfortable talking about myself because that feels least prescriptive.) but it’s unvoidable that we hurt others. it’s a given; communication being as haphazard as it is, and humans being so different from each other in the way they feel and act.
if you step on somebody’s foot on a crowded street, i don’t think it would occur to anyone to react defensively and to protest that they didn’t mean it. we assume that. instead decent people simply apologize (and hopefully analyze whether there _was_ anything they could have done differently; maybe not hurried so much). even if there was nothing to be done, an apology is a good thing because it acknowledges the other person as a human being with whom we share space.
that’s what should happen anytime when we’ve hurt somebody else’s feelings inadvertantly.
I was going to write about this very topic today, but you covered /exactly/ what I was going to say and no doubt more eloquently than I would have.
Now, for me, your posting of this is an odd temporal astonishment.
The Gospel lectionary text for tomorrow is Mark 8: 31-38. I had been thinking of working on the giving your life and receiving it, and I still want to, But on rereading this morning, I thought it would burke the Scripture if I didn’t address shame.
Could I possible use the first five paragraphs of this post, incorporating three quoted paragraphs of the earlier post, as our Words of Wisdom?
Absolutely!
Like they say, if you’ve never stepped on anyone’s feet, you’ve never been for a walk.
Which is why it’s so important to be able to deal with your own mistakes afterwards.
Thanks for this.
I think there’s another element to it, which is in some ways simply one of culture shock. If one faces other people with different experience and specifically a different experience of one’s society, it creates culture shock. What is OK in one culture is not OK in another; this is well known. So one can shame oneself or at least feel shamed without knowing what on earth one did. It may take years to be able to understand it, or one may never understand it.
The first trouble when it comes to race, as opposed to being physically in a different country, is that it’s not supposed to be admitted that one is in a different country than the one you grew up in when talking to a person of another race, so the possibility of experiencing culture shock is at best unmentionable, at worst inaccessible to consciousness. Which makes it all the more destabilizing when you think “I JUST DON’T KNOW what I did wrong” or “I JUST DON’T KNOW how I could have done that.” If it’s bad between intimates (and anyone in a long-term relationship has experienced it), how much more cognitive dissonance is created when it happens with somebody whom one doesn’t know, has every intention of being polite to, and has hurt very personally? It can’t be objectified, either, by saying “I’m in another country, and they make the rules” at least not very easily. The whole history of American antiracism has not been in that direction–it has been toward the idea of this country all the same country.
The second huge stumbling block is implicit in the last sentence. That is, we as white people don’t like to think of the history we have with people of color as being one of power relationships. At least not now. We’d like to think that is all in the past, and that what is being required of us now is simply social graces, and in one sense it is more often now on that level; what we fail over, predictably, is the expectation–a just one–that the social graces be taken at least as seriously as any commitment in the past to vote or march against overtly top-down relationships. Because for one thing, the top-down relationships still exist in the visible history of much of the world, they still exist in society, and they have shaped the social interactions now taking place face to face; for another, refusal to do what the social interactions take–as another person is calling the shots–brings us back to the power relationships. 500 years of top-down relationships can’t be wished away just like that. In other parts of the world where one people does not own a continent, that is clearer. Nobody expects the French and the Germans to be totally easy with each other, or the Jews and the Arabs. To expect that things be different between white Americans and POC is to deny POC the dignity of naming a power relationship and rising to look it in the eye as adult men and women.
But it’s very, very easy to know all this and out of inexperience, and preconceptions that are not our personal fault, not know why we can know all this and still be doing it. There’s a defensiveness of knowing what one did wrong and being ashamed and a defensiveness of having absolutely no idea. And, to be devil’s advocate for a moment, there is such a thing as being falsely accused, too, and as women it’s been important for us to overcome false guilt; there’s also such a thing as variation in perceptions between POC, so what was OK with one person may not have been OK with another. So it’s not at all surprising that for many white people the response to being accused of racism is “HUH?”
The obligation as I see it is to let that reaction go, not deny it to oneself, and try to be faithful to the facts as one sees them, but not to forget about the situation and allow any thoughts of “Maybe I was wrong” that may come up. And of course apologize for hurting anyone, because that is the kind and adult thing to do and one would probably do it if identity were not at stake. (It can be done even if one disagrees.)
Oh, absolutely. I’m all in favor of being aware that there are no absolutes. Knowing how to recover from errors is a much more resilient strategy.
Yes, that makes sense. And therefore the apology needs to stand whatever the reaction of the other person.
Thank you.
Of course. I am honored. Blanket permission, any time you want to quote me.
an apology is a good thing because it acknowledges the other person as a human being with whom we share space.
Yes. This.
Yes. It’s a good one.
I just want to thank you for this post so much.
I was so overloaded with shame and guilt and failure over things I didn’t have any responsibility for that there was no room for me to admit my errors in the things I could have done something about. Paradoxically, I also ended up wallowing in shame and doing things that would keep me trapped in it, because I knew I deserved it.
Wow. Yeah. That sounds like a familiar tangle, easy to fall into and hard to escape. I suspect that a great many sensitive liberals are kinda stuck there.
Having just read the Race Agency post, I am now experiencing icon envy. May I appropriate your icon?
Yes — please give credit to the icon-maker and the wordsmith: slogan by, icon by .
Thanks! I’ve listed credit next to the icon in my userpics page, I hope that’s the correct/desired way to do it.