317. An Unaskable: "How can whites speak to blacks about deficiencies in the black community?"

"How, at this time, can the need to speak accurately be reconciled with the need to speak lovingly?"  I put the question  that easy, general way because, like every other American white I know, I find the particular question, the useful question, the one with the payoff, so hard to come out with: "How can whites speak to blacks about deficiencies in the black community?"

"Well, how can anyone speak to anybody about their deficiencies?  It's a universal human problem."  Except this one's a killer. 

If you hear an outcry at that word "deficiencies" you'll know what I mean.  And if you follow the news, as of Ferguson and all the white police brutalities, and sense the black need for reassurance and comfort, you may well cry, "What a terrible time to bring this up!"  Still, since I can't believe there's no payoff for the particular in an answer to the general, and since I believe that accuracy is helpful, I will stick with it for a while.

 I think the problem of being both accurate and loving is often disguised, and never more so than by those who call speech sensitive to an ethnic group's feelings "political correctness."  By plucking "correct" from etiquette books they make the issue one of "propriety," trivialize the sensitivity, and in the process muddle the essential opposition between correctness (as accuracy) and love.

I use the capsule "love" not just because it is so forceful in Christian ethics, but because it is such a strong force in discussions of minority feelings, and has a history of force in the humanitarian movements following the Enlightenment.  By now it, recognized or not, is what enlightened atheists feel.

Also, in "force of love" I include "force of being expected to love."  Force direct and indirect, and both kinds are felt in Christian communities.  The second comes from knowing you have Christian listeners.  None is so stone-hearted that he won't feel that, the possibly more powerful force.

I have often thought that we learn in family life more than we realize about nationally and philosophically vexed questions.  Your dear brother talks too much.  Out in the world you see that it's hurting his future in a major way.  You're his brother, nobody is telling him, and you've got to speak.  But so much time has passed that it's really going to hurt him.  "All this time I was boring my friends and loved ones and didn't realize it!"  Do I need to know anything more about the vexation in the question, "How can I speak both accurately and lovingly?"

We need to speak accurately so that we can live in the world fruitfully and safely.  Solve the problems it gives us.  We need to speak lovingly because, well, that's the way we are, or even if we aren't, that's the way we're expected to be.

All right, say we believe that everybody in the U.S could live more fruitfully and safely if blacks were better educated, and we see a deficiency in black culture — not enough encouragement in the family, say, or not enough father-presence — and we want to discuss what we and several scholars reporting at academic conferences see.  Just as we might want to do with respect to Appalachian culture.  But that is so, so difficult in America now — at a forum, on a panel, in a letter column, at a dinner table, anyplace where "serious" people exchange ideas.  (Right-wing ranters aren't "serious.")

It's difficult because your calling the problem a "black" one is "prejudicial categorizing," even though responsible surveys divide performance in schools that way — white, black, Latino  You know what has to be addressed, the categorizing has already been done, the slice is on your plate, and you cannot, without fear of rebuke, carry it into the room for public consumption.

It's difficult because your word "deficient" triples your chances of rebuke, even though in your use it is not in the least a categorical slur (as it sometimes is) but a conditional designator.  If the end is to land whales then a culture that fails to prepare the young for hardship in a whale boat is "deficient" (see Post 305).

I'm suggesting that what impedes use of such words is Christian love, in our hearts or in our listeners.  A Christian will say, "My God, this is my brother, one I am supposed to love.  And I am going to wound him!  I, whose kind have already wounded him nearly unto death."  That, or something like it, is what will hold his hand, or the hand of anyone into whom popular Christian ethics has seeped.

If not that then the fear of Christian listeners.  The voice that rebukes: "You're not supposed to cause pain.  You're supposed to show love.  We expect to see it."

Christian listeners.  Where are they?  I see them at every point around the present table of educated discussion, once we recognize that Christian seepage.  Enlightened Western discussion.  In this country I think that now takes in the whole commentariat to the left of the ranting right.  Those, every agnostic and atheist included, are the listeners I felt the pressure coming from when I couldn't bring myself to identify the barbaric rappers (Post 311) as black.  I felt them when I thought of giving Atticus Finch's statement that blacks of the fifties were "still in their childhood as a people" (Post 306) a possible basis.

Wherever they are, and whatever their motives, these listeners speak for love, and anybody who wants to speak for truth (or, if that's too grand, "speak accurately") is going to sense their force on today's audiences.  If it wins, if it pulls them away, then our grandest poet was right:

Odor of blood when Christ was slain,

Made all Platonic tolerance vain,

And vain all Doric discipline.

If it loses then cool, rigorous philosophy wins, and gives us a solution to our problem which, so hateful in the solving, is useless in the world.  Or worse.  A divider of a house that must stand.

There are risks in a win either way but right now it appears to me that Christian love is the greater threat.  It's got such a large proportion of our intelligentsia behind it that rational analysis can hardly find its voice.  Not a voice that will be trusted, anyway.