The Miami riots last summer, the recent rallies of the Ku Klux Klan, the murders in Atlanta, my work at Grady Hospital in that city, and a recent visit to my childhood physician's office, which continues to be segregated, have brought me face to face with rage in general and with the depth of my own personal rage. While I realize that some of my rage comes from the world not being the way I would like, a great deal of it comes from having to live as a black American.
There are many times when I wonder if we black people would not have been better off if we had stayed in Africa, and perhaps we would have, if we had had a choice. In our history and process of transition, we have lost a large part of our souls.
I am simply not clear about the gain for a people who live in a land which promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but forgets to mention that the price for these inalienable rights is loss of our souls. Much of the rage that fills the psyches of black Americans comes from the wounds of unkept promises. While a great part of this rage is expressed as justified anger at having no decent places to live, no real jobs, poor educational opportunities, inadequate medical care, and unfair laws, I believe the rage is far deeper than these issues alone.
When Grier and Cobbs wrote their bestselling book Black Rage in the 1960s, all of us sat up and took notice because the smell of the smoke and flames in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and other cities was still in our nostrils. But as the fumes evaporated so did our concern. Our desperate need to go on with business as usual pushed us to do just that. It was as if we had discovered a giant, oozing sore and were worried that it might be cancerous. Therefore we put a Band-Aid on it and refused to see a doctor. Unfortunately, Band-Aids have no power to cure and often provide no assistance at all.
It is easy to see just how malignant the sore is each weekend in hundreds of cities as black-on-black homicide continues to rise and we view the prison statistics and compare the ratio of blacks to whites who live behind bars. Another indicator of the cancer is the rise of fatal diseases among blacks, the psychological rape and homicide of massive numbers of black children in ghettos all across the land, and the spiritual deprivation which is so evident by simply walking through the areas where black people who have been labeled undesirable live.
All of us are responsible, blacks and whites alike. We who are black have tried to tell you who are white that we would like to be reconciled. But after you turned your backs, we called you deceitful honkies, the man, Charlie, or any other derogatory name we could imagine. The reason is simple: We hate you. Yes, we do. We hate you because we have not begun to forgive you or your ancestors for their enslavement of our ancestors; nor have we forgiven you for today's oppression of us, which comes primarily from the system that you protect and rule.
The issue of black rage was raised in a profound way for me during the time of my clinical internship in social work at Grady Hospital. I chose to work on a cancer ward in order to deal with the issue of death and dying. As usual, many other issues besides the one which led me to Grady surfaced, and I came to understand something about the need to acknowledge rage. I came to see the necessity of matching internal and external reality.
As long as we talk about reconciliation without acknowledging our very real and legitimate rage, we are trying to have a manipulated reconciliation which is a great deal like Bonhoeffer's cheap grace. Most of the time a black person would not consider sharing with a white person what she is really thinking because no trust exists between them, and there is so much rage. Only the reality of trust in a relationship and its ability to bear up under the truth will allow rage to be shared.
There are precious few places anywhere in the world where this can happen, and there are even fewer places where a black person would dare share his or her true feelings. This fact saddens me, but it angers me, too, because as long as we try to live in this atmosphere of unacknowledged feelings, we create an environment that allows us to be possessed by those feelings. These negative feelings make up part of our personal darkness and become our subconscious shadows. Since all of us have a shadow, it is quite easy to project on to others those qualities which we have refused to face. Blacks and whites make excellent companions on whom to project their shadows.
Our only hope is for blacks to start owning our personal darkness. Our wounds are not totally the fault of whites. We are persons, and we must accept responsibility for the lives which have been given to us. We have to struggle for wholeness just like our foreparents. We must choose between life, which involves struggle, or death.
Many of us have chosen to die both physically and psychologically. But the choice between life and death is before each individual black person, and nobody will make it for us. The Savior has already come, and no other savior will be coming. The Savior who has come wants to live in us and through us, and his life in us can make a difference.
Yes, we need jobs, good medical care, houses, schools, and better laws; but the deprivation of the soul is not going to be met by any of these things, as necessary as they are. As we move toward allowing our external places to become expressions of our internal places, and make for ourselves the connections between our heads and hearts, we set in motion the forces that can heal our souls and create an atmosphere where community might emerge.
White people as well as black people have a responsibility to be honest about their rage. White people have plenty of rage which demands acknowledgment, as well as guilt about the heritage of slavery. It is not enough to say that you didn't have anything to do with slavery and that you don't feel guilty about it. Perhaps you don't have a sense of guilt, but blacks and whites share a collective history, and just as blacks have to deal with slavery, so do whites.
As a white person you are a partner in the oppression which your foreparents created. The denial of this partnership has created a lot of pseudo-relating between whites and blacks. This type of pseudo-relating comes across as patronizing liberalism, and the world is not in need of more patronizing liberals. The denial of the feelings around this whole issue on the part of whites simply adds fuel to the fires of mistrust and deepens the wounds of both races.
Yes, there is rage in you and in me, too. It's OK. It's real. God loves us in spite of it. It doesn't matter how we feel. The good news is that as we own our rage it can become a thing which we can control instead of letting it control us. As we move into our journeys toward wholeness and allow the light of Calvary to shine upon us, that rage can be transformed into energy which heals instead of destroys.
That energy can create the atmosphere for reconciliation if we will become serious about it. At the present time there is very little real reconciliation between the races in this country. There is instead a fragile co-existence that can be tilted very easily.
Even the rhetoric of the religious community about reconciliation is simply that--rhetoric. Most churches are still segregated. Few relationships between blacks and whites exist which are based on equal respect and mutual trust. Even the blacks and whites who talk about reconciliation at the national level still cringe when they consider the prospect of intimate inter-racial relationships developing in their own families. Those old wounds of power and sex have not been healed even in the Lord's church.
Recently a white woman from one of the churches in my area called a black church to find a person who might like a job as a janitor. Several months ago I was invited to speak at a dinner in a very wealthy church; the meal was served by blacks who later did the clean-up. There were no blacks in the audience when I gave my speech. A lot of talk about racial reconciliation goes on in this church, but blacks are present there only in the role of servants.
Quite frankly, I don't believe that the United States is ready for racial reconciliation. Our deep desire to avoid hard tasks and the pain which goes with them leads me to this conclusion.
Only out of the biblical mandate for reconciliation between God and human beings can racial reconciliation grow. All of us must confront our places of darkness and light so that we can become convinced of how short we have fallen in this regard.
As I walk the halls of Grady Hospital and look into the eyes of my people, feeling their rage, seeing their slumped shoulders, and listening to their swallowed words, I am not very hopeful about reconciliation between the races. I am equally hopeless when I am invited to middle-class black and white churches and realize how much we have invested in not rocking the boat.
My only hope comes from finding the courage to look to Calvary and to trust that somewhere else others will look there and will find it impossible to say no to him just as I find it impossible to say no. Somehow in the "Yes, I will follow you, Lord," is hope for all of us that race might be put into perspective and that we might get on with the journey toward wholeness.
Catherine Meeks was dean of students at Mercer College in Macon, Georgia when this article appeared.
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