Recently, I was pointed to a fascinating article in the New Yorker and, believe it or not, it got me thinking. And even now, I'm still exploring those thoughts which I thought I'd share, at least in part, because I keep seeing things that I'm thinking about popping up as issues in other contexts that keep firing that thinking even more.
One of the key themes in the article, approached aesthetically and from the art side of life (a blog on its own, so let me leave it at that for now), was race, which is, in fact, the very first word in the title. And it was here that I had to stop and ask myself, what can this be about, since we know, biologically, scientifically, with all the power and authority of the scientific community, that race simply doesn't exist. The only proper use of the term is in the phrase "human race", everything else is simply a distortion of reality. But here was this insightful and thought-provoking article nevertheless. It was also about art, and among all the other questions it raised (which is, in my not-so-humble-opinion is what good articles should do much more than shower one with mere information), was is there such a thing as "Black Art", which obviously there is, but what is it if it isn't racial? In other words, how was I to understand what the author was trying to say? And here are my first thoughts:
As I noted who knows how many times in my posts so far, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not, the way people think (and I'm using the term very loosely here) hasn't always been the way people think. My friends Jean Gebser, in his Ever-present Origin, and William Irwin Thompson, in his The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light or Coming into Being, have made this case much more convincingly and poignantly than I have, but it boils down to this:
Each of us gets thrown (to use a Heideggerian term) into this world at some place at some time through no fault (or influence of our own). Thereafter, everything that happens to us, everything we do, how and what we learn, what we like or dislike, is experience. It turns out the Germans have two different words that we, in English, describe with just this one. namely Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The Gebser translators Barstad/Mikunas dealt with this issue by translating the former as "vital experience" and the latter as "lived (or undergone) experience". For example, "That roller coaster ride was quite the experience" (Erlebnis) in contrast with "Spending two years abroad was quite the experience" (Erfahrung). The differences in meaning are subtle, to be sure, but relevant. We intuit that the former is somehow "deeper" or not as readily accessible to our waking consciousness, which becomes clear the moment someone asks us to explain each of these in more detail. With the roller coaster we often end up saying something like "Ahh, you had to have been there, what a ride!" Yet in the latter case, we find ourselves telling anecdote, or stories, about things that happened while abroad. Someone who's never ridden a roller coaster may have trouble with the first kind of experience; those who have will relate it to their own, and in the latter case, depending upon the skill of the teller, the stories may make more lasting or fleeting impressions upon us.
Now, for as mundane as this may sound, I do think, in light of what Gebser, and Thompson, and others, are saying, we can start to understand how different realities may arise within the one overall framework we have called everyday life. In the course of human history, these modes of perception and mentation have been practiced, ingrained and passed on to succeeding generations. This might be the love or fear of roller coasters, or it might be the openness or closedness to other ways of slicing the reality pie. Once, these were shared among all humans, but over time, the group grew, split, wandered off, and became isolated from the others, but the underlying process remained the same. Over the millennia, the primary vital experiences were (most likely unconsciously) collected and collated into what came to be regarded as ethnic and later cultural constructs. Hence, we can see that while at the deepest levels of our psyches there are things (Jung would call them archetypes) that we share, but at less deep levels, shared experiences are more particular to a given group of indivduals who are in this way still very much connected to one another.
Anyone familiar with even the general run of history knows that particular groups of human beings, at any given time, have held any number of ideas, many of which seem odd, or even ignorant, to us today: a flat earth, a geocentric universe, the superiority of one's own group compared to all others, and for a whole slough of crazy reasons, "race". It was easy enough, especially at the superficial level at which most humans most often operate to simply split off "others" based on physical characteristics, such as skin color and hair texture, or more abstract, sometimes arbitrary, notions such as technological progress, "advancement", or culture (whatever it might have been defined as). These "seemed" to work, but as is so often the case when humans are involved, there were lots of negative side effects: oppression, exploitation, colonization, genocide, and more, all based on notions that in the meantime have turned out to be false. In other words, experience comes from within and is definitely imposed from without. Knowing this, we should simply flip over a mental switch or two and we move forward with our new knowledge. But we all know it's not as simple as that.
As a result of all our own individual and collective experiences that we have made using these false notions, we find it difficult to get out of the corner into which we painted ourselves. Once silly statements by not-so-bright demogogues (like Trump) now appear downright ludicrous and maliciously ignorant. Prejudices of all types reveal themselves clearly for what they are: unfounded judgements based on false knowledge. And this brings us back to our starting point:
As I said earlier, each of us suddenly shows up in this world at some place at some time through no fault (or influence of our own). Thereafter, everything that happens to us, everything we do, how and what we learn, what we like or dislike, is experience. But, this experience is both individual and collective as we have seen, and it is highly determined by the surroundings in which it takes place, whole history of experience that has been passed down through the group over the years and every experience that has been imposed upon any group that sees itself cohering for whatever reason. What is more, the "group" may change as well. Our forebears knew no countries (that is, nation-states), but for some reason we place a lot of value on them today. We have DNA strains in our bodies that come from the widest of sources and these combinations are -- how could it be otherwise -- different from our next-door neighbors' and most of us have no idea what they do or might mean. In other words, within a given general cultural grouping there are myriad subgroupings that mix, match, overlap, reciprocally influence, and differentiate themselves from one another. Each of these is legitimate in and of itself and how viable it is for how long is determined by the coherency and consistency of the experiences in which it is rooted.
It is easy to consider the world at a very superficial level ... for example, a country, like the United States ... and think that everyone there shares every national and cultural value in common, but this would be an obvious mistake, for it ignores everything that makes any one of us who he or she is. Within the United States (and we could take any country or region anywhere in the world and show the same processes at work), there are subgroups, ethnicities, subcultures that are very determining and stable entities which we can understand even without such faulty notions such as race. But for the longest time, race was a big card and it wss played hard there: Blacks in the USA were practically the last historically to be freed from slavery; the Emancipation Proclamation was fought politically and socially; Jim Crow ruled the roost for over a century; in my own childhood, separate facilities for "Colored" were commonplace; Brown v. the Board of Education caused more problems than it solved; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was even recently gutted; so it is apparent that for whatever reasons, at least those considered black had anything but equal rights, equal treatment in the eyes of the law and certainly not in neighborhoods with which I was familiar. Unfortunately, we all know that the those mental switches haven't been flipped and some may even be rusted in place. So even if we now know there's no such thing as race, it doesn't undo the lived and undergone experience of a significant portion of a familiar population. Saying there's not a problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem, it only means you are not willing to admit there may still be a problem after all.
Getting passed race, for example -- if what I'm thinking is on track -- means taking the vital and lived experience of others into consideration when dealing with them. We all share some things in common (deepest-level human experience), what we don't share in common (so-called "black" experience as compared to, let us say "red" or "yellow" or "white" experience) is common by nature: They're experiences and we can know that experience is what forms and determines who we are, hence we have a personally accessible way of understanding that a person has both vital and lived experiences and a whole history of experiences related to whichever groupings s/he may belong to. The process is the same even if the end-results are different. In other words, if you haven't already, there are ways and legitimately sustainable ways to better understand what others might be going through.
Any serious readerr will tell you how enriching even vicarious experiences are, and we now have an experience model that can enhance the one they were using all along. It's up to you, in the end. And I'm going to be more than interested in hearing what true racists are going to be saying once they find out there card has been trumped. (And you can decide if that pun was intended or not).
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