An Exercise in Listening
Monday, July 11, 2016
Jeff Lampl
“Whoever restrains his
words has knowledge,
and he who has a cool spirit is a man
of understanding.
Even a fool who keeps silent is
considered wise;
when he closes his lips, he is deemed
intelligent”
Proverbs 17:27-28
(ESV)
“My dear brothers and sisters, always be
willing to listen and slow to speak.
Do not become angry easily,”
James
1:19 (NCV)
Please take the time to read
the following article from the New York Times.
Seek simply to understand. Seek
to hear what is being said behind the words.
Seek to hear the heart cry which resulted in what you read. Do your best to put yourself into the writer’s
shoes. Suppress your desire to insert
“but” or “what about”. Refuse to argue
with the author. Just listen. Seek to transcend “this is right, this is
wrong” thinking, rather just read slowly and listen slowly. Listen until you hear. Once you have achieved
even a snippet of hearing his heart,
then you have come far. Remember this;
The Truth is always Bigger than Your Own Point of View.
Read the Article
We,
black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of more
than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that you,
white America, will always struggle to understand us.
Like
you, we don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die
the same.
But
there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at a
peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they
will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our
death on a homemade video recording. This is a difficult point to make as a
racial crisis flares around us.
We
close a week of violence that witnessed the tragic deaths of two black men —
Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile — at the hands of the police with a
terrible attack in Dallas against police officers, whose names we’re just
beginning to learn. It feels as though it has been death leading to more death,
nothing anyone would ever hope for.
A
nonviolent protest was hijacked by violence and so, too, was the debate about
the legitimate grievances that black Americans face. The acts of the gunman in
Dallas must be condemned. However, he has nothing to do with the difficult
truths we must address if we are to make real racial progress, and the
reckoning includes being honest about how black grievance has been ignored,
dismissed or discounted.
In the
wake of these deaths and the protests surrounding them, you, white America, say
that black folks kill each other every day without a mumbling word while we
thunderously protest a few cops, usually but not always white, who shoot to
death black people who you deem to be mostly “thugs.”
That
such an accusation is nonsense is nearly beside the point. Black people
protest, to one another, to a world that largely refuses to listen, that what
goes on in black communities across this nation is horrid, as it would be in
any neighborhood depleted of dollars and hope — emptied of good schools, and
deprived of social and economic buffers against brutality. People usually
murder where they nest; they aim their rage at easy targets.
It is
not best understood as black-on-black crime; rather, it is neighbor-to-neighbor
carnage. If their neighbors were white, they’d get no exemption from the crime
that plagues human beings who happen to be black. If you want interracial
killing, you have to have interracial communities.
We all
can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the whole
story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear that
story.
At
birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance,
never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are
status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is
for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the encounter is
over.
Those
binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories,
about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who
can’t be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t
make it into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed
down, informally, from one white mind to the next.
The
problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you
know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we
sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much. You think
we have been handed everything because we have fought your selfish insistence
that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty,
all its grace — should be yours first, and foremost, and if there’s anything
left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave
gratefully.
So you
demand the Supreme Court give you back what was taken from you: more space in
college classrooms that you dominate; better access to jobs in fire departments
and police forces that you control. All the while your resentment builds, and
your slow hate gathers steam. Your whiteness has become a burden too heavy for
you to carry, so you outsource it to a vile political figure who amplifies your
most detestable private thoughts.
Whiteness
is blindness. It is the wish not to see what it will not know.
If you
do not know us, you also refuse to hear us because you do not believe what we
say. You have decided that enough is enough. If the cops must kill us for no
good reason, then so be it because most of us are guilty anyway. If the black
person that they kill turns out to be innocent, it is an acceptable death, a
sacrificial one.
Terror
was visited on Dallas Thursday night. Unspeakable terror. We are not strangers
to terror. You make us afraid to walk the streets, for at any moment, a
blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to snatch our lives from us
and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or
breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too abrasively for your taste.
Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as
you say, or not doing as you say fast enough.
You
hold an entire population of Muslims accountable for the evil acts of a few.
Yet you rarely muster the courage to put down your binoculars, and with them,
your corrosive self-pity, and see what we see. You say religions and cultures
breed violence stoked by the complicity of silence because peoples will not
denounce the villains who act in their names.
Yet you
do the same. In the aftermath of these deaths, you do not all condemn these
cops; to do so, you would have to condemn the culture that produced them — the
same culture that produced you. Condemning a culture is not inciting hate. That
is very important. Yet black people will continue to die at the hands of cops
as long as we deny that whiteness can be more important in explaining those
cops’ behavior than anything else.
You
cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I write
is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug insistence that you are
different — not like that ocean of unenlightened whites — satisfy us any
longer. It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has
spared your reputations and not our lives.
You do
not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with ourselves,
because we don’t know how to make you stop, or how to make you care enough to
stop those who pull the triggers. We do not know what to do now that sadness is
compounded by more sadness.
The
nation as a whole feels powerless now. A peaceful protest turned into the scene
of a sniper attack. Day in and day out, we feel powerless to make our black
lives matter. We feel powerless to make you believe that our black lives should
matter. We feel powerless to keep you from killing black people in front of
their loved ones. We feel powerless to keep you from shooting hate inside our
muscles with well-choreographed white rage.
But we
have rage, too. Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when the
tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our bodies with high
blood pressure, sicken our souls with depression.
We
cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot
halt you; that is our curse.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology
at Georgetown, is the author of “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the
Politics of Race in America” and a contributing opinion writer.
