A confession

How tightly do you hold to your political and social values? To what length would you go to defend them? It's easy enough to preach to the converted, easier still to write passionate speeches in your own head. Easy, of course, to lob rhetorical grenades anonymously from behind the digital wall of a blog. But when confronted by a person whose values you abhor, when faced with the (duty? opportunity?) to venture into the teeth of an argument you disagree with, what are you willing to risk? Defeat? Discomfort? Physical injury?

Any progress we've made as a society has been a result of people willing to risk everything. And yet so many of us, even those who profess to believe very strongly in certain principles, can shrink in the face of a challenge. 

With much regret, I have to report one of my own such failures. While in Mississippi, I was welcomed with textbook Southern hospitality by a family that allowed me and my travel-mates to spend significant time in their home. This time was almost uniformly pleasant, but there were a couple of instances of profound ugliness. Specifically, the casual use of the word "nigger."

Even the well-traveled and well-educated among our hosts dropped the n-bomb a few times. Most shockingly, they didn't feel it was racist to do so. They explained in patient, vaguely condescending voices that they had no problem with black people, but disliked "niggers" - a distinct sub-group, they said, that was chronically unemployed, sexually irresponsible and violent. The word was okay to use, they said, because it's meant as a descriptor equivalent to "white trash" and because black people used that word all the time to refer to each other.

The ridiculousness of these arguments is evident on their face. It's no more defensible to hate poor people than it is to hate members of a particular race. And the use, by black people, of a word that exemplifies the sickest kind of racism, does not excuse its use by members of the race that perpetrated (and perpetrates) this racism.

An ignorant argument, easily defeated. And yet I didn't defeat it. When the n-bombs dropped, I sat there in stunned silence. 

Maybe it was the surprise factor, maybe it was the fact that these were people that had opened their home to me and I didn't want to offend them. But it doesn't matter. When I was confronted with a (duty? opportunity?) to stand up for cherished values, I choked. I wasn't even able to risk an escalation of the discomfort I was already feeling. It was an utterly shameful non-performance.

It is often said that the worst prejudices are allowed to survive and flourish not so much because of the people who speak the horrible words and do the horrible deeds, but because of the people who fail to speak and act against them. I would like to think of myself as a principled person and a positive actor in the world. Down South, I discovered an uncomfortable distance between this self-image and my ability to live up to it.

I have to do better.