LEFT: James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London / Allan Warren / CC BY-SA 3.0; RIGHT: Bayard Rustin at news briefing on the Civil Rights March on Washington / Warren K. Leffler / Public Domain
We see the world through the lens of our own experience. The miracle of human language is that we can experience the lives of other people through their stories, but our understanding of those stories is limited by our ability to imagine a life outside our own. And when those stories don’t align with our perception of the world — with what we believe to be true based only on our personal experience — we dismiss them as exaggerated or untrue. This can be the case particularly when those stories are about systems of harm and oppression.
I remember reading So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and feeling defensive about some of the points she was making about racism. “But I’m not like that!” I thought to myself. At one point I remember actually closing the book and setting it aside while I thought about what I had just read. It was uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. I was defensive because my perception didn’t match her experience, and I didn’t want to think of myself as having any racial bias.
But as I reflected on my emotional reaction, I realized that it wasn’t about me; it was about her experience as a Black woman in American society. My defensiveness was centering myself and getting in the way of hearing what she was trying to say.
I was fortunate to hear Ijeoma Oluo speak at a local event in June 2018. After her talk, I met a few people who had started a reading club inspired by her book to talk about race. The group would choose books by authors from marginalized groups and center those voices in deep and open discussions. I was invited to join, and over the next five years I learned as much about myself as I learned about others.
We read fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose. We selected authors who were Black, Latinx, Native American, gay, straight, transgender — each book and each story gave us a different perspective. We had conversations about how each author’s experience had impacted their lives, and how through better understanding, we might be able to work towards a better world. Because our reading group was so diverse, many of the members could identify directly with the authors’ experiences and offer perspectives different from my own. I will be forever grateful for what I learned from that group.
And as I learned more about the importance of listening instead of centering my own experiences, I began to see how easy it is to ignore or dismiss the experiences of others.
The voices of Black Americans have been largely excluded from the books we use to teach our children. Our history has been whitewashed and attempts to teach a more diverse and complete history have been met with attempts to ban discussions of race in the classroom. The publication of The 1619 Project, a series of essays on the history of American slavery and the contributions of Black Americans, was met with backlash, including a Florida law banning its use in public classrooms. As a society, we don’t want to face the uglier parts of our past, and we don’t want to acknowledge the systemic racism that continues to have an impact on all Americans to this day.
In 1965, a debate held at Cambridge University between progressive Black activist James Baldwin and conservative writer William F. Buckley explored the subject: “Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” (You can watch the entire debate at this link: youtu.be/5Tek9h3a5wQ)
Baldwin made the case that America indeed was built on the backs of Black Americans, but that our history books barely acknowledged it. He said:
When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and neither did I; that I was a savage about whom the less said, the better; who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And, of course, I believed it. I didn't have much choice. Those are the only books there were.
James Baldwin was a prolific writer and orator and was an important voice during the civil rights era. His words are just as relevant today as they were sixty years ago. He was also gay, and his experience as a gay Black American who advocated for change through nonviolence makes his voice essential in the work for justice and equality. He was a man who believed in an America that didn’t believe in him. But like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, he believed in the promise of America, and that by speaking his truth, America could achieve its promise.
Bayard Rustin was another essential voice for equal rights. While we celebrate Dr. King as the leader of nonviolent resistance, it was Rustin who inspired Dr. King with the teachings of Gandhi and who was behind much of Dr. King’s work. It was Rustin, not King, who organized the August 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. As an out gay man, Rustin was kept in the background out of fear that his being gay would undermine the cause. But being gay also gave him the ability to see that injustice for some is injustice for all. In a 1986 interview with Joseph Beam, Bayard Rustin said:
If we want to do away with the injustice to gays, it will not be done because we get rid of the injustice to gays. It will be done because we are forwarding the effort for the elimination of injustice to all. And we will win the rights for gays, or Blacks, or Hispanics, or women, within the context of whether we are fighting for all.
Following the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others in 2020, race in America became a hot topic of discussion. To some of my white friends who don’t believe race was a factor in those deaths, I recommended So You Want to Talk About Race as a starting point for discussion. Among the reactions to the book, some were dismissive, claiming Oluo’s stories were exaggerated or untrue because they hadn’t personally witnessed similar experiences. Centering themselves, they were unable to accept an uncomfortable truth experienced by others.
I know that in my own life, things I once thought to be true were not as they had seemed. I have learned that in my time as a senior military officer, there were people in my command who treated others differently when I wasn’t around. I have seen women treated differently by men than the way they treated me. And I have personally witnessed Black men and women treated differently than white people based solely on their race. I can only imagine how they are treated when I am not there to see it.
So, I try to listen to their stories without centering myself in the middle of their experiences.
I have a lot to learn from people like James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, and Ijeoma Oluo.
When I center myself, I limit my ability to see the world from someone else’s point of view. And when I close myself off from the experience of others, I am incapable of seeing the harm the system that protects me can inflict on those who don’t share my white male privilege.
Recommended reading:
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- Time on Two Crosses, The collected writings of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise
- How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
