Laura Ferris
Compassion, Hate Crimes, and Shame
Last night at my fellowship, FoCUS, a friend of mine led us in a time of communal prayer about the hate crimes perpetrated against the African-American community at UC San Diego and the LGBTQ community at UC Davis.
She began, deeply distressed, by praying, “God we know you are not a racist God, or a sexist God, but a God of compassion, and I feel so sad that this could have happened in such a liberal place - ”
She almost started to cry, and I felt a grave heaviness begin to fall upon our fellowship and surface in my own heart. It was a very painful feeling, one I had little trouble identifying: shame. Shame that this had happened in California, at the University of California, that it had been perpetrated by students of my age and my ethnicity, and I felt bad. Or I thought that I should feel bad, and in fact felt confused, angry, and bad that I couldn’t feel bad. That I could not attune my internal emotional state to the group emotion of shame that I perceived settling upon us.
I was very upset about this after church ended, and told a friend about how I had resented and resisted the feeling of shame, and he said that it’s good sometimes “to feel compassion for suffering people distant from us.” I felt bad that I could not accept this answer or justification for what, emotionally, I had seen happen to me at the end of FoCUS.
It was only this afternoon that I figured out why I had felt so resistant to feeling shame along with my friends. Why I had felt resistant to feeling “compassion” for those “suffering at a distance.”
Compassion does not mean experiencing “nice feelings” towards other people, and it does not mean taking on the feelings of other people as though they were our own. True compassion is an exercise of critical empathy: we imagine what another person might be feeling based on the objective use of intuition and reasoning - based on things such as their words, tone of voice, the facts and circumstances of their life - and the subjective experience of our own life, remembering how we may have felt in the same circumstance or in some analogous circumstance, which is why it is more difficult to empathize with someone from a very different background and with different life experiences. And from that understanding, deeply felt and/or very conscientiously constructed, we feel compelled to act in such a way that we actively relieve another person’s suffering, protect them from harm, or add to their joy, never forgetting the true, healthy boundaries that exist between people, which must be respected.
So if I were to imagine how I would feel if I and my community were a victim of a hate crime that so viscerally resonates with a history of discrimination and homicidal violence in the country where I and my ancestors have lived, loved, bled, and worked, I would feel afraid, humiliated, furious, and I would demand justice. I would want my community and the wider community to repudiate and punish the people who had committed the hate crime. I base this not only on my own intuition and conversations and studying I’ve done in my life about hate crimes or abuse, but also on the silent “Blackout” that members of our African-American community at Cal engaged in on Monday, gagging themselves with black cloth and blocking Sather Gate in solidarity against the actions of the white UC San Diego students, and on a spoken-word performance by a student-teacher-poet of African-American descent from Poetry for the People of a poem she wrote about the inclusion of the word “Negro” on the 2010 Census, which I also heard on Monday. The last thing I would feel is saddened contrition, the urge to anxiously examine my conscience, or shame.
But there is a group of people, suffering at a distance, who would or should feel shame. Our group exercise in empathy and identification was with the victimizers.
This does not surprise me. After all, FoCUS is a predominantly white and straight fellowship. If my observation last night was accurate, there wasn’t a single African-American student in the First Pres sanctuary that night. (Although there are, of about 100 members of our fellowship, perhaps 2 or 3 African-American or African students.) And during the four years I’ve been a member at FoCUS, I have not seen a single member of our community publicly acknowledge having anything other than a heterosexual orientation. I felt communal shame was warranted when my friend, very sincerely, prayed, “God, we know you are not a racist God or a sexist God” - in a gathering of believers that reflects the reality of racial segregation and homophobia that still exists in our Christian community at Cal as a whole.
To accept the shame of the victimizers onto our shoulders would be a betrayal of our responsibility to the victims of these hate crimes. If we spend our best prayers, feelings, and energy trying to understand the minds, hearts, and motivations of the perpetrators of these crimes, then we are perpetuating the historic privilege, attention, and precedence given to the experience of oppressors instead of to the experience of the oppressed. We do not serve the victims of these hate crimes when we accept the shame that rightly belongs to the perpetrators, which echoes, in some way, our own personal and cultural experiences and transgressions. We do so when we stand beside the wronged groups and individuals, no matter how uncomfortable and unfamiliar that may be at times, and make a statement to the perpetrators of these actions: “Shame on you. We reject you and your actions. Make amends and ask forgiveness.” When we call upon, not our Lord the God of mercy, but our Lord the God of justice.
And this is not to say that the students who committed this shameful act - both the party itself and the escalation to the noose hanging in the library, or the discriminatory defacement of UC Davis property - are not, in fact, suffering truly as well, and that there is ever value in demonizing another group of people, or punishing someone in disproportion to their crime. Clearly such an act of hatred and violence comes from deep brokenness. And if their sin causes us to reflect upon broken places and sin in our own personal lives and those of our Christian community here at Cal and to seek remedy and forgiveness for our offenses, then all the better.
But our empathy and sympathy belongs with the victims of hate crimes first: and always first.
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March 5th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Indeed. You provide some thoughtful reflections on our response to the hate crimes at other UC campuses. As a white male, I have also observed the tendency of some white people to feel shame at such events. You are correct in pointing out that this is an inappropriate reaction. Of course, white people may be guilty for our inaction to correct systemic racism. (Though we are no more guilty, I would argue, than those brothers and sisters of color who are equally inactive.) Yet the thought that our own repentant grovelling is somehow productive is error because it makes us feel as if we are doing something — when we are in fact doing nothing — thus salving our conscience and distracting us from actions that might actually be beneficial. It also does not properly connect the shame to the action or inaction.
If we are guilty of inaction, we should strive to address this issue, which does not entail spending inordinate amounts of time in sackcloth and ashes. True repentance would be manifested in changed behavior, which would mean an end to our inaction. Likewise, I think true compassion requires that our “nice feelings” be translated into helpful actions.
While we can devote much rhetoric to calling for “action,” the truth is that most of us will not spend multiple hours each week seeking to root out endemic racism. And I think that this is okay. After all, there are many injustices in the world that call for action, and we cannot devote our lives to every worthy cause. What, then, can we do? Should we do?
First, I think we must educate ourselves. This may mean reading a few articles and books, having conversations, attending lectures or rallies, trying to empathize with the sufferers and understand the issues.
Second, we must apply this knowledge to opportunities that come across our paths. Having learned more about racism, in all its forms, we will be better able to spot it when we see it, and to speak out against it in our conversations. This may entail educating others, it may even mean correcting and rebuking others. It will entail thoughtful political participation. On some occasions, it may even involve radical or uncomfortable personal action. When we have the opportunity to act in constructive ways, we must not stand on the sidelines.
Of course, if others have ideas about more constructive ways we can respond, I would very much like to hear them…