Racism in hiding

Mennonite Church USA, like other Christian denominations, is committed to becoming an anti­racist church. One of the things that makes that difficult is that racism, like many systems and like the “powers” described in the New Testament, is pernicious and likes to remain hidden from our awareness. Part of becoming antiracist is keeping our awareness of racism alive.

The opposite of that awareness is denial, and such denial runs rampant in our society. We like to pretend we aren’t as racist as we may be. A recent article in The Atlantic (September) helps call us to task.

In “Fear of a Black President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the magazine, writes that as our first black president, Barack Obama has avoided mention of race almost entirely. He goes on: “In having to be ‘twice as good’ and ‘half as black,’ Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.”

The fact that Americans elected a black president is often cited as evidence that we have moved beyond race as a factor in our politics. But that notion is shown to be false.

This does not mean that opposing policies of the Obama administration signifies racism. Racism is a much subtler system.

Coates points to an irony of the United States: “For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.”

Coates shows this irony in the events around the death of Trayvon Martin last February. As soon as Obama addressed the parents and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the case moved from a kind of national mourning to what Coates calls “racialized political fodder,” and he gives numerous examples.

Historically, Coates writes, African Americans have been limited to protest and agitation in addressing the disconnect between democracy and white supremacy. Now, when Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of what happened” in the Martin case, he was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. “The power was black,” Coates writes, “and, in certain quarters, was received as such.”

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred,” Coates writes. “It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” He notes several studies that have shown the role of race in voting patterns and in opposition to and support for health-care reform. After Obama’s election, the rhetoric of fear became much more prevalent. Signs at Tea Party rallies read, “Obama plans white slavery,” and one congressman complained that Obama “favors the black person.”

The double standard of having to be twice as good “haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.” Coates points out that in the first two years as president, “Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.”

The myth of “twice as good,” writes Coates, “holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.”

Coates makes clear he does not agree with all of Obama’s views. He particularly abhors his embrace of a secretive drone policy. His point is about the pernicious presence of racism in our politics. “Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story,” he writes. “It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”

The problem goes beyond politics and affects—infects—every area of society. Love, not fear, should guide us.

Prejudice and religious ignorance

Mennonites are used to being misunderstood, both in negative and positive ways. We often hear others ask about horse and buggies or plain black clothing when they hear we are Mennonites.

On the other hand, some people laud Mennonites for being committed to peace and justice, not realizing the great diversity in our ranks on those subjects.

We all carry prejudices. We prejudge others, make assumptions about them, often out of ignorance about those people and what they may believe.

Much of our media betrays great ignorance about religion—not just Mennonites but many religious groups. And if you spend much time on the blogosphere, you encounter great ignorance as people spout views that are at times hateful, certainly prejudiced and that show ignorance about the groups they are putting down in order to advance their own views.

One of the groups most commonly misunderstood are Muslims, whose numbers are growing rapidly in the United States. And worldwide Islam is the second largest religion.

Nevertheless, it is treated as monolithic and homogenous. As religion scholar Philip Jenkins writes, “Arguably, over the span of its development, Islam worldwide is quite as diverse as Christianity.”

One of the stereotypes about Islam is that it is Arab, yet, Jenkins writes, “Of the world’s eight largest Muslim countries, only one—Egypt—is Arab in language and culture, and it would not be too far off the mark to see Islam as a religion of South and Southeast Asia.”

A recent book, Woman, Man and God in Modern Islam by Theodore Friend (Eerdmans, 2012, $35), is an excellent source for getting to know modern Islam.

Friend, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an award-winning historian, traveled across Asia and the Middle East in order to understand firsthand the life situations of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book relates hundreds of encounters and conversations with people he met along the way.

Friend writes that the reader will find “respect for Islam conjoined with faith in women and in their creative and productive potential.”

Meanwhile the media regularly report bombings by Islamicists but ignore peaceful overtures by Muslims, such as “A Commond Word” in 2007.

Ignorance of religion has enormous consequences, whether it’s a white supremacist killing Sikhs or U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an or the U.S. invasion of Iraq helping overturn half a century of women’s right to be treated as equal citizens in Iraq.

And with the recent rioting over the anti-Islam video reveals religious ignorance going many directions. 

Religious ignorance extends beyond Islam. Every day some media reinforce views of religious groups that are simplistic and fail to build understanding.

One media source that helps counter this practice is Religion News Service. For example, the weekly report dated Sept. 5 included an article on Mormons okaying Coke and Pepsi, one on Seventh-day Adventists arguing about female clergy, a Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the “Ground Zero mosque,” one on Jews in New Orleans, a Q&A with David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, and one on the trial of Amish bishop Samuel Mullet Sr., whose followers forcibly cut the beards of Amish men.

There are many sources for learning about others and their beliefs before we make judgments about them. Jesus’ warning about judging others (Matthew 7:1) is pertinent. Let's take time to understand others' religious beliefs before we make judgments about them.

A troubled genius

Last Sunday, the Wichita Eagle published my review of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max (Viking, 2012, $27.95, 356 pages). I hesitate to place it here, but I do for a couple of reasons. First, some of you may be, as I say in the first paragraph of my review, "serious readers of contemporary American fiction." Second, as I mention in the last paragraph, Wallace struggled to find "some truth behind the banalities of daily life." While Wallace was particularly religious, though he did delve into Buddhism and Catholicism, his struggle is similar to a spirituality in the present tense, i.e., seeking to live in each moment with an awareness of God's presence. Wallace, at least, strove for awareness, which is a worthy struggle. Anyway, here's the review:

Serious readers of contemporary American fiction at least know about David Foster Wallace, a wunderkind whose massive novel “Infinite Jest” had a great effect on literature. Now, just four years after his death from suicide at age 46, we have the first biography of this remarkable writer.

D.T. Max, a New Yorker writer who worked with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends, distills a large amount of research, including access to Wallace’s notes and many of his letters. Max also displays his careful reading of the writer’s published works, including his three novels, three short story collections and many nonfiction essays.

Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., then went to Amherst, where he excelled in his studies, focusing on philosophy and literature, winning many academic awards. He also struggled with depression and had to leave school at times.

During one stay at the psychiatric unit of a hospital, “the doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression.” But they ended up putting him on Nardil, which instead treats atypical depression. He would stay on this drug until a year before he died.

A recognized genius (he received a MacArthur grant), Wallace incorporated huge amounts of information and created new approaches to storytelling. His head teemed with thoughts too numerous to communicate. For an epigraph to the book, Max uses a quote from Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon”: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

We learn how much of Wallace’s own experience he used in his fiction. In a footnote, Max quotes Wallace’s sister, Amy: “We [the Wallace family] quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”

Max traces Wallace’s writing from his first book, “The Broom of the System,” written as his senior thesis at Amherst and widely acclaimed, to his last, the posthumous “The Pale King,” which he left unfinished at his death. He shows how Wallace changed through the years, growing from “Broom,” a postmodern novel heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, through his first story collection, “The Girl with Curious Hair,” which critiques such metafictionists as John Barth, to “Infinite Jest,” which marked a major change from using irony to pointing toward a more positive outcome.

Partly through his own experience of addiction, Wallace had come to see America as “a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.” However, rather than simply describe that addiction, Wallace said in an interview, the writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” Wallace noted that “American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out.”

Max, who gives much attention to Wallace’s best-known work, writes, “In ‘Infinite Jest,’ Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire.” He goes on: “The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity.”

With the publication of that book in 1996, Wallace became a celebrity, and the attention was excruciating to one who so resisted crowds and prized his privacy. By then he had taken a job at Illinois State University that allowed him to teach part-time and write the rest of the time.

After nearly a decade there, he accepted an invitation from Pomona College in California, to write and teach one course per semester. There, following many failed relationships with women, he met Karen Green, an artist, whom he later married.

Meanwhile, he published two collections of short stories, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion,” plus numerous nonfiction pieces, many collected in two books, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.”

But he agonized to make progress on “The Pale King,” the novel he was writing about the IRS. Always a perfectionist, he felt stuck trying to figure out the right approach to the work.

At the same time, he was happy with Green and decided to go off Nardil in 2007. Doctors tried different combinations of antidepressants and even electroconvulsive therapy, but on Sept. 12, 2008, Wallace hung himself at home.

Max has charted not only the life of this extraordinary writer but his influence on literature. One of his more influential works actually came from a graduation address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. In a speech against egoism and egotism, he encouraged students to practice awareness, to open themselves, even in line at the supermarket, “to a moment of the most supernal beauty—‘on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.’ ”

Someone taped the speech and wrote it out online. It went viral and later was published in a short book. The speech summed up, in a way, the arc of Wallace’s writing, seeking some truth behind the banalities of daily life. And his honest struggle seemed to resonate with many readers. It still does.

Humility and pretension

Every so often we see a film that just clicks with us. We may not know why, but it may be worth exploring. Let me explore.
Last week I saw Ruby Sparks, which is a good (not great) film and has received good reviews. But I came away thinking, I loved that film. Why?

First, let me tell you a bit about it. The story is about a young writer, Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano), an introvert whose first novel was a huge success but who now, 10 years later, suffers writer's block. He lives alone with his dog and sees a therapist, Dr. Rosenthal (Elliot Gould). Meanwhile, his brother Harry (Chris Messina) tells him he just needs to get laid. Calvin dreams about a girl. When he tells Dr. Rosenthal about it, he tells Calvin to write about that. "Write something bad," he says, addressing Calvin's perfectionism.
Calvin begins writing on his manual typewriter, which sits next to his iPod (go figure). He names the woman from his dreams Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), and the words come with a new freedom. A day later, a young woman shows up in his apartment who fits his description of Ruby. It takes him some time to realize that she is real. He tells his brother but makes him swear to secrecy.
A succession of events follow, including a visit with Calvin's whacky mother (Annette Bening) and whackier stepfather (Antonio Banderas). The young couple experience differences, which Harry had warned Calvin about. Calvin can change Ruby by simply writing something about her on his typewriter, but unforeseen consequences follow.
The tone of this postmodern fable is funny but touching. It's directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who directed Little Miss Sunshine, and written by Kazan.
As in Little Miss Sunshine, the characters here are often over the top, which adds to the humor but strains the credulity. But by the end, as in the earlier film, I was won over. I predicted the ending, but I didn't care. I wanted it. And besides, it provided a good lesson that I enjoyed learning along the way. 
What's the lesson? In a nutshell, that love cannot be controlled but must be given and received freely. That may seem obvious or trite, but it's still a good lesson, and Ruby Sparks provides a fun way to have it presented.
Why did it connect with me? I tend to like movies that explore the inner lives of writers and other artists (I loved Capote), and this one captures the mixture of humility and pretension that infects many writers. Writing is a vulnerable, humbling activity that's usually marked much more by failure than success. But it can also be pretentious. For example, who am I to think other people might be interested in the thoughts I'm writing here. I could identify with that mixture of humility and pretension, and perhaps it has a broader relevance. Maybe those two adjectives describe much of human activity.
Another reason I liked the movie is that it's shamelessly romantic, and I have a strong romantic side. And Dano and Kazan (who are a couple in real life) are a charming duo who show us that life is messier than we'd like it to be. But out of that messiness, a beautiful connection can come.