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Beyond the dream: from ubuntu to embrace

Recently, I remonstrated with a student concerning a set of unacceptable behaviors. He retorted that there was nothing illegal or immoral about them. I said they may be legal and “moral,” but it’s not the right thing. Ethical action—or doing the right thing—requires a new consciousness that calls many time-honored approaches into question. This is true, it seems to me, in intercultural pursuits in America these days, especially in higher education. It may be time to abandon the “I have a dream” rhetoric of the last fifty years and look to an ethic based on truth and reconciliation. The nostalgia of the Lincoln Memorial moment will have to be surrendered if the harmonious ordering of differences called peace is to reign in our country and our world.

Is racism dead?
After forty years of justice and peace struggle, a talk show guest on National Public Radio—a white, high profile journalist—declared racism dead in America and tagged anyone who thought or said differently as whiners. Her position is legal and “moral,” but it is certainly not the right thing. She not only was ignorant of history and contemporary social psychology, but she had also not read the morning paper. It was the same day as the shooting of Amadou Diallo. What could save this journalist from her danger to us all would be an ethic based not on justice, but on an appreciation of Desmond Tutu’s ubuntu philosophy of reconciliation. (Ubuntu means “I am because we are.”)

First some considerations about our traditional mantra, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Miroslov Volf suggests that our concentration on justice as a prerequisite condition for securing peace is misdirected. Even if strict justice were achievable—he argues that it is not—it would not insure peace, the harmonious ordering of differences.* Three cases in point:

• Randall Robinson reviews the state of America since 1967 and finds that black and poor America is much worse off and the world situation much more treacherous in 2001 than forty years before. The March on Washington for jobs, peace, and freedom has not had the success common wisdom trumpets.†
• Audrey Chapman suggests that our euphoria over the success of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the victory of Tutu’s approach may be short lived.**
• In what some may be termed an exercise in pessimism, Derrick Bell maintains that racism is so ingrained in the fabric of American life and spirit that it and its effects will be with us forever.‡

Now almost forty years after his great peroration at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s great crescendo is still quoted and lifted up as a hopeful symbol of racial harmony in the United States. But the symbol is lifted up more than the speech’s substance. The speech in reality was not about dreaming but about a blueprint for economic justice for poor (not just black) people. Much has transpired historically on a global basis, not the least being the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Until now it has succeeded in bringing a bloodless end to apartheid in South Africa, thereby becoming a blueprint for restoration of order around the world.

Yet the dream seems still deferred and the South African summer is becoming an ominous autumn. Matters are worse, Chapman maintains, because both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the civil rights movement share a common limitation. White South Africans and white Americans have not been enabled to own their part in perpetuating a system of inequality and oppression, not only institutionally but also at the grass roots level. The clergy have prayed, the lawyers have been paid, but everywhere there has been an individual and institutional failure to do the right thing.

The will to embrace
The intercultural and interracial dialogue and cooperation which takes place in higher education—if it is to contribute substantively to peace and justice in our society—must be an ethical dialogue which seeks not justice as its goal but reconciliation. Bishop Tutu’s African gift of an ubuntu foundation for reconciliation may be a saving grace for us all. In every conversation, memory and the ownership of past wrongs that have contemporary expression must be acknowledged. Volf suggests that an ethic of reconciliation requires four movements of embrace*:

• The will to embrace the other, even the offender.
• The will to determine what is just and to name what is wrong as wrong.
• The will to embrace as the framework for the search for justice.
• The will to seek a community in which each recognizes and is recognized by all and in which all give mutually to each other in love.

This “will to embrace” is the antithesis of the political correctness—and worse, opportunism—that has characterized much dialogue and programming to date. In too many cases, the wish to enter into dialogue has been initiated by historically white institutions as a matter of self-interest for legal or “moral” purposes. In the absence of the exercise of institutional memory, well-meaning proponents bring to the dialogue packets of psychic power that they reflexively exercise. The historically oppressed find themselves oppressed again; thus, representatives of historically black institutions are often reticent to enter into such dialogues. If on the other hand they do engage in dialogue, it is sometimes for legal, “moral,” or monetary reasons (that is, for power). It is a co-dependant behavior effecting an imposed harmony, a pacification.

An ethics of reconciliation
What I propose is an ethic of reconciliation to form the foundation for ethical dialogue among historically black colleges and universities and historically white universities. The goal in these exercises must not be to achieve justice but rather to create a sensitivity among all and in all institutional relationships which will help people live in a humane way in the absence of a final harmony*. Such an ethic requires beginning with the truth of our institutional relationships, a willingness to own what has been done and change what is being done to impede embrace. Strategies for hearing and honoring each other’s stories are the first step in embrace.

Strategies for conversion are a second step. Communities must be taught to want to embrace. Conversion from individualism to communal value is a high challenge in American culture. An ethic of reconciliation requires a visceral value for relationship with a different other. In black communities of learning that have lost so much already, it may require the risk (if not the fact) of losing a good deal more.

Strategies for helping students, faculty and staff to own their present complicity in oppressive behaviors, whether as oppressor or oppressed are imperative, are a third phase. Just as white South Africans are not being enabled to own their complicity in apartheid and its effects, white Americans are not being enabled to own their complicity either in black oppression in America or global poverty and environmental destruction.

An ethic of reconciliation based on the will to embrace affords us all a foundation of integrity and trust. It allows us to leave the table of common endeavor without sfeeling as if we just bought a new car and got “ripped off.” Such an approach assures us that what we plan and effect is not only legal and moral, but it is indeed the right thing.

Rev. Edward B. Branch, D. Min., directs Lyke House, the Catholic Center at Atlanta University Center. He also serves as a member of the Center for Ethics’ external Advisory Council.

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* Miroslav Volf, “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Edited by Ray Helmick and Rodney Peterson. Templeton, 2002.
† Randall Robinson, The Debt. Plume Publications, 2001.
** Audrey Chapman,“Truth Commissions as Instruments of Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation.
‡ Derrick Bell, Voices at the Bottom of the Well. Basic Books, 1992.

[ Posted by Edward Branch at September 1, 2002 09:20 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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