"Whom you would change you must first love..." MLK

the following is an article I wrote a year ago for the Calvin College Chimes, the student newspaper for Calvin College where I did my undergrad. The quote from Dr. King, "whom you would change you must first love" has come to my mind often when thinking about multicultural issues. DSM
Moving forward, not drawing back
As MLK said, “Whom you would change you must first love”
By Daniel McWhirter
Staff Writer

Individualistic, consumerist, ignorant, loud: if you think, “America,” or “American,” when you read this string of adjectives, then you are not alone on this campus.

In my first class of the semester our professor had us break into groups and come up with adjectives for Latin America. The professor then had us repeat the exercise with the United States in mind. Tellingly, every single adjective that was written on the board under “America” was negative, the adjectives I’ve strung above in an attempt to catch your eye being a representative sample. Lest you suspect that I managed to work my way into the only all-Canadian class on campus, let me assure you: most of us in the room were U.S. citizens. Neither was this experience, nor the perceptions behind it, an anomaly: there is a growing sense of discontent and frustration among students with their own culture. Whether it be a reaction to the cavalier foreign policy of the present administration, or a recognition of the bankruptcy of consumer culture, the number of dissidents is growing. And more power to them, I say.

However, this growing attitude of discontent and frustration, of criticism, too often takes a nasty turn that unsettles me. I will not call it cynicism. That adjective has been rendered trite by over-use and seems to miss the mark anyway. It is something akin to arrogance, mixed in with a bit of spite — a lack of love and concern.

Not only do we criticize our culture, but we too often fail to love it in the first place, to see something worth changing for the better, something worth saving. I’ve heard it said that Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished, “Whom you would change you must first love” — wise and true words that hold for both individuals and larger institutions.

To be able to see the ill in us — the broken institutions and malignant attitudes and habits — is imperative. Yet to operate on our cancerous body we must first know what it is we are saving, what to excise and what to nurse to health. To simply draw back in disgust at the sick and disfigured form of the diseased — to leave it to rot — is an attitude both selfish and unloving; an attitude all the more duplicitous in this situation as it is we ourselves who need healing.

Disgust at a culture, even one’s own, is never a virtue; rather it betrays a lack of love on the part of the beholder. The wrongs in the world are what they are, not because they are ugly in themselves, but because they mar what is good. Sin and brokenness in our culture and in ourselves is a tragic desecration of God’s creation and should cause us to lament and repent. However, revulsion, contempt, disgust — these are false responses to the desecration, steeped in evil themselves. They hypocritically stand over the broken and fallen and sneer — curse the broken for their disfigured forms without acknowledging their own culpability. Even God himself, who could truly stand apart from the refuse heap of our situation in shock and horror, chose instead to come down to us and soil himself with our flesh. Following his example, the wrong in our culture and in ourselves ought to sadden us, moving us ultimately to compassion and service.

Individualism, consumerism, ignorance; these are aspects of our cancer, and the healing of these sins is our task as Christians. Were we not in 21st Century America, we would have other ills to lament, repent and heal, however this is our task. That we recognize the ills in ourselves is the first step, and we should be moved to lamentation and repentance. But let us keep disgust and contempt far from us.

© 2004-2005 Calvin College Chimes - All Rights Reserved.

Response to Martinez and Branson

Dr. Martinez seeks to equip the reader with cultural tools to better enable the reader to interact with cultures. These tools are specifically dialogical, or two-way—re-reading history, telling stories, and being a multicultural church all seek to both speak and to listen. Historically we have seen the damage that can happen when we as a church lack the tools or fail to use them, for example when missionaries seek to “civilize” cultures or conversely when syncretism has eroded the church in particular contexts. My wife and I attend a mostly African-American church and I have noticed a few times when, because our different cultures have different views of social relations, self, world and so on I risk offending or being offended when no offence is intended. There are a range of responses that I have not yet learned: am I supposed to laugh at that or take it seriously? How do I express appreciation, or thankfulness? These things are fairly basic, yet while we live in the same neighborhood and same country and speak a roughly equivalent language I stumble sometimes. I am learning.

Dr. Branson’s concept of Praxis is illustrative here. As I have engaged with this community I move back and fourth between observation, experimentation, and returning to observation to further modify my concepts. I observe that I seem to have accidentally missed a social cue here and mildly offended a sister. This prompts me to consider the situation more closely, and to subsequently re-engage the community with some new thoughts and categories.

Branson describes the relationship between society, culture, community and individual well. Society is the most macro, with many cultures living and interacting together within a society. Branson’s addition of community I find particularly helpful because it provides a bridge between the individual to a concrete group of other individuals and not just a large, generic collection of people such as a culture. It is at the level of community that I belong to other, particular people. I may inhabit many cultures partially, but this does not include any relationship to particular persons. It may be possible to inhabit more than one community, though Branson’s rigorous criteria for community make that less likely. What is important, however, is that at the community level I, Daniel McWhirter, come into contact with a collective group that has particular faces. Daniel McWhirter as participant in consumer culture, or the culture of academic humanities does not have any necessary relationship with other distinct individuals. What defines my involvement in culture is not who I am related to. However, on the level of community, there is no way to define my involvement apart from other particular people and groups of people (e.g. particular families, circles of friends). The addition of communities to our framework for understanding social structures helps to ground the individual in a concrete group rather than the impersonal sea of culture, which is faceless.

Reflections on Takaki Reading, pp. 153-353

Cultures placed together, or nested within each other, invariably cause tension, particularly between the generations of ethnic minorities. It struck me that many things that may be strengths in one culture become points of conflict when that culture is transplanted into a new context and becomes a minority. This came up most clearly with the account of Italian immigrants—the rigid, disciplined, family-oriented culture of the old country conflicted with the dominant culture in America. In many ways we can admire the Italian culture: Joanna Dorio notes how her father was the family “godfather,” which, while patriarchal, also displays a marked devotion to the larger family. The family together took care of each other, including the single aunt and the financially failed brother. In some ways this was only possible because of the patriarchal/disciplinarian culture of the home that caused tension between Joanna and her father.

While I react to the chauvinism of the culture, there is something in the Italian culture that I respect in the way the family feels responsible for taking care of each other. My wife and I were discussing several of the readings from this section together. Bethany noted that just as an individuals greatest strength can also contribute to ones greatest weakness, particular cultures are often strong and weak in the same area, both admirable and questionable. For example, compare determined/stubborn in an individual to collectivist/authoritarian in a culture.

To what extent is the chauvinism of Italian culture problematic in its own right? In the old country the traditional method of family life would work without hitches beyond those that any family anywhere at any time experience; it seems that it is only in conjunction with American individualism and the culture of the nuclear family/atomist individual that the tensions arise in this family. It seems to me, though I may well be wrong, that the Italian culture, as described by Joanna, while patriarchal is not patriarchal in the same sense as described by Shanti, the immigrant from India. Is there something more problematic about traditional Indian culture and its treatment of women? Is traditional Italian culture less problematic, until it comes into conflict with enlightenment liberalism?

How (not) To Argue Against Diversity

During the first or second class session for Ethnicities and Churches we were asked the question “what might constitute present systematic racism here at Fuller Seminary?” Something about many of the initial responses put red flags up for me: “language,” “teaching styles,” “academic expectations.” I reacted to some of these, and proceeded to reflect on why I found these answers problematic.

Such answers are far too open-ended and broad, to begin with. This in itself is no great moral failing. When put on the spot we students cannot be expected to consistently come up with careful, brilliantly crafted answers. However, it is bothersome to me that when asked to identify areas of racism students quickly picked up on areas of cultural particularity, labeling them “bad.” This combined with the broad nature of the answers is problematic because it seems to make cultural particularity itself evil. The evil of racism, classism, and ethnocentrism is not that one group is different from another, but that this difference is either believed to make ones group better than others or is used as a weapon against other groups. Thus, the fact that it will be difficult to get along in most US cities without a grasp of the English language is not by itself racist. It would be absurd for me to feel oppressed living or visiting Argentina simply because I did not speak Spanish and everyone else there did. However, that the United States recognizes only English as an “official language” is a good example of systematic racism, particularly in the South-West where Spanish is both widely spoken and is historically part of the culture.

My root concern is that when we simply identify difference, particularity or the inherent difficulty of cross-cultural communication as evil we miss the point entirely and are dangerously close to denouncing difference or diversity itself as evil or lamentable. We need to carefully distinguish between simple cultural particularity and diseased forms, expressions or uses of culture. We need to be wary of confusing the difficulty of cross-cultural communication with evil and corruption.

An anecdote may illustrate this. When I visited Germany a year ago, the most difficult period of time was our stay in former East-Germany. We (my fellow students and I) were all housed with different German families for a few days and spent almost all of our time with our host families. Culturally there was a far greater difference between us and the East-Germans than between us and the Western Germans we had been staying with a week before. It was the first time in Germany that I really felt “yes, this is culture shock.” But that week was the most rewarding and moving week of my whole month in the country, and I came to feel a greater sympathy with my east German acquaintances than I did with the West Germans. Some of the other students on the trip absolutely hated the time in East Germany and wanted to leave as soon as possible. Many of them framed their feelings in moral/spiritual terms, they just “felt oppressed” in this city, and so on. I cannot speak for them, but I did wonder if these students mistakenly construed the difficulty of communicating and identifying with the East Germans as bad and oppressive.

Takaki Reflections, pp. 50-150

reflections on Takaki pp. 50-150

The reflections of Frederick Douglas (“Don’t Give a Nigger an Inch”) and Millie Evans (“The Best Mistress and Master in the World”) are an interesting, almost contradictory juxtaposition. Fredrick Douglas brilliantly recognized that participation in oppression corrupts good character, noting how Mrs. Auld changed over time and internalized the framework of slavery, including its injustice, as she participated in the practice of owning slaves. Treating another human being as less than human, concludes Douglas, poisons and subverts an individual’s moral sense. On the other hand, Millie Evans portrays two slave holders who are more or less good people. My intuition is that we, as enlightened, post-moderns living more than a century after the civil war will readily interpret Ms. Evans memoir as idealistic and romanticized—it wasn’t really that good, we conclude. However, I do not think this gives a fair reading to either history or to Millie Evans. In all probability there were “good” salve owners, people who participated in a system of oppression yet were well intentioned and strove to be morally upright people.

We tend to be absolutist in our reading of history, demonizing and villainizing individuals in the past who held beliefs and/or practices that are unusual, shocking or worse to us as twenty-first century westerners or easterners. This is problematic because history is made up of both good and bad characters, just as our world today. An absolutist reading of history is as uncharitable as damning a foreign culture and labeling it “immoral,” “uncivilized” or “heathen” merely because it is different from our own. Such an absolutist mindset simultaneously overlooks the sin and filth within ourselves and our particular culture and is closed off to challenge from an other culture (historic or contemporary), seeing good in others only when they resemble oneself.

Now, do I mean to beatify and defend Millie’s owners? No. My point is rather to neither demonize nor canonize, to complicate our understanding of cultural “others” be they contemporary or from a different period in history. History and the present world is full of individuals who are neither mere minions of Satan nor walk-on-water saints. Such a duelist framework that sorts humanity into two camps, one run by Hitler and the other by Mother Theresa, is simply inadequate, as Millie’s account reminds us. Her owners participated, wittingly or not, in a system of oppression and exploitation—yet we cannot simply conclude that they were calculating, despicable people bent on creating as much misery and destruction as they possibly could because they are portrayed as actually caring for other people, treating individuals that their culture deems sub-human as something more than mere work animals. We might reasonably conclude that the owners and operators of peon-camps (described by a former inmate on pp. 102-111) were simply horrid, corrupt individuals who intentionally sought to maximize their own gain on the backs of others—these individuals strike me as more or less in the same camp as Nazi SS officers who flayed prisoners and kept their skins preserved like animal hides, making lampshades out of human hide. However Millie’s account presents us with strikingly different characters from whom I cannot simply draw back in revulsion. Rather, what these characters from a different time and a different culture do is cause me to wonder how like them I really am. What systems of oppression do I, and everyone around me, participate in unwitting or half-wittingly? What do I do or condone that will be looked on with horror by some future other? It is easy to point to one or another contemporary issue, sweatshops for example, but these are things we are remotely aware of—what might there be within each of us that we cannot even see that condemns us, along with Millie’s owners?

A Biography through Song

WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. On the surface, this term, usually a pejorative, fairly well describes me. I am white, descended from immigrants from the British Isles, and my family on both sides has been protestant as far back as anyone now alive knows. To make maters worse I had the misfortune of being born with both an X and an Y chromosome, genetically predestining me to belong to one of the last remaining groups of true villains out there, white males. However, this term WASP, as with slurs in general, obscures more than it uncovers. Reality complicates stereotype.
Culturally and ethnically I know most about my fathers side of the family tree. As recently as my granddad’s generation the family was dirt-poor subsistence farmers from the remote regions of Alabama. Essentially “white niggers” the McWhirters fought on the “wrong” side in the war from the southern viewpoint. I recall also finding a reference to my great-grandmother’s side of the family, Beasely, in an exhibit about southerners in the Union army in a civil war memorial site in Georgia. Ironically this was a source of embarrassment for some later generations, who, steeped in the racist mindset of post-reconstruction Alabama, didn’t talk very loudly about their family’s involvement in the Union army. In my own time this heritage has been generally (though sometimes ambiguously) celebrated. My great-grandmother was mostly proud of it but a little reserved, later generations are far less reserved.
Growing up I was exposed to a lot of bluegrass, Appalachian and folk music, and have come to find these genres are a part of my culture and cultural self-perception. Songs about sharecroppers, coal miners, racial tensions and the people, good and bad, of the south were made a little more poignant knowing that my granddad more or less lived in the world of these songs. A lot of songs that have since become well known and popularized are ones that my great-grandmother, my granddad and great-aunts and uncles grew up with. For example, a few years ago I was playing the song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (a.k.a. In the Pines; brought to the MTV generation via Nirvana’s “Unplugged in New York” album) on my guitar. When I had finished the song my granddad remarked, “where’d you learn that song, Daniel? That song’s older than me.” I have grown up hearing, singing and playing such songs not merely as interesting relics or just “good music,” but as living stories, things that I myself am caught up in however distantly. Coal mining and lynching, wayfaring stranger’s traveling through a weary land; I’m mixed up in it all, and often see myself and the present facing me as a continuation of this past.
Songs are also an apt marker of my involvement in the church. Both my mother and father are musically inclined and have been involved in leading worship for the entirety of my existence. When I moved out and began college I quickly found myself also involved in leading worship. It has surprised me, since I have never felt called to music ministry and consider myself very much a dilettante in this area. Retrospecting, perhaps it is not that surprising—my mother and father before me valued music, hymns and instruments and that has rubbed of on me. As I have developed as a worship leader I find myself gravitating to the songs and melodies of my cultural history—“I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger”, “In the morning when I die, give me Jesus”, “Come thou fount of every blessing”, “What wondrous love is this, O my soul?” These are the words I have learned to worship in and the melodies my soul resonates with—Spirituals, Appalachian and Southern hymnody. Several themes from these traditions have become important to me, most significantly the theme of homelessness and an often sorrowful longing for God and/or Jesus. Similarly, many of these songs reflect a humility that continues to challenge me, a sense of awe at the grace of God:

what wondrous love is this / O my soul, O my soul, / what wondrous love is this, O my soul? / What wondrous love is this / that caused the Lord of bliss / to bear the dreadful cross for my soul?”

You done showed us how,
we’se a’ tryin’,
Master you done showed us how,
even when you’se dyin’ Jus’
seem like we can’t do right,
look how we treated you,
Our eyes was blind, we couldn’t see,
we didn’t know it was you.

I am American. Often people in my situation—whose ancestors immigrated so far back no one can remember, and whose genealogy is sprinkled with Scottish, Irish, Swedish, Polish, and even a little African blood—often such people believe they have no culture, no ethnicity. “I’m a melting pot,” they say. However, this culture—this emerging, American culture—is as rich and poor, as admirable and dubious, and as high and low as any culture in history. There are heroes and villains, winners and losers, saints and sinners in my past, as the songs of my culture reflect. Ultimately we are all poor and wayfaring strangers traveling through a world of woe, but as we struggle to follow Christ we have a hope. Never a trite hope, four our past and present are serious and often tragic, but a hope in Christ.

Who is my neighbor?

Throughout the history of the United States there has been a tension between those accepted as “Americans” by the dominant culture, and those who are rejected. The marginalized have repeatedly challenged the dominant culture to expand its boarders to include other groups. Takaki recounts how different groups have laid claim to the “rights” declared by the dominant culture, in a sense challenging those on the “inside” to be consistent with their own ideals. This is strikingly different from, say, radical socialism, which calls for the marginalized to rise up, overthrow the bourgeoisie, and take their place by force. Inherent in the American story, as told by Takaki, is a gradual expanding of the scope of the constitution, bill of rights, etc. Thus even the most progressive movements in this story are essentially conservative, because they want to hold onto the rights the majority reserves for themselves.

I have observed before that many of the ethical failings in our history, perhaps most, can be traced back to a truncated definition of person, human being, individual, etc. First we had “all men are created equal,” thereby excluding women, then we merely extended the sphere of ethical obligation to include white people. Today this language comes up in the abortion debate, where arguments frequently rest on questions like: to whom do we extend “personhood” to? Who can we agree to feel ethical obligation to? Abortion is a complex issue and I do not want to hastily draw conclusions here, but merely use it as an example. In the light of history it behooves us, I believe, to err on the side of over expanding our definitions of “us,” of “person” and “neighbor” rather than on the side of limiting these definitions to the smallest agreeable set of individuals/entities. I recall the exchange between Christ and an "expert in the law" in Luke 10 (the good Samaritan passage). "But the real question is, who is my neighbor!" the expert declaims. It is notable that Christ does not identify who "my neighbor" might be, but rather focuses on "who acted or behaved like a neighbor in this story?" It seems that, rather than getting the right definition of "person" or "individual worthy of ethical concern," we should rather seek to behave neighborly in all things.

DSM

Testing out this thing

The site has been having troubles, but I think this will actually post...
My name is Daniel McWhirter, and I grew up alternately in up-state NY and northern CA. Bethany Eising and I were married this summer, which gives me ties now to Ontario, Canada and the mid-west. For anyone considering marriage, I must say that when it is done well it is a very good thing. Both Bethany and I have been surrounded by people telling us that, from their experience, "it just gets better," and we have found that to be true for us.

I grew up in academia. When I was very young my father was a PhD student in physics at Cornell University, and later on he taught physics for nine years at Union College. Through that time my mother stayed at home, and home-schooled my siblings and I through highschool. A significant number of my parents friends growing up were either science grad students or professors, many of whom found it immensely humorous to induce me to use words like "spectroscopy" and "quark" at an early age. I also grew up in the church, since both parents were very much involved in local congregations wherever we lived. Most of these churches were rather on the conservative, baptistish, side of things, which made for a curious contrast with the academy. So, on the one hand I grew up taking the big-bang for granted, while continually running into people at church who were adamant 6-day creationists. But I usually liked both the people at church and the people I knew who used cool lasers and expensive cryostats to delve into secrets the church people thought should probably be left alone.

One of my mentors through college, David Smith, first interested me in cross-cultural issues. Through teaching me German, David taught me how to learn about myself through the eyes of another culture, as well as how to help others better know themselves. I have found that often students on the left and the right take a monological view of cross-cultural communications: those on the right tend to tout their culture above all others, while those on the left tend towards a curious form of cultural self-loathing and view all other cultures as superior to their own. I’m interested in pursuing a more dialogical cross-cultural communication, one in which there is give-and-take, and where the complex and contradictory nature of all cultures, foreign and domestic, is recognized.