Here are some thoughts, as they occurred to my mind this week: some for an author and his readers, some for all descendants of Sarah Hill- and Josiah Lassiter and of people who worked for the Lassiter Mills in the 1850s, and some for everyone...The train of thought is easier to follow, I think, through all three sections, but the questions are for those in a position to answer them.
1. Questions for Robert Turner and His Readers
What kept post-Egyptian African kingdoms from flourishing for long? Why, when slavery was global, were Africans seen as "by nature slavish" in a way Europeans, Asians, and Americans were not? (Somebody had a hope when they linked our word "slave" to the enemy tribe's name "Slav," but it didn't work in practice.) The African climate has been blamed for some things, but these slaves were no longer exposed to it. Tropical diseases deserve blame for some things, but valuable slaves were immune to those. African slaves were probably easier to recognize in Europe and America, but if that were the reason why they were considered "slavish," why did it not apply equally to European slaves sold in Africa--as some were? I think it had to have been the group consciousness. One of the African proverbs that seems to have been most widespread, and longest remembered, was "Because we are, I am." In other words, I am worthless apart from a group of other people; the group comes first, the group's chosen leader has the right to make life choices for me, if I've been sold as a slave then I have to be a slave no matter how unethical the terms of sale were...
We'll never really know to what extent this is true, but to some extent it is indisputably true that when African slaves in the United States claimed their freedom, they ceased to be African tribesmen and became Black Americans. They didn't want to go back to Africa, at least not just then; they wanted their own land and their own piece of the American Dream. And, as described in precise historical detail in Creating a Culture of Repair, in surprisingly few works of fiction and even fewer of the history books where it belongs, when people tried to cheat Black Americans out of that dream even after 1900, racial hostility escalated--but that's not the thought I wanted to bring up today.
"Conservative" writers have argued that a fundamental reason for some cultures' being more successful than others has always been individualism--a clear sense that the individual comes before the group. In order to be born we had to have fathers, but we can survive if they died before we were actually born. We had to have mothers, but we can outlive them, too, after we're about a year old. In the absence of biological mothers we needed mother-surrogates up to age five or six or so. Then, like other lifeforms, we might have been younger and smaller than others but were able to survive on our own. After that point, "Because we are, I am" becomes "Because I am, and you are, it's possible that we can agree to form a 'we,' to agree on some common goals and interests--such as defending ourselves from hungry wolves and bears, having babies, maybe even building houses that are more pleasant to live in than caves..." We instinctively crave social circles, but we can live without them. Some of us even choose to live happily, successfully, productively, without them; this has generally been recognized as something close to a super-power, and has often been feared and hated for that reason.
Yes, solitary humans who've written anything have written about their instinctive craving for company, and usually mentioned the ways they've found to meet that need--writing and reading that gave them mental companionship, talking to occasional visitors through a window, living in a "silent" monastic order where they saw other people regularly but didn't converse, bonding with animals or with employees to whom they didn't talk...We all loved that primal bond with our mothers, when we were babies. We all want to recapture reminders of it after we no longer depend on it. We can reproduce without pair-bonding, as so many other mammals do, but most of us will put up with vast amounts of abuse and injustice to be able to depend on some sort of pair bond. Yet people outlive every social bond they have, and they survive. Christianity teaches that some people may be saved, in the Final Judgment, without any of the social bonds they had, and they will rejoice. We can live without social bonds.
(We can live without fresh sun-ripened fruit. We can live without music. People even claim to live without feeling gratitude or worshipping God, though I'm not sure I believe that.)
Certainly what I was consistently aware of, reading every single page of Creating a Culture of Repair, was that some of Turner's hundred suggested actions recognize the primacy of the individual (and are likely to make sense to most or all readers), while others don't recognize the primacy of the individual (and are likely to seem ridiculous to most readers). Most Christians and many Humanists would feel moved to help maintain a lovely historic (Black) church or pay a deserving (Black) student's tuition. People who can spare a little money might feel rewarded by the mere sight of the church or the student but no reasonable person supports a demand that everyone else be taxed to pay every Black American a large amount of tax-free money.
Everyone should read Carter G. Woodson's Mis-Education of the Negro, because Woodson was modest and polite about saying it but his findings apply to all disadvantaged people. As J.D. Vance said last night, what he observed about the poor "hillbilly" families who moved to industrial cities is also applicable to Black and at-the-time immigrant families who moved to the same cities. People who recognize themselves as a disadvantaged group can benefit greatly by connecting with and supporting others in the same group. Even at schools this principle works. It doesn't need to be "freshmen against sophomores," but good things can come from thinking in terms of "freshmen in support of freshmen."
The level of group consciousness and loyalty that helps individuals enjoy the bliss of social connection also tends to be profitable.. But it can get out of hand and become unprofitable when individuals forget the primacy of the individual. Defining people as primarily members of groups promotes prejudice and causes conflicts. Someone who believes that "every Black man is my brother, every White man is my enemy" does not automatically become violent, but does cut off all possibility of social or business benefit from the majority of the people he meets, and also, as the old saying goes, he might as well change his name to Abel.
People who became slaves according to the law of Moses sold themselves, for up to seven years at a time, to pay their debts. Other people became slaves because their tribe lost a war, or because their relatives didn't pay a ransom. In many cultures people sold themselves, also, for five or seven or ten years, to masters of a skilled trade, in order to learn their skills. But it's also well documented that several cultures historically allowed some people to sell their relatives as slaves, just for extra money. Rules differed; an Englishman could sell his wife with her consent and co-operation, a Chinese man could sell his children--and in some parts of Africa a tribal leader could sell the rest of the tribe, and often they did. If ethnic groups owe money, as groups, or are entitled to money, as groups, this means that Black Americans owe reparations to themselves.
All people have ancestors who were done wrong by somebody. Most people, if we examine the matter, have ancestors who were done wrong by other ancestors. If we take the idea of groups owing "reparations" to other groups seriously, for a start, all German-Americans owe money to themselves. Most of us will, in fact, owe money to ourselves. Group "reparations" are nothing but a pretext for a few people, most of whom will probably not be Black Americans, to "redistribute" the wealth of everyone else, Mostly, of course, to themselves. The British Isles were historically a mess of tribal wars before the British became Christians, so the redistributors, mostly of British descent, would need a lot of money to live on while trying to work out exactly how much they owe themselves for what.
We as a nation need to think of criminals as owing "reparations" to those they have harmed. If someone steals a purse, feeding and sheltering him at public expense does less good to "society" than making him work to repay the owner of the purse does. We needed to be, in 1921 and today, governed by a law like the law of Moses, under which trials for property crimes focus on how much money or property the criminal owes to the victim. We also need to understand that crimes are committed by individuals, against individuals, and criminals have to be made to pay during their own lifetimes if they are going to be made to pay at all.
The difference between the Old and New Testaments, in the Bible, is that the OT was written for a group, a tribe that grew into a nation by obeying the laws God gave their group. Their food and hygiene rituals worked better than other tribes' rituals did. Their civil law code taught people how to behave toward other people. God knows and judges their individual souls. But the NT was written for individuals. Salvation is offered to individuals. Individuals knowing themselves to be saved can think for themselves and subvert governments. In the ancient world no nation really liked any other nation; ancient Israel was attacked and often oppressed, but early Christianity was hated, persecuted, and martyred because it liberated individual souls from whatever was happening to and among groups.
How much have we personally discovered for ourselves of the liberation that comes from thinking of ourselves and others as individuals? How does individualism promote healthy relationships among people who might be classified as different demographic groups? How do we move beyond "liking X kind of people," which is very hard to put into practice, into "liking the best qualities of humankind as I find them expressed in people of my kind and other kinds"? How much progress have we made beyond the legalism, tyranny, and bigotry the OT's focus on groups can promote, into the liberating individualism Christ offered His disciples?
2. Questions for the Lassiter Families of North Carolina
Thinking of relationships among slaves and slavemasters in the past, I thought, as so many times before, of Grandma Bonnie Peters' family of origin, the Lassiters of North Carolina. My real name is "of" Virginia, but I'm related to some of these Lassiters too.
There is exactly one record of a Lassiter who immigrated from England. He and his wife are, so far as was known when the genealogy was published in 1980, the ancestors of all White people by that name. (The only Lassiter many Americans ever heard of, one of Louis L'Amour's characters given an unusual family name, was a fictional invention.) There are records of how his descendants respected the indigenous population, prospered, and acquired slaves, up into the generation before the Civil War. At that point the heir married the daughter of one of the last European slaves sold in America, who had earned his freedom and prospered in his trade. He became very conscious of the evils of slavery, such that, upon inheriting the right to do it, he sat down and emancipated three hundred slaves--reportedly "in one day," probably having prepared for that day for years.
It cost money both to record the emancipation of a slave and to send that slave away with enough money to start an independent life, (In Virginia each emancipated slave had to be given a thousand dollars in cash, which was why landed poor people, like General Lee, failed to emancipate their slaves at once too. One of the Randolphs was considered extravagant for emancipating two slaves each year.) So this Lassiter was seen as a big stupid show-off and, to show how much he didn't care, he told all of those ex-slaves that if they needed work, they could apply for paid jobs in his businesses, and if they needed to register surnames, they could call themselves "Lassiter" after their employer. And there are Black and Lumbee people in North Carolina who use the name Lassiter, and affirm that they're not related to one another or to the White Lassiters, unto this day.
The one who emancipated the slaves ended up going west; the businesses did not survive the 1860s. The English-American Lassiters are still proud of their "blue blood" and their unique family name and story, but they're not millionnaires. Not, in fact, necessarily richer than the Black and Lumbee Lassiters. But it's always seemed to me that it would be proper for the Lassiters to get together, compile the history of all six or however many families share the name, find out how one another are doing, and set up a scholarship fund for the most deserving student in the families in any given year. It would just show some other Southern families.a thing!
I shared this thought with GBP, back in the 1990s. I could see on her face that she liked it. Whether she liked the idea of going to North Carolina to meet more Lassiters, or the idea of showing up the Jeffersons (whose cringeworthy behavior gave me the idea), or whatever else, she never said. Then she said, "But none of the Lassiters I know is all that rich."
Meh. Enough living people use the name that they wouldn't have to be all that rich. It wouldn't have to be a full scholarship at Duke, or not in the first year, anyway. If the idea had ever got off the ground GBP would probably have scraped up twenty or fifty dollars; if it gets off the ground, now that she's gone, even I could probably scrape up twenty dollars in her memory. Well, do the math; it wouldn't take a great number of living Lassiters to make a dent in somebody's educational expenses, even at twenty dollars apiece. But family pride would probably motivate someone to chip in $500, someone $1000, and so on, as far as they could afford. And the name of the families that did that would deserve to be represented at a big-name university, every year, wouldn't it?
Questions for the Lassiters: How? When? Where? Should a Lassiter Fund support, or wait until after, the restoration of Asheville?
Would a fund created by individuals who voluntarily contribute what they can spare be a good example of how "many hands make light work,: provided that all of those hands are there to work and nobody is engaged in "social loafing"?
3. Questions for Everybody
We usually hear the word "individualism" applied to some extreme idea which is then denounced as a bad thing. Has this interfered with our sense of the primacy of the individual?
All individuals need to spend time alone regularly, even though an unfortunate minority have mental deficiencies that make them hate and fear solitude. In the twentieth century some influential people tried to deny the need for solitude. We all need to reverse this denial, to recognize that failure to enjoy "quiet time" is dysfunctional and a warning that an individual may not make good decisions, much less be a good role model. We need to recognize that although we've read and heard a great deal more about individuals' desire to connect, much of that has come from social pressure.
A major reason why people divorce, for example, is that one spouse does not leave the other spouse private time and space. "S/He is not a bad person--we're still friends--I just fell out of love and realized how much I missed having time to think." These people thought they wanted to spend their lives together. If they spent adequate time alone, not chatting with bachelors on the Internet but doing some sort of creative work in their rooms or gardens, they might discover that "falling in love" is a hormone cycle and that they do love each other.
When people respect each other's privacy, they can live under the same roof in peace. When people are crowded together, they lose the ability to appreciate one another.
Do we need to spend time alone, forming our real selves separately from other people, in order to from the connections we all want? Does anyone want to work with, or marry, or talk to, "just one of the crowd"? Don't we want to know individual men and women we don't meet every day?
How do solitary activities, and friendships outside any demographic categories into which we may be put, help us build healthy independence from groups?
Christianity is often supposed to remind Christians to recognize all the people with whom we interact as children of God. Has it had that effect?
How do relationships with other people suffer when people fail to maintain enough time and space for themselves?
Whether or not we notice it, being around other people is a source of physical stress. Failure to notice this stress is probably a reason why extroverts tend to age faster than introverts. How do we reduce this stress when we want to from "we" relationships? How do we reward respectful, friendly behavior and discourage pushy, outgoing behavior?
How does respect for others' privacy help build healthy relationships?
Hoe does respect for others'' property help build healthy relationships?
Even if people could be said to begin doing anything at the same beginning point, differences of abilities and priorities will always cause them to reach different end points. Once people learn to read, some choose to spend their lives in the world of books, and other read only when they have to read. When people are doing a paid job, not only their different abilities but also chance guarantee that they'll get different results much of the time. This is why so many people, not necessarily either White people or people who are generally regarded as privileged, oppose the idea of anyone trying to ensure "equality of outcome." Schemes to do that usually violate privacy, always violate property rights, and ensure unequal rewards for the work people have actually done. Then, on top of that, even if the workers who started at four o'clock p.m. get the same payment for the day's work as the ones who started at four a.m., by the next day their own choices will have produced even more different outcomes; one worker goes home, gets a good night's sleep, eats a good breakfast, and reports to work bright and early the next day, while another one goes out, gets drunk, sleeps late, and drags into the workplace late, feeling miserable. Moses said nothing about equality of outcomes or incomes, but merely told people to have fair, universal system of measurements they could use to agree on what things are worth. How does respect for individuals' differences help us overcome envy of the different sets of advantages and disadvantages that add up to some people's earning more money than others?
When people have, historically, treated each other as enemy tribes rather than individuals, and whole groups of people have had to live with the knowledge that their neighbors wanted them to be and remain disadvantaged, people in the victim group may grow up with twisted perceptions of differences. Suppose you, understand why it's fair and reasonable that Apple-Polisher Paul got a merit raise while Sluggish Sal got his hours cut back. Suppose further that, having reached this understanding since being born in the year 1900, you have always worked with your parents in a little general store in Greenwood, Oklahoma. Every morning as you rotate the stock and dust the shelves, you remember how at least one of your parents has been in this store for twelve hours a day for as long as you've been alive. You watched them expand and modernize the store. It has grown up along with you. You now hear people on the street pointing to your parents as an example of success. People come into the store and ask whether you might be planning to move away and let them take your job. You and your family earned this success; you deserve it; you fee good about enjoying it. You also hear some people muttering that your family have no right to be so successful when you're all Black. One night some of those people, and some of them don't even look particularly White to you, come out and set fire to the store. One day you were successful and prosperous; the next day you're waiting in line, with your overcoat buttoned around your pajamas, for a small dish of soup and a cot in the church basement. You had finished three years of a four-year degree program, and you know you're not going to be able to afford another year at college. You had nice new winter clothes you've never even worn, and if any of them survived the fire, you're trying to sell them. What happens to your sense of having earned what you have, now?
If you are in fact Black, or Cherokee, or Jewish, or Irish, or if you're a woman, how do you reconcile the fact that some individuals have treated/you or your ancestors unfairly with your own need to deal fairly with individuals here and now? What if you were qualified for a merit scholarship at a big-name university, but were not even admitted to the university because you're an introvert? What if you did a great job on the Republican campaign a few yers ago, and today you were passed over for a job without consideration because the boss is a Democrat? What, if anything, keeps you from becoming enmeshed in prejudice against a whole group of people where some people have treated you unfairly? Do you even want to be free from bigotry? If so, why?
Can anything be done to help people who want to spend their lives stuck in resentment of the bad things done by people who are now dead?
What are some ways we might want to choose to support members of our own demographic group, e.g., buying things from local independent businesses even if similar things may be cheaper at a big-chain store?
What are some ways group loyalties have led us to make decisions that were not in our best interest, e.g. trusting the word of a member of our group over the word of a member of some other group?
What are some ways thinking of the people around us as individuals, rather than groups, has contributed to healthy relationships with them?
If that's not already happening, what are some ways thinking of people as individuals, rather than groups, could contribute to healthy relationships with them in the future?
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