And Pharaoh's Heart Hardened

I have never told this story to anyone except my father. I may have told my spouse at the time it happened, but I don't recall. My children were there, they were the reason it happened, but I doubt they remember.

In the mid 90s my spouse was attending graduate school at The Pennsylvania State University, in State College, Pennsylvania. He and I and our three then-small children lived in graduate student housing, on campus, in an old World War II era duplex of 625 square feet. It got a bit close at times, to say the least, and in addition I worked at home writing, so I made every effort to get the kids out to do something, anything, when I had the chance and the activity was age appropriate for small children.

A traveling photo exhibit came to the student union. I noted the photographer's name first because early in his career he had worked at the local newspaper in the area where I grew up [it completely escapes me now]. He had since expanded his journalistic photography; this exhibit contained a series of portraits of African-American women, specifically women who had contributed to the nation as artists, writers, activists, community organizers, business women, singers, what have you.

That looked promising!

One afternoon we walked over, me and the spawn. I suspect that my daughter was seven and the twins were five.

The photos were all I could have hoped for, beautifully shot, large and imposing, opening a tiny window onto these magnificent women of strength and purpose. Many of the women were, at the time the photographs were taken, elders; maybe most were. They were a testament to the power and importance of age as a weight that anchors and balances a society when storm winds batter it, yet you could also see in their faces the hard work they had done when they were young.

Some I had heard of; some were names I'd seen although I knew little enough of them; some I had never heard of. The children were as patient as children can be at that age and I knew better than to drag out our little expedition beyond their ability to enjoy the outing and the novelty. We didn't linger over any of the portraits until we came to Rosa Parks.

Like so many, I have a soft spot for Rosa Parks.

I thought it worthwhile to give my children an early lesson in citizenship.

I had to choose my words to work for the level at which they could understand, overly simplified and yet truthful. I said something like this (reconstructed from faulty memory):

"This is Rosa Parks. She is a great American hero. When she was younger, there was a law in some parts of the country that people who have black skin, as you can see she does, had to sit in the backs of public buses. People who had white skin, as you can see we do, could sit in the front. Isn't that a strange law? Just because people's skins are different colors? Of course, it was wrong to have a law like that. And she knew that, so she with the help of some other people decided to protest the law. She got on the bus one day after work and refused to sit in the back of the bus, and then she was arrested, but then many more people began to say that that law was wrong, and then the government got rid of that law. So she is a hero. She is hero for the people who could now sit wherever they wanted on the bus. But she is also a hero for all America, because a law like that hurts all Americans because a bad law like that hurts the spirit and heart of America."

They listened attentively, perhaps drawn by the fact that I got a bit of a tear in my voice, but by this time it was clear we had reached the limit of our visit to the exhibit, so I steered them toward the exit door.

As I herded them forward, a woman, also exiting, had paused at the door and turned back to look at me. She was an African American woman about my age, maybe a bit older.

She caught my gaze, and she said, "I want to thank you for what you said to your children."

My first reaction was surprise, succeeded almost immediately by embarrassment. I said something in reply; I have no recollection what. She went on her way; we went on ours, and my embarrassment subsided to be replaced by a sudden and very sweeping sense of shame.

Not at myself. I try to live a decent life (as do most people, I truly believe).

It is difficult for me to express how deep the chasm is, this exposure of the pervasive racism that afflicts the USA.

My father taught American history. He taught his children that "if you grow up in a racist society, you are a racist" by which he meant not that you burn crosses on lawns but that you have absorbed unexamined assumptions about the way things are and that it is therefore incumbent upon you (I am using the generic "you" here, as he was) to honestly reflect and examine where you stand and what is going on around you as often as you can.

The presence of racism is not news to me, therefore. But I am white, and while I have intersectionally dealt with forms of prejudice directed at me personally or family members or friends or as part of the body politic, for someone like me it can still take a moment like this one to really expose that particular chasm, however briefly, in its full and terrible darkness.

*She* thanked *me*.

I have no idea what prejudice that woman had faced in her life, what moments of anger, hatred, denial, insult, grief, rudeness, and perhaps outright physical danger she might have experienced because she was black. That made her--the one afflicted by racism--take notice of a solitary woman and her three children, *and thank me* for such a small act. I felt shame, among so many other reasons, that what I said to my children was even worthy of comment. Because in a better world it shouldn't be. It should be ordinary. It should be unremarkable.

Never think this story is about me, because even though I naturally tell it from my perspective, it is a story about the way in which racism and prejudice harm our country in the most deep seated ways imaginable.

Think instead that it might be the story of Pharaoh hardening his heart each time Moses asks him to "let my people go." He hardens his heart (or God hardens it for him, but that's another layer to a story that has many layers of meaning) in order to bring himself to say "NO."

To harden our heart means to turn away from our connection to others, to deny compassion, to refuse to change. Psychologist Erich Fromm says that "every evil act tends to harden man's heart, to deaden it. Every good act tends to soften it, to make it more alive."

Every time Pharaoh hardens his heart, he makes it easier to harden his heart again, the next time. Surely this is true for all of us. Every time we turn away from our connection to others, we imprison ourselves a little more. In the end we can so accustom ourselves to this condition that we cease to notice it is going on.

The question of the systemic racism threaded through American history, as well as the question of the extermination of so many of the original indigenous inhabitants of this continent as the destiny and dream of a mighty empire (for that is what we are, speaking in the context of history) was being established, cannot be dealt with in a brief piece of writing like this one. So I won't try.

This is what I will say:

Prejudice is a form of hardening the heart. Prejudice, as we unfortunately know, comes in many forms. Just as human beings show a propensity to be tolerant and inclusive so also, often at the same time, and sometimes in the same person, they show a propensity to be intolerant and exclusive. Human beings are such forces for good, and yet such forces for bad, and sometimes in the same person. The contradiction makes one dizzy. I am not immune.

Prejudice harms and hardens each of us as individuals. It also harms and hardens that thing which those of us who are Americans like to call "America," which is a dream and an ideal and, in some ways and at some times, a reality.

For those of you who are not Americans (USAians, to be precise), if you are still reading (and frankly, were I not American, I am sure I would get sick and tired of all the maundering Americans do about the Dream of America), I do not apologize but simply explain that this is specifically written from the perspective of an American speaking of America.

The USA has always had a contentious love affair with immigration, which may be inevitable in a country founded on the three legged stool of genocide, slavery, and liberty.

In the 19th century those dirty Jewish immigrants were considered, as a group, ineducable; in the 20th century, some universities (more than I care to think about) maintained quotas for how many persons of Jewish background they would admit, because so many (i.e. "too many") qualified. Similarly, plantation workers brought in from different countries and regions of Asia in the 19th century to settle here in Hawaii were considered not smart enough to succeed in Western-style schools. Of course this makes me laugh now--in a sardonic way, I suppose, the joke being on those self-righteous missionaries--given that perhaps three quarters of the students in my sons' high school honors classes were, of course, girls of Japanese-American ancestry.

In World War II, as I need not remind you, citizens of Japanese ancestry were forced into internment camps on the Mainland because they were considered threats, people who would "by nature" feel more loyalty to the place of their parents' or grandparents' birth than the place those same forebears had chosen to immigrate to, to make a new life, presumably because they sought greater opportunity here than what was available to them there. They were considered threats even though this was the country most of them had been born in and identified with.

My father's grandparents came to this country because it offered them more than the old country did. My mother, an immigrant, did the same, I believe. Why should I not assume that others came likewise when I see the evidence all around me that it is so?

Now, of course, Japanese Americans are seen a "model minority." These days if a child goes after school to, say, "Mandarin school" (as my father, back in the day, went to "Dane school" or my children attended "Hebrew school") to learn the language of his/her grandparents and the culture of her/his heritage or the religion of their ancestors, then we call that a fine thing. Or many of us do anyway. Or some of us, at any rate.

For the whole point of the USA is not that it is homogenous but that it is a greater whole woven from diverse strands. It has never been truly homogenous; the social fabric has always been influenced and altered by each latest wave of incoming immigrants. For me it is a truism that immigration is what makes this country strong, and that specifically the diversity of immigration that does so.

When I grew up, we were taught that the USA was built from those who had the courage to leave the safety of the known to build a better life elsewhere. Taking into account, of course, those who had no choice but to come, shackled by the slave trade, and those who were already here, although of course the original peoples who colonized the Americas were also people courageous enough to seek a new land, a new home. In other words, part of the mythology of America is that the brave and the bold and the desperate and the ambitious come here to make a better life because America is the land of opportunity.

And yet a cycle repeats itself. Every generation seems to fixate on some "new" immigrant group as a threat that can't or won't assimilate itself properly, that is stubborn or ineducable or secretly under the thrall of the Pope or or or. You can fill in the blanks. It happens over and over again as meanwhile people who want to build a good life for themselves and their children, and their children who can conceive of nothing other than being Americans because, well, that is what they are--they are Americans just as I am, or you over there, or you, or you--get on with living a decent life . . . if they can, if they aren't locked into internment camps or having their places of worship burned because they are this decade's or this generation's Threat to Our Way of Life.

But that's the thing. Our way of life is predicated on change. Change is embedded in the Constitution, in that codicil called the Bill of Rights. Change is embedded in life itself. Judaism survived as a religion because it changed from a religion based around a single temple to one based on--well--community centers, although we call them synagogues. Societies that do not change will ossify and die. I guarantee it.

So is that not the beauty of the USA? That our institution, our mode of citizenship, creates the constant possibility of change? That change is not just a possibility but a necessity? Not often radical change but usually incremental change driven in part by reversals and resurgences?

Somewhere out there in the USA today a citizen of Indonesian-American descent who happens to also be Muslim is going about the ordinary business of life. So are you. So am I.

This should be unremarkable.

We do not become stronger through prejudice. We become weaker. Those against whom the prejudice is directed are hurt most, of course, but in the end, we all lose.