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The Hidden Wound
In this beautifully written book-length essay, Berry explores the “hidden wound” of racism and its pernicious effects on white people in America. Rigorous, honest, and deeply felt, The Hidden Wound is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the problem of race in this country.
150 pages, Paperback
First published December 3, 2005
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About the author
Wendell Berry
293 books4,909 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 184 reviews
May 19, 2012
I love Wendell Berry-pretty much all of his writing, whether its his poetry or his fiction or his essays rocks my world. The Hidden Wound is not my favorite work but its in the top three for sure. Berry wrote this during winterbreak at Stanford in 1969-when student riots were breaking out around campus and students were voicing the need for a Black Studies program. In his typical style Berry unflinchingly lays out the tangled web of race relations in this country by focusing on the role of black people in his own life. The starting assumption is that racism creates a hidden wound in everyone-whites as well as blacks-and Berry admits that while he has been aware of the wound for a long time, he had tried to ignore it or cover it up until he sat down to write his essay. At one point he claims that there is not much love in much of the talk about race and racism today-and that the love that is present is the love of self-righteous blame on the part of the perceived victims (minorities) and the love of self-righteous guilt on the part of the perceived oppressors (in the case of the essay, white people, but given some of today's conversations we could just as easily say the "overculture" or "mainstream" or whatever is most definitely *not* the minority). In a way I think the entire essay turns around this lack of love-and the appeal that we bring love back into the picture, in our dealings with one another, our neighbors, our community members and in the recognition that in denying anyone for any reason a sense of basic dignity denies ourselves that same dignity, absolutely and finally.
August 11, 2010
In order to provide a meaningful summary of this book, I need to fill you in on some details about my classwork, so please indulge a brief digression. The last ten weeks of classes were fairly typical for me—a few intense academic courses and a few that, while necessary for my education, didn’t seem to demand as much from me. One of these less important classes, “Pastoral Practice and Racism,” was in my schedule because one class I had initially enrolled in was intended to satisfy a cultural requirement but was obviously geared towards students of another background who came to the United States. “Racism” worked in my schedule, and so I took it, though it was the in the dreaded once-a-week time slot, from 1-4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons.
My basic sense of the class was this: there is something to all this talk about racism, prejudice, and discrimination, but none of the prevailing explanations (power, politics, xenophobia, etc.) taken by themselves held any water. All the talk about “celebration of diversity” and “learning from non-white communities” sounded enlightened and welcoming, but no one could ever tell me outright what it was we can learn, or what they have to offer. There was plenty of call for dialogue (which was taken up with even greater vigor when the Reverend Wright began his crusade), but I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be talking about as long as we made sure we were talking. Now, most of this was due to the fact that the class was being taught by a local priest who was committed to the civil rights movement but didn’t have a formal grounding in it. He also conducted his class in the interrogative mood, answering questions with questions; this certainly got us talking, but at a cost of accumulated frustration. I wanted something to chew on, but all this added up to a buffet of statistics and good intentions that spread about a heavy malaise as we sampled from it.
In one of our assigned readings, the author made a passing reference to the book I am reviewing now, and having read one of Berry’s books before, I set out to lay my hands on a copy to supplement the coursework. It was the best decision I made all quarter long, and saved me from personally writing off the class as unsalvageable. For the first time, I was reading an informed and reflective opinion about what white racism did to whites and what whites had to learn from blacks. He is a southern writer dealing in southern racism, and so not all of it was clearly applicable to our own situations of a primarily urban setting, but after the shadowboxing I’d been engaging in for weeks, I was delighted to have a sparring partner.
The first third or so comprises Berry’s reminiscences of growing up as a white child with black mentors. It’s not immediately appealing, but stick with it—much of the rest of the book will operate on this body of experience. Berry ranges wide as he catalogues the ramifications of racism. He takes up the effect slaveholding had on southern Christians and their leadership, insisting that the heavy emphasis on faith and the soul in southern varieties of Christianity was necessary to gloss over the contradictions inherent in attending church with one’s slaves. He discusses the American culture and its superficiality born of smoothing over the festering sore it must conceal. He points to Tolstoy, Twain, and Homer as offering exemplars for what is possible (and necessary) for contemporary relations between classes and races.
But by far the most compelling treatment is the way he ties the race question in with his passionate defense of the land and humanity’s relationship with it. The greatest loss the white race ever suffered from its slaveholding was the loss of contact with the land as a lived experience, substituting the capitalist’s abstract management for the sake of profit. Actually working the land was relegated to “nigger work” and hence was unworthy of the white man. While this did much to enrich whites, a corresponding impoverishment fell upon them (as is so often the case with sin—nobody wins).
Berry describes this impoverishment this way: “It seems to me that the black people developed the psychology, the emotional resilience and equilibrium, the philosophy, and the art necessary to endure and even enjoy the hard manual labor wholly aside from the dynamics of ambition. And from this stemmed an ability more complex than that of the white man to know and to bear life. What we should have learned willingly ourselves we forced the blacks to learn, and so prevented ourselves from learning it.” Interestingly enough, this is a perceptive investigation of the mechanisms and anthropological effects of social sin. In an age when we are only beginning to recognize and dismantle the structures that undermine human flourishing, these insights are valuable even thirty years after they were written.
In short, I found Berry’s insights to be unrecognized more than a quarter century after they were put into words. To his credit, he continues to be a vocal defender of the same ideals he puts forward here. Those of you who get through The Hidden Wound might want to pick up his 1996 book Sex Economy Freedom and Community, which doesn’t deal directly with racism but articulates in greater detail the dehumanizing forces at work in the culture and economy of our own day. It is an equally informative (and pleasing) read.
My basic sense of the class was this: there is something to all this talk about racism, prejudice, and discrimination, but none of the prevailing explanations (power, politics, xenophobia, etc.) taken by themselves held any water. All the talk about “celebration of diversity” and “learning from non-white communities” sounded enlightened and welcoming, but no one could ever tell me outright what it was we can learn, or what they have to offer. There was plenty of call for dialogue (which was taken up with even greater vigor when the Reverend Wright began his crusade), but I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be talking about as long as we made sure we were talking. Now, most of this was due to the fact that the class was being taught by a local priest who was committed to the civil rights movement but didn’t have a formal grounding in it. He also conducted his class in the interrogative mood, answering questions with questions; this certainly got us talking, but at a cost of accumulated frustration. I wanted something to chew on, but all this added up to a buffet of statistics and good intentions that spread about a heavy malaise as we sampled from it.
In one of our assigned readings, the author made a passing reference to the book I am reviewing now, and having read one of Berry’s books before, I set out to lay my hands on a copy to supplement the coursework. It was the best decision I made all quarter long, and saved me from personally writing off the class as unsalvageable. For the first time, I was reading an informed and reflective opinion about what white racism did to whites and what whites had to learn from blacks. He is a southern writer dealing in southern racism, and so not all of it was clearly applicable to our own situations of a primarily urban setting, but after the shadowboxing I’d been engaging in for weeks, I was delighted to have a sparring partner.
The first third or so comprises Berry’s reminiscences of growing up as a white child with black mentors. It’s not immediately appealing, but stick with it—much of the rest of the book will operate on this body of experience. Berry ranges wide as he catalogues the ramifications of racism. He takes up the effect slaveholding had on southern Christians and their leadership, insisting that the heavy emphasis on faith and the soul in southern varieties of Christianity was necessary to gloss over the contradictions inherent in attending church with one’s slaves. He discusses the American culture and its superficiality born of smoothing over the festering sore it must conceal. He points to Tolstoy, Twain, and Homer as offering exemplars for what is possible (and necessary) for contemporary relations between classes and races.
But by far the most compelling treatment is the way he ties the race question in with his passionate defense of the land and humanity’s relationship with it. The greatest loss the white race ever suffered from its slaveholding was the loss of contact with the land as a lived experience, substituting the capitalist’s abstract management for the sake of profit. Actually working the land was relegated to “nigger work” and hence was unworthy of the white man. While this did much to enrich whites, a corresponding impoverishment fell upon them (as is so often the case with sin—nobody wins).
Berry describes this impoverishment this way: “It seems to me that the black people developed the psychology, the emotional resilience and equilibrium, the philosophy, and the art necessary to endure and even enjoy the hard manual labor wholly aside from the dynamics of ambition. And from this stemmed an ability more complex than that of the white man to know and to bear life. What we should have learned willingly ourselves we forced the blacks to learn, and so prevented ourselves from learning it.” Interestingly enough, this is a perceptive investigation of the mechanisms and anthropological effects of social sin. In an age when we are only beginning to recognize and dismantle the structures that undermine human flourishing, these insights are valuable even thirty years after they were written.
In short, I found Berry’s insights to be unrecognized more than a quarter century after they were put into words. To his credit, he continues to be a vocal defender of the same ideals he puts forward here. Those of you who get through The Hidden Wound might want to pick up his 1996 book Sex Economy Freedom and Community, which doesn’t deal directly with racism but articulates in greater detail the dehumanizing forces at work in the culture and economy of our own day. It is an equally informative (and pleasing) read.
December 22, 2017
I think rather highly of Wendell Berry, but find his oeuvre somewhat uneven. When he is on to something, he is prophetic. When he is cranky about a hobby horse, it shows, and his prose suffers.
This short book, which I only recently heard of, is among the finest of the former category. In traveling back through his childhood experience of America's racial caste system, he cuts to the heart of the social and economic dislocation crushing the American soul. Jim Crow and slavery are only the half of it.
Though this book is nearly 50 years old, it seems even more incisive now than I'm sure it must have been then.
This short book, which I only recently heard of, is among the finest of the former category. In traveling back through his childhood experience of America's racial caste system, he cuts to the heart of the social and economic dislocation crushing the American soul. Jim Crow and slavery are only the half of it.
Though this book is nearly 50 years old, it seems even more incisive now than I'm sure it must have been then.
January 29, 2021
I stand in awe of almost anything Berry writes and The Hidden Wound only cemented my admiration. The Hidden Wound was written more than 40 years ago but is so timely, it might have been written yesterday. It's a thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply personal exploration of the damaging consequences of racism, both to the oppressed and the oppressor.
September 17, 2019
My thoughts on this book are complicated. The book was written in the late 1960's about the author's relationship to his own racism. He uses two Black people from his childhood as his points of reference for his feelings about Black people and his own exposure to racism. For that time and place, he does a remarkable job of taking responsibility for the racism of his country. He understands the power that his family and even he, as a child, have over Nick and Aunt Georgie. He loved them both but realizes that racism kept him from ever knowing them. He sees racism as a wound that can never heal until White people face it. My complications come from the way I think he romanticizes their lives. Nick, especially, stands in for rural connection to the land and simplicity. While he acknowledges that his thoughts may simply be his own projections, he does not fully grant either of these people a full range of humanity. No doubt, Berry is a great writer but readers should also read contemporary books with a more current understanding of how racism works in the U.S.
June 26, 2020
Flannery O’Connor said, “I write to discover what I know.” Here, in The Hidden Wound, you get to watch as someone does just that. However, I am suspicious that not everyone would be able to discover with such incisive and beautiful language as Berry.
In a time when many white people (myself included!) are trying to reckon with their relationship to race and racism, Berry does the same, only he is doing his reckoning back in 1968 and 1988, respectively- a reminder that our present moment is nothing new, just wearing different clothes. This book (this essay and afterword, really) is one of memory and philosophy and social critique. It has a moment of such intelligently crafted literary analysis that I’m saving it to show students in the classroom. It oozes honesty and thoughtfulness and refuses any self indulgent appeals to pathos.
Do I agree with every single thing he writes? No. But has that ever happened with any significant piece of writing? No. Not for me. But I agree with most of it and value how it’s caused me to examine my own connection (through my life, community and beliefs) to the relentlessly destructive powers of racism and white supremacy.
In a time when many white people (myself included!) are trying to reckon with their relationship to race and racism, Berry does the same, only he is doing his reckoning back in 1968 and 1988, respectively- a reminder that our present moment is nothing new, just wearing different clothes. This book (this essay and afterword, really) is one of memory and philosophy and social critique. It has a moment of such intelligently crafted literary analysis that I’m saving it to show students in the classroom. It oozes honesty and thoughtfulness and refuses any self indulgent appeals to pathos.
Do I agree with every single thing he writes? No. But has that ever happened with any significant piece of writing? No. Not for me. But I agree with most of it and value how it’s caused me to examine my own connection (through my life, community and beliefs) to the relentlessly destructive powers of racism and white supremacy.
June 6, 2021
Summary: An extended essay on racism in America, our collective attempts to conceal this wound upon American life, and its connections to our deformed ideas of work.
Wendell Berry wrote words that would be exceptional for most whites today. These were written in 1968 by a white man of the South, making them all the more exceptional:
“If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of the wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.
This wound is in me….I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it….”
Berry begins by acknowledging the story of his family as a slaveholding family, one that sold as well as acquired slaves. He acknowledges a family that went to church with its slaves but inured itself to the teachings about moral obligations that would have unraveled slavery.
He then turns to a childhood memory of Nick, a Black man who worked for his grandfather. He spoke of the racist structures that assigned Nick a place of being a worker and tenant and the dignity with which Nick accepted these but also the dignity of Nick’s work–his careful study of saddle horses, of the requirements of the land. Nick took Berry under his wing and taught him about the work of the farm. But the wound was there, evident in Nick not being able to accept the invitation to Berry’s birthday party, and Berry deciding that the only decent thing to do was to sit with Nick outside.
Berry recognizes in both what he learned from Nick in all his dignity and the underlying social divisions between them a picture of the deformities of our American society that defined success as distancing oneself from the physical labor of the farm and that used knowledge and status to make money off of the labors of others. So we have diminished ourselves, even as we had to diminish the personhood of Blacks to enslave them, something we have done since 1619. In doing so, we have alienated ourselves from good work and from the land upon which our lives depend. We have considered that work to be “n***** work” (Berry’s terminology, objectionable today but reflecting the demeaning character of its historical usage). By this we have not only demeaned persons but also lost our connection to the pleasures of good physical work and the land where this work is done.
Berry’s argument isn’t for legislation or structural change (and I believe this may be a weakness in ignoring the goods that can be done by addressing unjust structures). He argues that we need one another to heal the wounds racism has inflicted. Just as Nick taught Berry the wisdom of the farm and good work while Berry bridged the divide by sitting with Nick rather than staying with the white folks during his birthday, Berry argues that the task is not so much for whites to “free” Blacks but rather to “recognize the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity” and that “they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in pain.”
In his Afterword, written twenty years later, Berry addresses the displacement of racism from rural to urban settings and the decline of family farms, including Black farms. What has happened is simply a shift of the deformed ideas of work from the farm to the city with high paid executives and others who do “menial” work. Overcoming racism means no longer perpetuating these destructive ideas of work but paying just wages for all good and necessary work. Berry, drawing on his deep values of community also argues that integration without the restoration of the fabric of community is inadequate.
Perhaps the most significant thing in this extended essay, which I felt stands well on its own without the Afterword, is Berry’s courageous acknowledgement of the wound of racism on our national body. It is a wound caused by whites, but one from which whites suffer as well as Blacks. A strength of this work is that he owns his own complicity and his own learning with no “yes, buts.” It is vintage Berry, utterly consistent with other works of his on the dignity of manual work, of knowledge of the land, of caring for place, and of membership in community. What is striking is that Berry here offers a generous vision of community and membership that includes Black and white and the value in the humanity of each person. While Berry downplays systemic issues and may be faulted for this, his integration of issues of race into the larger themes of his work makes this more than merely a writing of place by a rural agriculturalist. It is an essay that discerns the fabric of society we are weaving, the rents in that fabric, and the crucial threads needed for a durable and useful garment.
Wendell Berry wrote words that would be exceptional for most whites today. These were written in 1968 by a white man of the South, making them all the more exceptional:
“If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of the wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.
This wound is in me….I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it….”
Berry begins by acknowledging the story of his family as a slaveholding family, one that sold as well as acquired slaves. He acknowledges a family that went to church with its slaves but inured itself to the teachings about moral obligations that would have unraveled slavery.
He then turns to a childhood memory of Nick, a Black man who worked for his grandfather. He spoke of the racist structures that assigned Nick a place of being a worker and tenant and the dignity with which Nick accepted these but also the dignity of Nick’s work–his careful study of saddle horses, of the requirements of the land. Nick took Berry under his wing and taught him about the work of the farm. But the wound was there, evident in Nick not being able to accept the invitation to Berry’s birthday party, and Berry deciding that the only decent thing to do was to sit with Nick outside.
Berry recognizes in both what he learned from Nick in all his dignity and the underlying social divisions between them a picture of the deformities of our American society that defined success as distancing oneself from the physical labor of the farm and that used knowledge and status to make money off of the labors of others. So we have diminished ourselves, even as we had to diminish the personhood of Blacks to enslave them, something we have done since 1619. In doing so, we have alienated ourselves from good work and from the land upon which our lives depend. We have considered that work to be “n***** work” (Berry’s terminology, objectionable today but reflecting the demeaning character of its historical usage). By this we have not only demeaned persons but also lost our connection to the pleasures of good physical work and the land where this work is done.
Berry’s argument isn’t for legislation or structural change (and I believe this may be a weakness in ignoring the goods that can be done by addressing unjust structures). He argues that we need one another to heal the wounds racism has inflicted. Just as Nick taught Berry the wisdom of the farm and good work while Berry bridged the divide by sitting with Nick rather than staying with the white folks during his birthday, Berry argues that the task is not so much for whites to “free” Blacks but rather to “recognize the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity” and that “they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in pain.”
In his Afterword, written twenty years later, Berry addresses the displacement of racism from rural to urban settings and the decline of family farms, including Black farms. What has happened is simply a shift of the deformed ideas of work from the farm to the city with high paid executives and others who do “menial” work. Overcoming racism means no longer perpetuating these destructive ideas of work but paying just wages for all good and necessary work. Berry, drawing on his deep values of community also argues that integration without the restoration of the fabric of community is inadequate.
Perhaps the most significant thing in this extended essay, which I felt stands well on its own without the Afterword, is Berry’s courageous acknowledgement of the wound of racism on our national body. It is a wound caused by whites, but one from which whites suffer as well as Blacks. A strength of this work is that he owns his own complicity and his own learning with no “yes, buts.” It is vintage Berry, utterly consistent with other works of his on the dignity of manual work, of knowledge of the land, of caring for place, and of membership in community. What is striking is that Berry here offers a generous vision of community and membership that includes Black and white and the value in the humanity of each person. While Berry downplays systemic issues and may be faulted for this, his integration of issues of race into the larger themes of his work makes this more than merely a writing of place by a rural agriculturalist. It is an essay that discerns the fabric of society we are weaving, the rents in that fabric, and the crucial threads needed for a durable and useful garment.
October 5, 2024
Berry's approach to race clarifies some of the strengths and limits of his overall project. It is obviously good that he condemns chattel slavery, the Jim Crow regime, US racism in general in the harshest terms—'evil' is his word—much harsher than you'd expect from his fellow agrarians or some of his loudest present-day boosters (not a very high bar to clear). Also good, and interesting from someone so mindful of 'roots' and community, is the scrutiny of his family's treatment of black people, both his slave-owning ancestors and people closer to him, his father, grandfather, and himself. Really finely parses the way a racist system constrained their actions and good intentions, and the responsibility they bear anyway—in general he unpacks basic concepts of systemic injustice, privilege, complicity, etc. in ways that could have a chance of landing with readers frightened by more contemporary 'woke' terminology (or at least could've had a chance a few years ago). His memoir of the two black farmhands who played key roles in his childhood is very moving and respectful, recognizing his child's perspective constrains what can be said about them, and using that void of information to gesture at a great dignity—more people should learn from his technique here.
The more abstract/analytical material is a mixed bag. Berry's particular kind of environmentalism lets him cut pretty quickly to the idea that racism is rooted in the economic situation: for him, viewing land as a resource you own necessitates denigrating the land, those who work it, and the work itself (whence the ressentiment of southern white farmworkers)—especially true as industrialization reduces much labor to menial work. Kind of an interesting counterpoint to the 'Protestant work ethic'—he thinks the root of the problem is contempt for hard work. It's on these grounds he sees prejudice as deeply intertwined with the system and says the whole thing must be upended: 'the willingness to profit from a destructive economy at the top results in economic nonentity at the bottom.' But his disdain for industrial capitalism spills over to all urban living, so he concludes that city life denies black people the chance to be as self-reliant as they might be in the country—this is where the limits of his worldview really start to show. Basically he thinks the ultimate economic crime committed against black people (he acknowledges there are worse moral ones) is that they are denied the chance to become Wendell Berry.
The 'hidden wound' of the title refers to the spiritual and moral damage done to white people by the racial caste system—not 'reverse racism' nonsense but the idea that there are no winners in the system, everyone becomes less human by participating. It gets tricky when he tries to suggest there are concomitant moral gains for black people amid suffering and degradation: a vibrant culture (which he contrasts favorably with that of white Kentuckians, come on now), access to virtues white people have cut themselves off from, namely endurance and stoic resignation. He knows this is shaky ground and does a lot of hedging to reassure the reader he is not suggesting black people should be glad of their lot; I believe him, but by placing so much value on hard work and connection with the land he backs himself into a very tight corner. Better to have simply said 'blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven' and leave it at that.
The more abstract/analytical material is a mixed bag. Berry's particular kind of environmentalism lets him cut pretty quickly to the idea that racism is rooted in the economic situation: for him, viewing land as a resource you own necessitates denigrating the land, those who work it, and the work itself (whence the ressentiment of southern white farmworkers)—especially true as industrialization reduces much labor to menial work. Kind of an interesting counterpoint to the 'Protestant work ethic'—he thinks the root of the problem is contempt for hard work. It's on these grounds he sees prejudice as deeply intertwined with the system and says the whole thing must be upended: 'the willingness to profit from a destructive economy at the top results in economic nonentity at the bottom.' But his disdain for industrial capitalism spills over to all urban living, so he concludes that city life denies black people the chance to be as self-reliant as they might be in the country—this is where the limits of his worldview really start to show. Basically he thinks the ultimate economic crime committed against black people (he acknowledges there are worse moral ones) is that they are denied the chance to become Wendell Berry.
The 'hidden wound' of the title refers to the spiritual and moral damage done to white people by the racial caste system—not 'reverse racism' nonsense but the idea that there are no winners in the system, everyone becomes less human by participating. It gets tricky when he tries to suggest there are concomitant moral gains for black people amid suffering and degradation: a vibrant culture (which he contrasts favorably with that of white Kentuckians, come on now), access to virtues white people have cut themselves off from, namely endurance and stoic resignation. He knows this is shaky ground and does a lot of hedging to reassure the reader he is not suggesting black people should be glad of their lot; I believe him, but by placing so much value on hard work and connection with the land he backs himself into a very tight corner. Better to have simply said 'blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven' and leave it at that.
April 8, 2008
Wow, Wendell Berry wrote this book when he was only 34. At the Wisconsin Book Festival, Rick Bass said it was his favorite Wendell Berry book. It is an amazing chronicle of a man looking honestly at his beliefs and his culture regarding racism and trying to wipe away the cob webs and face the real life effects on blacks and whites alike.
This book was published in 1970 and I don't think our culture has yet faced the "wound" as Berry tries to in this book as illustrated by the reaction to Barack Obama's "racism" speech. By chance the next book I picked up to read is a compilation of essays about the state of America, "These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers on Their State Within the Union" edited by John Leonard. The first essay is by Diane McWhorter as she discusses these same issues in present day Alabama. It is subtitled "The Past is Still Not Past". I highly recommend it as a continuation of the issues discussed in "The Hidden Wound".
This book was published in 1970 and I don't think our culture has yet faced the "wound" as Berry tries to in this book as illustrated by the reaction to Barack Obama's "racism" speech. By chance the next book I picked up to read is a compilation of essays about the state of America, "These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers on Their State Within the Union" edited by John Leonard. The first essay is by Diane McWhorter as she discusses these same issues in present day Alabama. It is subtitled "The Past is Still Not Past". I highly recommend it as a continuation of the issues discussed in "The Hidden Wound".
March 27, 2022
Written in 1968 with an afterword from 1988, but ringing just as true in 2022.
February 23, 2022
I feel like I owe Wendell a "thank you" for the clarity this book sheds on the topic of race. At several points the book reminded me of a lecture I attended awhile ago by Nancy Pearcey. In it, Pearcey discussed how men have, very wrongly, abandoned their household duties and how women have, very rightly, protested this fact. The ongoing mistake made by women, however, according to Pearcey, is that many women now, rather than insisting that men return home, have fought for the right to follow men out of the house. There are some assumptions here, of course, and I won't get into them right now. I mean only to say that it may be the case that the familiar adage, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," (an idea which I believe to be abjectly pessimistic and erroneous) has been deeply ingrained into our problem-solving psyche.
Wendell Berry is making a similar argument here. The freedom of the Black man or woman is not achieved by their being invited to make the same mistakes as oppressive, greedy, self-interested white men and women. The race issue is best overcome by loving communities, not by Black and white collaboration in an exploitative system. Our continued efforts for racial equality have to be deeper, and far less abstract and remote.
Wendell Berry is making a similar argument here. The freedom of the Black man or woman is not achieved by their being invited to make the same mistakes as oppressive, greedy, self-interested white men and women. The race issue is best overcome by loving communities, not by Black and white collaboration in an exploitative system. Our continued efforts for racial equality have to be deeper, and far less abstract and remote.
May 16, 2012
No one, but no one exemplifies the phrase “Less is more” than Wendell
Berry. In The Hidden Wound, an extended essay (100 pages and change) written in 1968-69, with an afterword in 1988, he takes on the subject of black-white race relations in America. He begins with KY boyhood memories of a couple of workers on his grandfather’s farm, then attempts to extrapolate from his experience with them to the inner lives of American blacks and whites in history and the future. He’s on risky ground, and his tentative tone shows it:
I suppose it is the aim of every writer to produce a definitive statement, one that will prove him to be the final authority on what he has said. but though my aim here is to tell the truth as nearly as I am able, I am aware that the truth I am telling may be a very personal one, the truth, that is, as distorted and qualified by my own heritage and personality. I am, after all, writing about people of another and a radically different heritage, whom I knew only as a child and whose lives parted from mine nearly a quarter of a century ago. As I write I can hardly help but thinking of the possibility that if NicK and Aunt Georgie were alive to read this, they might not recognize themselves.
He needn’t have been so cautious, for so many of his observations are both original and true:
In a racist society, the candor of a child is ... extremely threatening. ... The racist fears that a child’s honesty empowered by sex might turn into real and open affection toward members of the oppressed race and so destroy the myth of that race’s inferiority.
In the afterword, looking back twenty years later on what he had written, in the year Jesse Jackson nearly won the democratic nomination for president, Berry lifts the situation beyond race. What good does it ultimately do to dress black people in corporate clothes and hand them the same salaries as their white counterparts if they are practicing the same corrupt, impersonal, detachment from productive work and inner fulfillment as their white counterparts? To Berry, America began to lose it all when we lost touch with the source of our work, our creation. When the money we earned to put bread on the table came from abstract entities like stocks and bonds and oil futures instead of crops and crafts produced in some way by our own direct efforts. When whole communities became anonymous one from the other and we were no longer a nation of intertwined humans, but isolated entities each trying to strive and exist as an organism unto itself.
All these wonderful insights beg the question, so what do we do about it? The Hidden Wound has no real answers to that one, and twenty years later, even though we have elected a black president, no real answers have appeared. So why read this? Because it’s a sensitive, wonderfully written piece by one of the foremost authors of our time. And the only farmer-author left among us. At least as far as I know. From Kentucky.
Berry. In The Hidden Wound, an extended essay (100 pages and change) written in 1968-69, with an afterword in 1988, he takes on the subject of black-white race relations in America. He begins with KY boyhood memories of a couple of workers on his grandfather’s farm, then attempts to extrapolate from his experience with them to the inner lives of American blacks and whites in history and the future. He’s on risky ground, and his tentative tone shows it:
I suppose it is the aim of every writer to produce a definitive statement, one that will prove him to be the final authority on what he has said. but though my aim here is to tell the truth as nearly as I am able, I am aware that the truth I am telling may be a very personal one, the truth, that is, as distorted and qualified by my own heritage and personality. I am, after all, writing about people of another and a radically different heritage, whom I knew only as a child and whose lives parted from mine nearly a quarter of a century ago. As I write I can hardly help but thinking of the possibility that if NicK and Aunt Georgie were alive to read this, they might not recognize themselves.
He needn’t have been so cautious, for so many of his observations are both original and true:
In a racist society, the candor of a child is ... extremely threatening. ... The racist fears that a child’s honesty empowered by sex might turn into real and open affection toward members of the oppressed race and so destroy the myth of that race’s inferiority.
In the afterword, looking back twenty years later on what he had written, in the year Jesse Jackson nearly won the democratic nomination for president, Berry lifts the situation beyond race. What good does it ultimately do to dress black people in corporate clothes and hand them the same salaries as their white counterparts if they are practicing the same corrupt, impersonal, detachment from productive work and inner fulfillment as their white counterparts? To Berry, America began to lose it all when we lost touch with the source of our work, our creation. When the money we earned to put bread on the table came from abstract entities like stocks and bonds and oil futures instead of crops and crafts produced in some way by our own direct efforts. When whole communities became anonymous one from the other and we were no longer a nation of intertwined humans, but isolated entities each trying to strive and exist as an organism unto itself.
All these wonderful insights beg the question, so what do we do about it? The Hidden Wound has no real answers to that one, and twenty years later, even though we have elected a black president, no real answers have appeared. So why read this? Because it’s a sensitive, wonderfully written piece by one of the foremost authors of our time. And the only farmer-author left among us. At least as far as I know. From Kentucky.
October 29, 2021
Berry wrote this extended essay regarding our collective wound of racism in 1968 and then added an afterword in 1989. If you’ve read Berry before, you’ll know to expect this to be thoughtful and honest, and that it will likely stress the importance of community and our connection to the land in which we live. There’s much to contemplate and consider here.
I think I’ll also go ahead and save some quotes:
“I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness – the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.”
“There is no safety in belonging to the select few, for minority people or anybody else. If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities – and not the communities simply of our human neighbors, but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. We would be looking too for another kind of freedom. Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”
I think I’ll also go ahead and save some quotes:
“I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness – the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.”
“There is no safety in belonging to the select few, for minority people or anybody else. If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities – and not the communities simply of our human neighbors, but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. We would be looking too for another kind of freedom. Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”
December 26, 2007
Recommended to me by Alex Lima, this book does at least two things with great efficiency and poetry. It gives a sense of what whites lose from racism. Berry does this by telling from his childhood in which a black man and black women play pivotal roles in developing his sense of justice. It also shows how this wound is systematic -- infecting the church and other institutions.
For these two aspects alone, it probably deserves 4 or 5 stars. But since I am looking for material just like this, I found it wanting on two counts. I found Berry a bit romantic about the human relationship with land. I believe in the importance of space/time specificity for human health. We need to connect to spaces and places as much as we need light, air, and water. And while I am sure that a working relationship with land -- farming, for example -- provides skills, virtue, and wisdom, I have seen how having to work the land bends human bodies into living tools. Bent tools also break. Land and nature can do that to human beings. (Its the same problem I have with Ward Churchill's view of land, by the way.)
Nor is Berry's book as systematic as I would like. I would like a book that works from personal experience towards how every institution of society is contorted by the hidden wound of racism.
If you find something like this, do let me know.
For these two aspects alone, it probably deserves 4 or 5 stars. But since I am looking for material just like this, I found it wanting on two counts. I found Berry a bit romantic about the human relationship with land. I believe in the importance of space/time specificity for human health. We need to connect to spaces and places as much as we need light, air, and water. And while I am sure that a working relationship with land -- farming, for example -- provides skills, virtue, and wisdom, I have seen how having to work the land bends human bodies into living tools. Bent tools also break. Land and nature can do that to human beings. (Its the same problem I have with Ward Churchill's view of land, by the way.)
Nor is Berry's book as systematic as I would like. I would like a book that works from personal experience towards how every institution of society is contorted by the hidden wound of racism.
If you find something like this, do let me know.
October 27, 2016
I found this book extremely moving. Berry has a way with words. I had not read any of his work prior to this book, but I have a much greater desire to read some now. He explains the issues in such a profound yet emotional manner... it has really caused me to reflect upon my own situation and the way I interact with those around me.
"... These are in the best sense instructive texts, and their aim is revolution of a sort. But they are not political texts. They are not interested in the superficial revolutions by which men change their politics; they are interested in the profound metamorphoses that occur when men 'rectify their hearts'" -Pg. 104
"It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power." -pg. 106
"I believed then, and I believe more strongly now, that the root of our racial problem in America is not racism. The root is in our inordinate desire to be superior-- not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people-- but to our condition." -pg. 112
"... These are in the best sense instructive texts, and their aim is revolution of a sort. But they are not political texts. They are not interested in the superficial revolutions by which men change their politics; they are interested in the profound metamorphoses that occur when men 'rectify their hearts'" -Pg. 104
"It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power." -pg. 106
"I believed then, and I believe more strongly now, that the root of our racial problem in America is not racism. The root is in our inordinate desire to be superior-- not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people-- but to our condition." -pg. 112
July 26, 2007
How a white Southerner addressed racism in the Sixties...and with the re-emergence of the book in the Eighties through the auspices of the late, lamented North Point Books...he's addressed it for all time. As a friend told me, He's got it. He's one of the few white people to 'get it,' too. I'm sure Berry's views have widened since. This is a brave, honest book from someone who appreciates community and the land.
November 11, 2024
Wendell Berry is about the last person I would have expected to have a book on racism, but here it is. A lot of this is autobiographical, relating his own experiences with Black farmworkers on his family farm as a child. For being written in 1968, much of it is still very relevant and doesn't feel like outdated thinking at all. My favorite part by far was the afterword, written in 1988, where he proposes that the root of modern racism is man's devaluation of physical work and the need to assign that work to a group of people he views as inferior to himself.
September 23, 2025
Convicted by Wendell Berry and a handful of others, I have been pondering “the land” a LOT. One thing that has often troubled me is figuring out how to reconcile these poetic concepts of the land with the history and horror of slavery. I think this book addresses this spot on and in a way I did not quite expect.
I will say, I feel like his use of the n word was uncomfortably liberal. And mostly because of that, this isn’t the first Wendell Berry book I would recommend to anyone, but I think it’s a worthwhile read if you’re also pondering these things. And his afterword, which you can tell is written after he wrote Unsettling of America, is classic Wendell Berry and full of many mic drops.
Overall, I’m glad he made this effort to interrogate and identify the effects of racism on a society as a whole and that he dove into how the perpetuation of disintegration harms us all at the end.
I will say, I feel like his use of the n word was uncomfortably liberal. And mostly because of that, this isn’t the first Wendell Berry book I would recommend to anyone, but I think it’s a worthwhile read if you’re also pondering these things. And his afterword, which you can tell is written after he wrote Unsettling of America, is classic Wendell Berry and full of many mic drops.
Overall, I’m glad he made this effort to interrogate and identify the effects of racism on a society as a whole and that he dove into how the perpetuation of disintegration harms us all at the end.
February 14, 2021
This is a very important book.
December 31, 2019
A small book of great substance. Wendell Berry sees racism in a refreshingly original way. The beauty of his prose and the exquisite subtlety of his ideas make it a classic.
I believe that the experience of all honest men stands, like these books, against the political myth that deep human problems can be satisfactorily solved by legislation. On the contrary, it seems likely that the best and least oppressive laws come as a result or the reflection of honest solutions that men have already made in their own lives. The widespread assumption that men can be set free or dignified or improved by monkeying with some mere aspect or manifestation of their lives—politics or economics or technology—promises no solution, but only an unlimited growth of the public apparatus. The American people may solve their problems themselves, and so save the world a catastrophe, but not by insisting that the government do their work for them. No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
Read
June 25, 2011After reading a bit about racism and U.S. race history in college textbooks, it was fascinating to read Wendell Berry's thoughts on the subject. His words were personal and refreshing. Being white himself, I don't think I can say he understands the issue completely (I don't think he would say that, either), but he seems to be keenly aware of the limits of his knowledge and describes every nook and cranny of knowledge within those limits. That is, I think he expresses his experience of race from a white perspective thoroughly and well, without postulating on what he doesn't know.
Similar to what I've read in his other works, Berry in The Hidden Wound connects the main issue to agriculture and the land. The way he does this with racism, particularly in the afterword, was revealing. Berry's other recurring topic, spirituality, shows up here as well. The careful, clear phrases he uses to describe the spiritual damage caused by racism were so precise that I often put down the book just to reflect on what he had said.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about race and racism.
Similar to what I've read in his other works, Berry in The Hidden Wound connects the main issue to agriculture and the land. The way he does this with racism, particularly in the afterword, was revealing. Berry's other recurring topic, spirituality, shows up here as well. The careful, clear phrases he uses to describe the spiritual damage caused by racism were so precise that I often put down the book just to reflect on what he had said.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about race and racism.
October 10, 2023
I had never read a Wendell Berry book, but I knew lots of folks who had, so I was interested in his take on racism, which is the focus of this book. Berry has an itereting thesis that racism was an outgrowth of capitialist expansion and both were an attempt to distance oneself from the land and manual labor. Beginning with reflections from his childhood growing up in segregated Kentucky, he provides some unique insights into the nature of black-white relastionships and its connection to urbanization and industirialism. This book has prompted to consider looking at my own family history and the hidden or forgotten stories of racial exploitation and white supremacy.
2023
Rereading this book 14 years later I am struck by the romantic notion Berry had of poverty and slavery and his fixation on the rural life and connection to the land as the source of wholeness. While he addresses the underlying issues fueling racism, he fails to see the systemic nature of racism at all levels of American life. Nowin is 80s I wonder how Berry would assess his words from his younger years
2023
Rereading this book 14 years later I am struck by the romantic notion Berry had of poverty and slavery and his fixation on the rural life and connection to the land as the source of wholeness. While he addresses the underlying issues fueling racism, he fails to see the systemic nature of racism at all levels of American life. Nowin is 80s I wonder how Berry would assess his words from his younger years
March 5, 2022
The poet and essayist Wendell Berry wrote a book about racism. Yes he did. It is moving and provocative and full of his insights and his uncertainties. He reflects on the damage racism has done to humanity through the lens of his own experience and his long-articulated passion for the land.
It is the last book I tackled in 2017. I am simmering in it and expect the flavors to grow richer like a good stew. Written in 1968-9, with an afterword added in 2010, Berry raises credible questions and proposes novel challenges unlike any I've encountered. These aren't platitudes but excavations by a white man looking at racism as something that continues to rob us all of our dignity and humanity.
Sometimes, a poet sees what is hardest to see and finds words to express it. Berry is such a poet.
It is the last book I tackled in 2017. I am simmering in it and expect the flavors to grow richer like a good stew. Written in 1968-9, with an afterword added in 2010, Berry raises credible questions and proposes novel challenges unlike any I've encountered. These aren't platitudes but excavations by a white man looking at racism as something that continues to rob us all of our dignity and humanity.
Sometimes, a poet sees what is hardest to see and finds words to express it. Berry is such a poet.
August 23, 2017
"I am a good deal more grieved by what I am afraid will be the racism of the future than I am about that of the past." This is easily some of the best writing about American racism from the source of a white ally I've ever read, and considering the time it was written (1968-69) and when its afterword was added (1988), it remains remarkably incisive and relevant still today. I'm sure this does not surprise Berry one bit, either, given the conclusions he's drawn within it.
March 26, 2016
The Afterward is the best part. And I'm more optimistic about the future. We must be.
September 8, 2017
Perhaps one of the best books about the toll racism takes on white people.
September 29, 2017
One of the most important books I've ever read.
October 8, 2015
"The Hidden Wound" by Wendell Berry is an essay that was penned during the turbulence of the civil rights unrests from 1968-1969. Berry here sets his own thoughts and experiences to the pen, and all the insights of his agrarian perspective and characteristically incisive prose reveal a depth of wisdom and understanding underlying this sensitive topic that few others writers are able to achieve. The hidden wound, according to Berry, is the indelible and diseased mark that slavery has left on this nation. It is a wound revealed in our institutions, in our relation to the ecology around us; it is reflected in our agricultural practices, in our industrialism, and, ultimately, it is a wound within our very psyche as American individuals. Berry sees race relations for the dysfunctional and disintegrating relationship that it is. How could the white man have very enslaved another man because of the color of his skin? Such a violent and oppressive act has damaged the white man and the black man alike, and the selfishness behind it is still lurking within us, perniciously. Berry thinks of white guilt as self-righteous, and black anger also as self-righteous. In both cases he believes these mirrored forms of a kind of self-love. The solution, as Wendell Berry urges, is to love one another as human beings first. Only through accepting the humanity of the black man may the white man heal the wounds within himself. Anyhow, Berry says it better than I can, so I'm attaching here the concluding paragraphs of "The Hidden Wound:"
"I believe that the experience of all honest men stands [..] against the political fantasy that deep human problems can be satisfactorily solved by legislation. On the contrary, it is likely that the best and least oppressive laws come as the result or the reflection of honest solutions that men have already made in their own lives. The widespread assumption that men can be set free if dignified or improved by monkeying with some mere aspect or manifestation if their lives -- politics or economics or technology -- promises no solution, but only an unlimited growth of the public apparatus. The American people may solve their problems themselves, and so save the world a catastrophe, but not by insisting that the government do their work dir then. No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
For want of the sense of such freedom, even as an ideal, the white race in America has marketed and destroyed more of the fertility if the earth in less time than any other race that ever lived. In my par of the country, at least, this is largely to be accounted for by the racial division of the experience of the landscape. The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man's use of the earth in America is a scandal. The history of his effort to build here what Allen Tate calls 'a great European pattern' is a farce. To farm here, as we have done for centuries, as if the land and the climate were European, has been ruinous, ecologically and agriculturally, and no doubt culturally as well.
The notion that one is too good to do what it is necessary for somebody to do is always a weakening. The unwillingness, or the inability, to dirty one's hands in one's own service is a serious flaw of character. But in a society that sense of superiority can cut off a whole class or a whole race from its most necessary experience. For one thing, it can curtail or distort a society's sense of the means, and of the importance of the means, of getting work done; it prolongs and ramifies the life and effect of pernicious abstractions. In America, for instance, one of the most depraved and destructive habits had always been an obsession with results. Getting the job don't is good. Pondering as to how the job should be done, or whether or not it should be done, is apt to be regarded as a waste of time. If we want coal, it seems to us perfectly feasible to destroy a mountain or a valley in order to get it. If we want to 'contain Communism,' we do not hesitate to do so by destroying the 'threatened' country. Today we send a bulldozer or a bomber to do our dirty work as casually, and by the same short-order morality, as once (in the South) we would 'send a nigger,' or (in the North) an Irishman, or (in the West now) a Mexican.
The abstractions of the white man's relation to the land has forced the black man to develop resources of character and religion and art that has some resemblance to the peasant cultures of the old world [..] but at the same time it has denied him the peasant's sense of a permanent relation to the earth. Hr has wandered off the land into the cities in the hope of being better treated, only to be scorned as before. And on the land his place has been taken by machines -- and we are more estranged from our land now than we ever were.
For examples of a whole and indigenous American society, functioning in full meaning and good health within the ecology of this continent, we will have to look back to the cultures of the Indians. That we failed to learn front hem how to live in this land is a stupidity -- a racial stupidity -- that will corrode the heart of our society until the day comes, if it ever does, when we do turn back to learn from them. Inheriting the cultural graph of thousands of years, they had a responsible sense of living g within the creation -- which is to say that they had, among much else, an ecological morality -- and a complex awareness of the life of their land which we have hardly begun to have. They had a cultural and spiritual wholeness of which the white and black races have so far had only the divided halves.
Empowered by technology, the abstractions of the white man's domination of the continent threaten now to annihilate the specific characteristics of all races, virtues and vices alike, absorbing them as neutral components into a machine society. It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity if the black race, the white race will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost.
As soon as we have fulfilled the hollow in our culture, the silence in our speech, with the fully realized humanity of the black man -- and it follows, of the American Indian -- then there will appear over the horizon of our consciousness another figure as well: that of the American white man, our own humanity, lost to us these three and a half centuries, the time of all our life on this continent.
It is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will 'free' the black and red people. It is a condescension to believe that we have the lower to do that. Until we have recognized in them the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity we will be able to set no one free, for we will not be free ourselves. When we realize that they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in Lao , then the wound in our history will be healed. Then they will simply be free, among us -- and so will we, among ourselves for the first time, and among them."
"I believe that the experience of all honest men stands [..] against the political fantasy that deep human problems can be satisfactorily solved by legislation. On the contrary, it is likely that the best and least oppressive laws come as the result or the reflection of honest solutions that men have already made in their own lives. The widespread assumption that men can be set free if dignified or improved by monkeying with some mere aspect or manifestation if their lives -- politics or economics or technology -- promises no solution, but only an unlimited growth of the public apparatus. The American people may solve their problems themselves, and so save the world a catastrophe, but not by insisting that the government do their work dir then. No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
For want of the sense of such freedom, even as an ideal, the white race in America has marketed and destroyed more of the fertility if the earth in less time than any other race that ever lived. In my par of the country, at least, this is largely to be accounted for by the racial division of the experience of the landscape. The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man's use of the earth in America is a scandal. The history of his effort to build here what Allen Tate calls 'a great European pattern' is a farce. To farm here, as we have done for centuries, as if the land and the climate were European, has been ruinous, ecologically and agriculturally, and no doubt culturally as well.
The notion that one is too good to do what it is necessary for somebody to do is always a weakening. The unwillingness, or the inability, to dirty one's hands in one's own service is a serious flaw of character. But in a society that sense of superiority can cut off a whole class or a whole race from its most necessary experience. For one thing, it can curtail or distort a society's sense of the means, and of the importance of the means, of getting work done; it prolongs and ramifies the life and effect of pernicious abstractions. In America, for instance, one of the most depraved and destructive habits had always been an obsession with results. Getting the job don't is good. Pondering as to how the job should be done, or whether or not it should be done, is apt to be regarded as a waste of time. If we want coal, it seems to us perfectly feasible to destroy a mountain or a valley in order to get it. If we want to 'contain Communism,' we do not hesitate to do so by destroying the 'threatened' country. Today we send a bulldozer or a bomber to do our dirty work as casually, and by the same short-order morality, as once (in the South) we would 'send a nigger,' or (in the North) an Irishman, or (in the West now) a Mexican.
The abstractions of the white man's relation to the land has forced the black man to develop resources of character and religion and art that has some resemblance to the peasant cultures of the old world [..] but at the same time it has denied him the peasant's sense of a permanent relation to the earth. Hr has wandered off the land into the cities in the hope of being better treated, only to be scorned as before. And on the land his place has been taken by machines -- and we are more estranged from our land now than we ever were.
For examples of a whole and indigenous American society, functioning in full meaning and good health within the ecology of this continent, we will have to look back to the cultures of the Indians. That we failed to learn front hem how to live in this land is a stupidity -- a racial stupidity -- that will corrode the heart of our society until the day comes, if it ever does, when we do turn back to learn from them. Inheriting the cultural graph of thousands of years, they had a responsible sense of living g within the creation -- which is to say that they had, among much else, an ecological morality -- and a complex awareness of the life of their land which we have hardly begun to have. They had a cultural and spiritual wholeness of which the white and black races have so far had only the divided halves.
Empowered by technology, the abstractions of the white man's domination of the continent threaten now to annihilate the specific characteristics of all races, virtues and vices alike, absorbing them as neutral components into a machine society. It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity if the black race, the white race will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost.
As soon as we have fulfilled the hollow in our culture, the silence in our speech, with the fully realized humanity of the black man -- and it follows, of the American Indian -- then there will appear over the horizon of our consciousness another figure as well: that of the American white man, our own humanity, lost to us these three and a half centuries, the time of all our life on this continent.
It is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will 'free' the black and red people. It is a condescension to believe that we have the lower to do that. Until we have recognized in them the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity we will be able to set no one free, for we will not be free ourselves. When we realize that they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in Lao , then the wound in our history will be healed. Then they will simply be free, among us -- and so will we, among ourselves for the first time, and among them."
February 10, 2022
The book was very instructive not in a utilitarian sense but rather it was instructive to the spirit… to what is human in us. There were some sections that were a struggle to read as I sensed that Berry was struggling to write them. His consideration of the issue of race in America focuses more on the personal approach as he sees the problem is best addressed by individual interaction rather than societal adjustments. He offers examples of such interactions of individuals from his own childhood and he offers examples from canonical literature. The afterward written some twenty after the original essay which had been written in 1968 is extremely helpful. Berry posits that the present race problem in America is a symptom of a malady that is weakening us all human beings, our self chosen rootlessness that as resulted from a pursuit of “success” which has little to do with what is human within us. Such “success” separates us from the human community. It is disintegrating. The ideas he presents in 1968 and then later in 1988 certainly gives me pause. He causes me to look at some issues from some angles I hadn’t considered before. I wonder what his take would be on things now. We are certainly farther down the road he warned about in 1988. From the tone he employs in the afterward, I think he knew that we would be.
December 30, 2022
Wendell Berry is a great writer, thinker, and moralist. He doesn't approve of me and I, having no agricultural skills or inclinations, can do nothing to get on his good side. Yet I read his books with chastened pleasure.
This one is an examination of how America's history of slavery and then race-based classism has been far worse for white people than we've generally allowed ourselves to think about-- our 'obfuscation' of the issue is intended "to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism-- an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves." It's very much worth reading, if you can get your hands on a copy-- they're strangely expensive, and only show up in an excerpt in the Library of America edition of Berry's nonfiction.
Ahem:
"I am a good deal more grieved by what I am afraid will be the racism of the future than I am about that of the past. The past may to some extent be understood, and it is our obligation to do that, but it cannot be corrected.... The historical pressures upon race relations in this country tend always to push us toward two complimentary dangers: that, to whites, ancestral guilt will seem an adequate motive; that, to blacks, ancestral bondage will seem an adequate distinction." (This is a tougher-minded and far more potentially useful version of White Fragility.)
This one is an examination of how America's history of slavery and then race-based classism has been far worse for white people than we've generally allowed ourselves to think about-- our 'obfuscation' of the issue is intended "to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism-- an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves." It's very much worth reading, if you can get your hands on a copy-- they're strangely expensive, and only show up in an excerpt in the Library of America edition of Berry's nonfiction.
Ahem:
"I am a good deal more grieved by what I am afraid will be the racism of the future than I am about that of the past. The past may to some extent be understood, and it is our obligation to do that, but it cannot be corrected.... The historical pressures upon race relations in this country tend always to push us toward two complimentary dangers: that, to whites, ancestral guilt will seem an adequate motive; that, to blacks, ancestral bondage will seem an adequate distinction." (This is a tougher-minded and far more potentially useful version of White Fragility.)
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