Thursday, June 19, 2008
The common bond of evil
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
A monstrous criminal has finally been brought to justice. A witness is called to the stand. The testimony begins, but after a few questions the witness stands, faints and has to be taken from the courtroom. Two decades later an interviewer asks the witness what caused his collapse that day. Was it the hideous evil he saw in the criminal? No, explains the witness. It was the hideous realization that such evil lies latent in everyone. "I saw that I am capable to do this ... ," the witness confesses. "Exactly like he."
The witness is writer and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur, whose story Chuck Colson tells in his 1993 Templeton Prize address. Dinur's story came to mind Sunday after I read the speech ("Bearing witness," Horizon, June 15) Leonard Pitts gave at the June 6 Roanoke Branch NAACP dinner and saw the photo of an Indiana lynching that accompanied it.
"The thing that makes it horrifying," Pitts says of the photo, "is not seeing Shipp and Smith hanging there. ... It is, rather, the crowd below, Christian white men and women smiling and laughing and behaving for all the world as if they were at the county fair." Pitts is right. The horror viewers feel when they see the photo is generated not by the two mutilated bodies, gruesome as they are, but by the normalcy of the onlookers. With Yehiel Dinur, we're forced to realize that the face of evil looks just like our own.
The shocking thing, though, is that the picture shocks. Evidence is as close as our daily newspaper or Internet news site that perfectly ordinary people are capable of perfectly evil behavior. The prophet Jeremiah pegged it 2,500 years ago. "The heart is deceitful above all things," he wrote, "and desperately wicked: Who can know it?" The heart Jeremiah is talking about is not the Middle Eastern heart nor the European heart nor the white American heart. It's the human heart.
In his speech, Pitts acknowledges that many white Americans do feel anguish when they're reminded of a time when such pictures could not only be casually taken but even sold as souvenirs. In that anguish, Pitts sees a path to national salvation. If we're sincere about wanting to bridge the divide that separates black Americans from white Americans, he concludes, we must "have the imagination and the courage to face beyond guilt and anger and find strength in our common pain."
Pitts' speech is eloquent and moving; his suggestion worthwhile. But one suspects finding strength in our common pain might be more difficult for blacks than for whites. Victims, not surprisingly, often find it hard to believe in the sincerity of victimizers who claim to be sorry for past behavior. And many black Americans today, whether they've personally been victimized or not, still view whites as the victimizers.
We might be more successful at healing the wounds of this nation's past if we found the courage to acknowledge, not just our common pain, but our common capacity for evil -- a capacity that, as G.K. Chesterton is credited with noting, has been borne out by more than 4,000 years of recorded human history.
One continuing obstacle to racial reconciliation in the U.S. is the assumption that slavery, with all its attendant and subsequent cruelties, was a white-only evil. When one group of people consider themselves incapable of the crimes committed against them by another group of people, forgiveness comes hard.
But the evil that created the Holocaust was not a peculiarly German evil, as Yehiel Dinur realized to his horror. Nor was the evil that created slavery in America a peculiarly white evil. Today's slavery victims in the Sudan can testify to that. The capacity for evil, whatever form it takes, is common to all.
So while much good might come from acknowledging our common pain, as Pitts suggests, paradoxically, an even greater good might come from acknowledging our common capacity for evil.
When the child of the sinner and the child of the sinned against are able to admit that under different circumstances one could just as easily be the other, maybe slavery's terrible legacy can at last be lifted from our land.
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
