In her writings about Adolph Eichmann, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt spoke about the “banality of evil.”  This was a new concept to me when first I read her work; I thought of people like Eichmann as the most extreme examples of white supremacy–hardly banal.  But Arendt made clear to me just how “ordinary” the prejudices against Jewish people had become, and she forced me to begin considering ways in which my deepest seated prejudices evidenced themselves in small and seemingly insignificant ways.  As I’ve watched America move through many decades of racist behaviors toward black Americans, I have often returned to Arendt’s thesis.  Quite recently, I found the amazing collection of prose poems by Claudia Rankine entitled Citizen:  An American Lyric.  Poem after poem caught my breath as Rankine showed me scenes and language that illustrated how “every day” or banal can be white people’s inherent thoughts and practices that remain racist at their core.  I am a white Southerner who grew up in the very bad old days in Alabama when white men like George Wallace and “Bull” Connor proclaimed from the rooftops how dangerous “Negroes” were to the established customs and beliefs of the South.  But I like to think of myself as having done loads of hard anti-racist work to free me from such embedded prejudices.  And on all the obvious scales of measurement, I have left such irrational and destructive attitudes behind. 

But Rankine’s poems drove me deeper into responses to certain “cues” that are still lodged in my psyche.  For instance, when I hear a black person speaking eloquently, I think before I can catch myself “S/he’s really articulate.”   It’s the seemingly harmless adverb that belies the depth of my racist stereotyping–“really” gives me away as someone who finds such behavior unusual or surprising.   Or, though I genuinely engage black people I know when I meet them in public settings, I almost never have those same people in my house for a cup of herb tea or a shared bowl of soup for lunch.  I depend on our finding ourselves in the same physical space rather than taking the initiative to allow social contact.  As more and more black writers are pointing out to self-styled “liberals” like me, it is in our “cultural practices” that we reveal our remaining racist attitudes.  It is in the everyday choices like who is on our Facebook lists or whose phone numbers are included in our speed dial lists or what ancient pigeonholes we keep blacks in even as we vote correctly and contribute correctly and look askance on our fellow citizens who make overt racist statements .

The work Hannah Arendt or Claudia Rankine, separated by many decades as well as by race and cultural background, would ask of me is simple and extremely difficult:  They would ask me to dig below all the surfaces until I find the gnarled roots that keep surfacing unbidden and that must not remain unexamined.  If I can ferret out these remnants and admit that I have them, I stand some chance of removing them.  If I refuse this last deprogramming exercise, I’ll continue being haunted by my Southern white ghosts.  And I’ll continue to miss out on genuinely deep connections with the black people in my life.

In 1984, Audre Lorde, black lesbian feminist writer, published an essay entitled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”  Though was speaking about ways feminist women might find to begin to “dismantle” the patriarchy that has afflicted us for so long, I’ve applied her thesis to many other situations.  Just now, I am recalling Lorde’s challenge to find radically different “tools” rather than adopting those used by the very people/institutions we were trying to change.  A friend alerted me to the recent appearance of statues of a nude Donald Trump positioned in several US cities.  I found them on Google.com and then found them very disturbing to me.  While I deeply lament what this obscene man has done to the English language and to any idea of civility, I could not embrace the manifestation of outrage and disgust that I assume lies behind this gesture. 

I do not think of myself as a prude, nor do I shy away from political satire as an outlet for moral and political outrage.  I even found the statement put out by the New York City Park Board clever.  (The statement said in essence “Erections are forbidden in the park, no matter how small.”)  Maybe I can respond with a guffaw to the statement while finding the statues outside my framework because the printed word is different from the visual image.  Certainly we know the last assertion is true in many instances, especially in this technological era in which the visual is so omnipresent.  Perhaps I also understand the moral outrage being felt and expressed by many serious Mormons in Utah, Republicans who say they can’t vote for Mr. Trump because of his obscene language on television and at his rallies.  These people do not think it is a good thing to curse and make reference to women’s and men’s sexual anatomy in so public a forum. 

If I try to analyze what it is about the statues that pushes them beyond my limits of what is culturally positive for me, I discover several specific objections.  The sculptor has made the “flesh” of the naked figure laced with cellulosis, something women certainly have been made to feel ashamed about having as we age.  Such imperfections of our skin is seen as unappealing to the male gaze.  Similarly, the sculptor has given the statues a large, sagging stomach that falls over the sex organs.  Once again, women are encouraged to experiment with dangerous diets or procedures to lose such flab, to have it “tucked” or removed/reshaped.  So I arrive at what I did not grasp at all in my initial negative reactions:  These statues make the big tall MAN look like an aged and no longer sexually appealing WOMAN.  So my responses relate to my very old and very strong resistance to stereotypical depictions of women’s bodies for the comic pleasure of male viewers.

So we arrive back at Audre Lorde’s essay written 40 years ago:  It will NOT make any serious or permanent change or even dent in patriarchal abuse of females if we define “liberation” as allowing for a similar abuse of males, even one as unworthy, dangerous, and offensive as the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

He died, between breakfast and dinner on New Year’s Day, 1954.  I was almost 17, a senior in high school, so we never had a conversation as two adults.  In the 1980’s a favorite form of therapy for working with dead people was called Gestalt.  In it, the client moved back and forth from two pillows, one of which was the client her/him self and the other the dead person with whom s/he wanted to “speak.”  I decided to enter into one of these strange dialogues and see if I could find out what my father might have thought about the person I became after he left this world.  The first of these exercises focused on my telling him I was a lesbian and his telling me how deeply he hated my choice, since he hated and/or feared women in general.  I remember feeling quite sad and then getting on with my life as best I could.  In this second Gestalt moment, I began by reminding my father of our last “talk.”  Then I told him of work I’d done with a therapist who specialized in shame work, telling him how much I had wanted to please him when I was little.  I told him that I probably thought he would like my being a lesbian since it was the closest I could come to being a man.  Reading over this admission now, I understand just how deeply I had internalized the psychology books that said lesbians were women who wanted to be men.  So, I wonder, might my initial choice to be with a woman have come not from pro-women feelings as much as from some pro-men feelings, a way to be “like” them?

As I continued in the one-way dialogue, I asked my father what he had wanted me to be and he said “Rich and famous.  I wanted you to be able to do for yourself and for me what I was not able to do for you.  I thought I could be your aging chaperone, that we could be together once you were grown. When you were little I didn’t trust myself to be around you.  I didn’t learn how to be around children or women or much of anyone.  I knew very little about how to relate to other people in appropriate way, so I retreated into magazines and the comics when at home with you all.  I wanted you and me to go abroad and to travel far away together.”  Hearing such words filled me with pleasure and fear all at once.  So he did want to be with me but in ways that sounded too much like a lover to be comfortable. (No wonder Judy Collins’ song about her father and her in France has always caused me to dissolve in tears.)

What I gave back to my father, once I’d gotten back on “my” pillow was anger.  He had said something so vague in terms of accomplishing it.  He had told me a dream of his and not a career path for me.  I had no more way of doing what he said he wanted than of being the son I had always known he’d wanted.  His wish may have involved my being self-sufficient but it was entirely unrealistic.  I felt ripped off again by his opacity, reminding me of the helplessness I’d felt the day he died as I watched two irritated ambulance men wheel him out of our house.  They were irritated because they’d been called out on a holiday–it was New Year’s after all.  The last words my father said to me in his own voice were these:  “The keys and my wallet are on the dresser in the bedroom.”  Then he vanished into the big van and I never saw or heard him again.  I was still sixteen;  I couldn’t even drive alone yet’ I had a sister who was sixteen and a half years older than I; I had a perfectly capable mother even if she spent the next few years in tears of grief over losing her husband.

Once the Gestalt session ended and I returned to being just myself, I noticed and liked how differently I felt towards my father than I had after our first exchange.  Instead of all that hostility before, I had some compassion this time for us both.  The biggest surprise coming in “my” voice was my saying that I was glad I’d talked to him this second time be seemed to have loved me but felt unable to express that in appropriate ways.  My last words to him had to do with my appreciating his warm word but that they came when I didn’t need them so much.  I’d needed his tangible love when I was a little girl in my strange household made up only of adults; he hadn’t been able to give it to me in any forms I could understand.  So how I felt was simply clear–not angry or self-pitying or even overly sad.  I felt like a grown-up and I felt honest.  The two pillows had worked their magic.