ABSTRACT
The prevalence of injustice in society should be understood as the outcome of both individual and household level forces as well as those that take place at various levels of societal interaction. Connecting personal, local, and global factors is important to advancing the kind of poly-centric approach that will bring about institutional, interpersonal, and intra-personal change. This essay reflects on the forces at work in one particular time and place, and how they shaped the author’s interpretation of society and how it develops.
In the unspoken stoic tradition of Northern European immigrants to the US, silence is generally not taken to mean approval. Part of that comes from the fact that most forms of strong, clear opinion are understood to be evidence of foolishness. If you are quiet, but accomplish your task, your actions speak for themselves. The success of a person or group is considered the most powerful when it is done with the culturally normative humility that is expected of the righteous and the victorious.
Look at hockey fans in a place like Minnesota, where I grew up. They are generally considered among the most knowledgeable and passionate fans that the sport has (and almost exclusively white). And yet, they are somewhat famously quiet in the arena during the average game. As a fan, I took it as a badge of honor when a TV analyst notices we get equally excited by strong defensive efforts as scoring chances – how else can we take it?
Ask a fan of a very successful version of the Minnesota Wild NHL team what their prospects are, and you’ll likely hear something like, “Yeah, they look pretty good this year. Not sure how they’ll do in the playoffs, but they’re pretty fun to watch, eh?” This sentence is about as glowing and hopeful as you’ll encounter.
This plays out in other spaces, too. Perform a provocative dance routine and the apparently blank faces of the crowd may actually hide widespread adoration. As a kid, I remember many times performing in sports or the arts and waiting to find out exactly how it was received by spectators because polite applause was likely the visual feedback in the case of both triumph and failure.
Sometimes I wonder if the measured response fans have to their teams or audiences have toward artists is more about innocuous cultural norms or a fear of the vulnerability that comes with making your raw thoughts and emotions known.
Whatever the origins of this pattern, the result in a place with folks who share my ethnic ancestry is that whether we believe something, even a deeply felt truth, or we do not, our quiet, understated pattern is to leave things unsaid. This has the effect of privileging the communication of a person who breaks these norms. This truth can have huge consequences.
When I was a teenager growing up in small, rural towns of Minnesota and North Dakota, I was a part of a religious community that did not adopt the language and theology of the majority of Evangelicals. In my church, we were not asked to offer testimonies of faith, or to recount our conversion stories, or to focus on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We didn’t (often) practice adult baptism, individual confession with clergy, or deep dives into sociopolitical topics. We were typically asked to apply the ethics of our religion in ways that were not explicit. Even the food drives, toys for tots, and various forms of mercy and charity in which the community participated were connected by implication to the grace of God. It was simply not normal in these spaces for a church leader to stand up and say, “Our faith compels us to work for the needs of the poor and marginalized.” Injustice and unmet needs were the work of abstract forces rather than human actors or social systems – at least as they were discussed in public.
In full disclosure, my parents were part of the church leadership in each of my personal experiences. But these were not particularities of their practice. Many other folks grew up in similarly ambiguous circumstances. And there are many things to like about these cultural spaces. For instance, I also learned that there was no necessary contradiction between strength and kindness. I learned to give folks the benefit of the doubt. And reflection upon the destructive power of actions never taken was built into our weekly rituals – a capacity on which I draw today.
The most explicit voices in my life came from the mouths of folks whose passion for their beliefs was the headline, but whose capacity for influencing the specific life lessons I was learning was the most significant legacy. Ethnic and gendered differences were minimized as unimportant details in the cosmic context; wellbeing of the body was dismissed as the stuff of temporal concern or sinful indulgence; and faithful obedience to the most extreme ethical practice held up as a sign of godliness.
I took these lessons to heart in my teens, and aspired to reach the heights of faithfulness. But at the same time, my internal pursuit of ethics tended to hold a narrow understanding of the right path. I learned to feel great disappointment in my failure to live up to the high standards to which I was attracted. I internalized a fundamental sense of disgust toward who I was. I believe that my disgust toward self also helped me take a self-righteous posture toward many others; after all, I was not asking them to live up to an ideal that I myself did not desire.
My high standards for ethical behavior and theological purity were an outward manifestation of deep discomfort with who I was and a sense that I had failed God and others. Zealotry was, in many ways, the only path to escape patterns of disappointment in my encounters with the world. With theological confidence in the eternal salvation of my soul, I thought that perhaps great virtue would allow my mind peace in the in-between.
If you took my experience back to the late 1990s and presented it to the leaders in my religious and civic life, you’d likely confuse and even hurt a lot of folks. I am sure that for a good number of people these lessons would feel like a personal failure. Others might say I am being unfair or overstating things. Maybe, but I don’t think so.
The problem with this mix of cultural norms is that it too easily allowed the unspoken and implicit values of the community to be widely interpreted. Whether I was left to believe that most of the earth’s population was going to hell, or that it was acceptable to use homophobic slurs, or to live in ignorance of the people whose land I occupied, or that our souls were more important than our bodies, or that differences in race were overstated, or that the poor to whom we were bound were that way because of their moral failings, or that deep affirmation of a person was self-indulgent and led to arrogance; whatever the lesson that I took from my environment, it was usually one that I received silently.
That actions speak louder than words may be true, but words also speak louder than those left unspoken.
The people who made up my community were in most cases lovely people to be around. The point I want to make is not that there is something unusually evil about the people, institutions, organizations, ethnicities, or behavioral patterns of these communities. It is not remarkable that this particular community’s faults have contributed to the ongoing marginalization of black and brown people, the erasing of indigenous peoples, the furtherance of trans and homophobic attitudes, the blaming of poor people for economic insecurity, and the imperial attitude of American exceptionalism.
But to understand how to transform our communities, we must reflect on the peculiarities of particular places. The correctives, interventions, and commitments needed for the pursuit of social justice mean that we must scale responses across rather than up. That is, the programs designed to combat oppressive forces in one place must be tailored to the patterns of cultural, political, social, economic, historical, familial, and temporal context in which it sits. If this sounds incredibly challenging, it’s because it is.
There is no advent of a world less violent, marginalizing, or oppressive without hard work. My people taught me that, and their wisdom gives me some hope.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.