White Narcissism

White Narcissism September 12, 2014
In the 1940s my white father, who lived in Arkansas, was visiting Michigan for a Methodist conference when he found his assigned roommate was a black man. Outraged, he thought about requesting a different room, asking himself how he could accept and room with a man he perceived as inferior and hang onto his own self-esteem? Despite this inner conflict, he was polite to him and then was surprised to find that he liked the man. At that moment in his life, he faced white narcissism, and I will be ever grateful to him for stepping away from it toward a new way of being. His polite restraint allowed him to meet a black man who, he told me later, “was a better man than I am.”
Both men became trailblazers in the movement toward racial equality. Stories like this made me want to understand what was going on on the “other side of the tracks.” As soon as I could, I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York City to study black liberation theology under James H. Cone and black history under James Melvin Washington. Cone’s writings had enormous influence on me.
When I returned to the South a dozen years later, I found a very different place from what I had left. Kudzu was everywhere; country shacks were disappearing from farmlands; white flight and black migration had radically changed city demographics; black political power was growing; and neighborhoods all over were much more diverse. As a pastoral counselor in Memphis, my caseload was as diverse as my neighborhood. Black liberation theology and black history made me acutely aware of hints of residue from slave psychological trauma. At first I noticed it mainly in the black clients who sought my help, but my anger at the obvious racism of white people kept me from looking at the slave-owning trauma my own racial family was saddled with. Gradually though, I began to see that years of slave ownership and white privilege had deeply harmed white folks, too—just in a more subtle way. My studies in black history had made me more sensitive to the black anger that seemed so justified to me, but it had not made me more sensitive to the white narcissism that is also a gaping psychological wound.
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