I am a regular commuter on both PATH and NJT. I have written an article which I hope you will publish on your opinion page. It concerns the continuing trouble in New Jersey and in our nation about racism. I write about what I've learned from the philosophy Aesthetic Realism and its founder, Eli Siegel: that contempt is the cause of racism, and only through the conscious criticism of contempt will racism end. I'll write about this more fully in a moment.

    To identify me: I am a composer, and a professor at Manhattan School of Music; and as I say in the article, I am also on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York. 

    As a white American who is an organist at a predominantly African-American church in East Orange, I am ashamed of the racism that persists both in New Jersey, and throughout our country. It showed itself recently in the anonymous threats (which included lynching) left in the lockers of three black employees at Newark's water plant in West Milford. It showed in that huge swastika which suddenly appeared, cut into a cornfield in Washington Township. It showed a year and a half ago in Union, in the death threats received by the actor Desi Arnaz Giles. His crime? The "temerity"—as an African-American—to act the role of Jesus in a passion play. 

    Most terrifying of all was the almost unspeakably brutal murder in Jasper, Texas of James Byrd Jr., dragged to his death. That shocked the nation, but it also—and this was scarcely reported—resulted in "copy-cat" crimes, in Belleville, Illinois and Slidell, Louisiana. These crimes, thank God, did not end in a person's death. But the terror and physical anguish of the victims of these echoes of Jasper were real—and should concern and alarm very American. 

    We need to ask: Why do people act in these horrific ways? And what do these terrible events have to do with the everyday racism that doesn't make it to the headlines—the racism, for instance, that can show itself this very afternoon in a factory cafeteria as a man gets a table of friends to laugh at a "joke" which makes millions of people of a different skin color look ridiculous? 

    Eli Siegel, a great historian and educator, and in my opinion the most honest man America has ever known, explained that the cause of racism is the hope for contempt. Racism he showed, with all its particular evil, arises from an emotion that is more basic—something we can see in ourselves and others every day. Contempt, he explained, is the "false importance or glory" a person gets by making less of the reality of other people. "There is," he said, "a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." 

    Before a person can participate in a racist act—can make an unkind joke, use a demeaning word, refuse to hire someone or rent to him because of his skin color, or even attack him on the streets—that person, I learned, first has to have years of everyday contempt, moment after moment in which there is a lack of desire to see who other people are and what they deserve. No one begins life racist; but all of us can yield to the temptation of wanting to feel superior to other people, especially when we feel unsure of ourselves. This is one reason why racism can flourish at times of economic uncertainty—times like our own. 

    And it is this hope for contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains—the desire to think other people's feelings are less important than our own, that we have a right to put aside, even annihilate their feelings any time we please—that quietly accumulating over years, leads eventually to the terrible things which shock us in the newspapers. 

    In his book James and the Children, a consideration of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Eli Siegel writes: 

    One of the clearest places where contempt can be studied as the cause of racism is in the terrible wave of church burnings these last two years. The media has largely "dropped" the story, but the truth is, the burnings continue. 

   I know from my work as a church musician that there are large emotions bound up with a church building—the emotions of many people: what they felt as they saw baptisms, weddings, funerals; as they sang hymns, heard sermons, and had moments of deep spiritual feeling—of sweet and large gratitude to God. All this emotion matters, is real, runs very deep—and whoever bums a church scorns it all; feels he has a right to turn it into nothing. 

    Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, writes about this with passionate clarity in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known: 

A person who sets fire to a black church feels that black persons have no right to see themselves as related to the biggest thing there is: the cause of the world, or God. He feels he will make himself big and substantial and sure by putting such persons "in their place"—showing such a large thing as the worship of God should not be for them, because they are so much less valuable than oneself is.

Note.— Due to the length of Mr. Green's guest column, it will be continued next week —Ed.

Volume 2, Number 32

August 11, 1998

    Every one of the men of the Tuskegee experiment was a victim of contempt, the ugliest possibility of the human mind. And certainly every person who endured slavery in America was. And yet, as everyone knows, there has been no official national apology for the horrors of slavery, those centuries of raw evil. 

    In my opinion, there is contempt, not just for humanity but for truth itself, in our government's reluctance to say directly:  "We, as a nation, regret what was done to our African-American citizens." 

    America was right to apologize to its Japanese citizens for the internment camps of World War II. What is at stake here is honesty about an injustice of far greater duration. 

    Contempt has affected American history; and it is affecting us now. A large way has to do with economics. Contempt is present in the agony people feel about money and jobs. There is contempt for example, in a factory owner as he gives himself the right to keep as profit money he didn't work for, money earned through the hard labor of other people. Some months back, the owners of UPS tried to get away with that, and they were met with a strike that had support across the country. 

    And it is not just corporations who have contempt for human lives—as they "downsize" factories, and lay off thousands of people to increase profits for distant stockholders. Our national government, too, showed terrific coldness and contempt when Congress passed, and the president signed what was called a welfare "reform" law. That law will result—and they know it—in children suffering terrible hunger, and even becoming homeless because their parents, through no fault of their own, cannot find work in our failing economy. Rather than criticize the profit system itself, the poor—of all races—are being scapegoated. 

    Contempt—the feeling we have a right to be superior to other people—is a national danger. It is also a personal emergency. It is what causes the everyday pain between men and women, parents and children. It is at work in every conversation where we talk, not to understand another person, but to have our way with them. 

    At the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, a not-for-profit educational foundation, where I am honored to be on the faculty, people are learning the alternative to contempt—the one honest, intelligent use of our minds—the hope for respect. Respect is the feeling—the accurate feeling—that we grow bigger every time we try to be fair to what is not ourselves. Respect is what our minds were meant for—it is the sanest, the most beautiful emotion. And I learned from Aesthetic Realism that respect for people begins with asking, and honestly trying to answer, this greatly kind and urgently necessary question which Eli Siegel first presented: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" It is impossible to think deeply about this question and hurt another person. 

    The people of America have a right to know the great education Eli Siegel founded. When they do, I am certain racism will be gone forever. 
 

To the educational foundation where the philosophy founded by Eli Siegel is taught

Further Resources:

Martin Luther King / The King Center
Anti-Prejudice Pledge / Anti-Defamation League
Aesthetic Realism Versus Racism