FOOD FOR THOUGHT: ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF RACIAL DISTRUST

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Board v. Board of Education (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2004) ("A great deal of interracial distrust now is a product more of retrospection than of immediate personal experience and prevails along fossilized boundaries of difference. We still have economic policies and social patterns to frustrate yellow, green, blue, black, pink, brown and red. Yet continually this frustration--with unemployment, crime, and public education--is understood in racial terms. 'White' blames 'black' and 'black' blames 'white' and who knows what others blame one another and them slop also in the black-white muck. It takes time to build up a record of experiences and narrative to justify distrust, and our repeated fallback upon race as an explanation exposes history's gravity. Within democracies, such congealed distrust indicates political failure. At its best, democracy is full of contention and fluid disagreement but free of settled patterns of mutual disdain. Democracy depends on trustful talk among strangers and, properly conducted, should dissolve any divisions that block it." When citizenly relations are shot through with distrust, efforts to solve collective problems inevitably founder." Id. at xiii. As Ralph Ellison put it, 'This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be." Id. at 23, citing Ralph Ellison, Working notes to Juneteeth. From the bookjacket: "'Don't talk to strangers' is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In this powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen ... takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with 'a citizenship of political friendship'." To label someone "Racist" is to assert, correctly or not, something about that other person, i.e., "You are a racists!" Similarly, to label someone "untrustworthy" is to assert, correctly or not, something about that other person, i.e., "You are untrustworthy!" or "You are not a person to be trusted!" However, to say, "I don't trust you!" or "I distrust you!" is make a statement about one's own self. It is a statement about one's own perceptions, rather than a statement about the other. I think it was Jack London who quipped, "There are two types of people in the world. Those you trust, and those you don't." On reflection, one realizes that he has not divided the world into two types of people--trustworthy and not tructworthy. Rather he has divided one's perception: I trust and I distrust. Perhaps some of the heat of the social and political rhetoric could be lessened were we to talk about our own racial distrusts rather than about the other person's alleged racism.).