Trading privilege for small miracles
In Arlington, I'm living some magical realism
I teach in a kind of miracle. I don't like my miracles too obvious; otherwise, everyone would see them and they wouldn't be miracles. I know, for instance, that Jesus turns the water into wine because only the servants see it. The guests leave laughing about how the groom lost his mind with the wine. They never witness the miracle.1
Miracles are an acquired taste. You acquire the taste by giving up privilege. Privilege, in turn, is a way of walking around. It's a way of defining and organizing the space around you. People along your way play along because they have to. The servants never tell the guests what really happens.
Anyway, my school. Most of the kids in the club I sponsor are Black. I'm old, male, and white, and I grew up in an entirely white suburb of a segregated Southern city. So to me my club’s a small miracle. Maybe it's the biggest miracle I can acquire with what little I've given up.
I teach in South Arlington. Here, I can catch a bus, head up Columbia Pike, and hear some of more than a hundred languages. That's a big miracle, like Pentecost.
We're a magnet school. Our students come from all over Arlington. Some of the kids from North Arlington are maybe like me, a suburbanite who wants to grow up a little differently. But I'm their grandparents' age—a late bloomer. Very late, I think, is better than very never.
A few friends back in the burbs think I've lost my mind. But another miracle happened to me here that couldn't have happened back there. Around Christmas, a woman got on a bus and sat opposite Victoria and me. She wore a hijab and spoke to her companion in a tongue I didn't recognize. She spent the ride looking directly at me and smiling.
I can't say what that smile said to me. But on that ride, for me, public transportation became public space. I was no longer defining and organizing the public out of existence. That's what miracles do: they create sudden, unexpected public space.
I love movies about people who walk through walls. So far, I've watched Blindspotting eleven times. There's this white guy who grew up in a mostly Black community, and his best friend is Black. The movie’s set in Oakland, set in the shadow of gentrification and San Francisco. Despite his upbringing, the white guy’s still got privilege, and his privilege bends, but doesn't break, their friendship. It's complicated. And it's possible.
It's also possible, I guess, that my bus affirmation could have happened to me back in the suburbs. But I never would have witnessed it.
In North Arlington, though, I witnessed something else. It was a few weeks before the bus ride. I climbed from a subway and saw this:
Something in me wanted to run. I had to remember that I've been there—not at Hillsdale, exactly; I've been schooled elsewhere—and that I could see myself in the young man. Frozen and frightened before his image, though, I was glad to think that at least for a few more years, at least while he's safely studying power, he won't really see me.
The smiling young man mastering the art of government brought to mind a James Baldwin essay, one Baldwin called a "love letter"2 to his friend Norman Mailer:
"I want to know how power works," Norman once said to me, "how it really works, in detail." Well, I know how power works, it has worked on me, and if I didn't know how power worked, I would be dead. . . . My revenge, I decided very early, would be to achieve a power which outlasts kingdoms.3
Baldwin, in turn, made me think of Paul, who admitted to his own thirst for power: "that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings."4 I thought of how Jesus (Paul's "Him") packaged power and suffering. I thought of how some people, like Paul, have the privilege to choose the package of power and suffering, but of how few do. I thought of how others, like Baldwin, have to achieve the power to cope with the suffering.
I also thought of a scene from Blindspotting. While Miles walks ahead into a shop, Colin stops before a poster in the shop's window. We look over Colin's shoulder at a smiling Black police officer:
Two nights earlier, Colin witnessed an Oakland policeman shooting an unarmed Black man. Miles, the white friend, wonders why Colin, who lives in a halfway house by court order, doesn't report himself as a witness to the crime.
I'm this old white guy staring at a poster offering political mastery. Colin is this young Black guy staring at a poster offering political courage. We're both appalled at the unmasked temptation.
Black man before a Black image, white man before a white image. It's not the color. It's the conception of power.
I’m so white. My students laugh at my daily attempts to get the handshakes right. And I love the laughter.
But I do want to become more politically Black, or rather to operate through something like a conception of power Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres call “political race.”5 Political race is different from liberalism or the political left. In fact, political race is much older and more fundamental than right and left, red and blue. To associate oneself with political race is to be guided politically by the Black experience in America and, more broadly, by the experience of all groups that have been singled out and treated poorly by power structures.
This suffering at the hands of power makes group members more “weak-we” than “strong-we,” to use Charles Lemert’s distinction:
Identification with their local group is the primary psychological resource for weak-we individuals, however oppressed and stigmatized that group may be by the larger culture. A person with a weak-we identity is much more likely to develop a sense of group consciousness than a person with a strong-we identity. The strong-we conception of self is constructed out of an abstract notion of an autonomous self that one then projects onto all humanity.6
It’s hard to turn a page of the Gospels without reading about Jesus demonstrating or advocating a more “weak-we” orientation to life.
While political race has been eye-opening, race itself keeps me from seeing miracles because it keeps me from seeing the context of miracles. Guinier and Torres might agree: "Race both reinforces hierarchies of power and, simultaneously, camouflages those hierarchies," they say.7 If race has its way, I’ll remain oblivious and dangerous, and the servants will play along with me to survive.
Against this reinforcement and camouflage, political race offers a non-hierarchical conception of politics. To operate through political race is to understand politics as "the possibility of a shared, collective, deliberate, active intervention in our fate, in what would otherwise be the byproduct of private decisions.”8
My understanding of political race also involves divesting myself of the wrong kind of power. Whites who operate through political race, Guinier and Torres say, "would start to critique systems of power, rather than seeking just to exercise more power themselves."9 Power would no longer work to organize or dominate the space around each privileged individual. Instead, power becomes collective and communal.10
Above all—at least above all to me—political race introduces one to a life of magical realism, Guinier and Torres argue. They point out that novels in that genre, notably Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison's Beloved, "infuse ordinary situations with an enchanted quality that distorts both physical and temporal reality."11 The "magical" part suggests that change is possible. The "realism" part suggests that change is impossible without a kind of poetic faith, maybe something like Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief."
Readers of magical realism see "familiar things in a completely new context."12 Things like a wedding feast or a bus ride become enchanted and are themselves reexamined. But while these enchanted settings disorient and prepare the mental ground for more just orientations, our real teachers are the characters in these disoriented spheres:
Though the new reality may astonish and disorient readers, the characters in the story react to it with curiosity and faith rather than with confusion, uncertainty, fear, or disbelief. . . .The reader enters a reality that is fantastic yet remains empirically grounded through the actions and reactions of the characters.13
Beloved astonishes and disorients me when, years after her mother kills her to keep her from slavery, she returns and haunts home. But her mother's other daughter, Denver, by finally seeking help from a neighbor, offers us the possibility of a healing political community despite our haunted national history.
Jesus also astonishes and disorients me when he turns the water into wine. But my teachers are the servants. They do what he asks. They smile and serve out the wine with a power that outlasts kingdoms.
The footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
John 2:1-11.
Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 269.
Baldwin, 279.
Philippians 3:10 NNAS.
Guinier and Torres, Miner’s Canary, 14.
Guinier and Torres, 88-89.
Guinier and Torres, 16.
Guinier and Torres, 204, quoting Hannah Pitkin.
Guinier and Torres, 21.
It’s no coincidence, I think, that the “power” that Jesus promised his disciples in Acts 1 came on a day when “they were all with one accord in one place.” Acts 2:1 KJV.
Guinier and Torres, 22-23.
Guinier and Torres, 23.
Guinier and Torres, 23.