Transcript
It is my pleasure to introduce you to our distinguished lecturer, Dr. James H. Evans Jr., the president of Colgate Rochester Divinity School. Dr. Evans is a systematic theologian who holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Yale University, and Union Theological Seminary. I am pleased to say that his most recent book, We Have Been Believers, which is also in the bookstore downstairs, is required reading this semester in my course, African and African American Theologies, and many of
whom are at the classes here today, and many of whom are probably going to ask him either today or another day to autograph his book for them. Dr. Evans' mentor was Professor James Cone, who is the progenitor of black liberation theology. In his academic works, Dr. Evans has sought to explicate the faith of the black churches in such a way as to demonstrate its meaningful relevance to the ongoing African American struggles for freedom and dignity. And
hence, we eagerly await his second lecture, which is entitled Honor, Shame, and the African American Experience. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Evans. Well, for those of you who are here again, I want to thank you for coming back after last night. It was certainly an opportunity for me to share with you some of my own learnings around womanist theology. For the next four lectures, we're going to shift gears a bit, and I want to share
with you portions of a work in progress, which deals with some issues that I'm dealing with in African American theology, and I guess if I could characterize it in one way, whereas the text Believers kind of focuses on the systematic task of African American theology. The work that I'm in the process of writing now focuses on something that might be called in some sense the kind of a practical, the practical task of theology. So, we like
to begin today by looking at honor and shame in the African American experience. One of the most critical problems facing the African American community today is the lack of self-esteem and its attendant maladies. The history of African American people in the Western world has resulted in an exorbitable chipping away at their collective self-worth. The issue of self-esteem is certainly not the exclusive domain of African peoples in the New World. The advent of industrialization
and massive bureaucratic and economic structures have done much to cast a long shadow over the question of the worth of the human being in general. However, for a variety of reasons, the issue of self-esteem has been persistent in the And the resources available to them for addressing the issue has been limited. To put the matter more bluntly, one might say that the self-esteem of African Americans has historically been and continues to be under assault.
This assault is most often supported and enhanced by the rhetorical structures and conceptual frameworks of honor and shame. The lack of self-esteem is rooted in the experience of being dishonored. And the sense of dishonor is related to, and in many ways grounded in, the social dislocation of African slaves during the Middle Passage. It continues to reappear in the deep sense of loss felt as poor black men, women, and children negotiate the impersonal labyrinth of the
social welfare system. This dishonor is not limited to black persons of lower socioeconomic status. In many important respects, it is an acutely felt dimension of the life experience of middle class and upper income African Americans, especially as they move into the corporate and professional world. Although the terms honor and shame are rarely, if ever, used to describe the problem itself, it will become apparent that they exert tremendous influence on the way in which human beings are
affirmed and valued in our society. The central concern of this lecture is to examine the theological underpinnings of this problem. The purpose is to contribute to our ability to do theology and ministry, taking seriously the dynamics of human evaluation, particularly those of honor and shame which permeate our society. The thesis which guides this discussion is that notions of honor and shame as more or less persistent categories of social order and ordering are crucial in the articulation
of an African American theology of grace. Since the language of honor and shame is seldom directly employed in discourse on human social problems, we will begin with an illustration of how these rhetorical strategies are employed in the argument against those policies and programs known collectively as affirmative action. A conceptual overview of the major scholarly discussion of honor and shame in the field of cultural anthropology will provide the context for a brief examination of the influence of
these concepts in the enslavement of Africans in the New World. In our next lecture, we will examine the function of the rhetorical strategies of honor and shame in the Bible, and we will conclude with a proposal for the articulation of an African American doctrine of grace. The affirmative action debate, the rhetoric of honor and shame. The term affirmative action refers to a group of policies and procedures which began with the Title VII of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. The original purpose of Title VII was to ensure fair employment practices for persons whose race, gender, and religion or nationality might be used against them. In spite of the broad net cast by the original language, these policies and procedures became the flashpoint for discussions around remedies for past wrongs done to African Americans. Although they were the law of the land, these policies were not embraced by everyone. Many felt and feel even more strongly
today that such preferential treatment of black people reduces the opportunities for employment and education for more qualified white persons. The examples of reverse discrimination suits are numerous. However, within the cacophony of voices, there were and are some people who object to affirmative action not on the basis of its presumed deleterious effect on white people, but on its purported effect on black self-esteem. This group, which includes some highly visible black conservative writers, are not monolithic in
their reasoning, but they do share a common refrain. That is, they argue that these attempts to level the playing field in employment and education actually do a disservice to black people because they contribute to the sense of black shame and dishonor. An illustration will suffice to make the point. In their controversial book, The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray present a detailed argument on intelligence and race, which
is seriously flawed in both its assumptions and methodology. However, what is important to this discussion is their critique of affirmative action programs. For these authors, the central question regarding these programs in universities is, and I quote them, how much harm is done to minority self-esteem, to white perceptions of minorities, and ultimately to ethnic relations by a system that puts, quote, academically less able, unquote, minority students side by side with students who are more able, end
of quote. The issue here is not the validity of their claims, but the rhetorical strategies which they employ to make their case. They point out that by placing so-called non-qualified black students on campuses with white students, white students will resent these black students because, quote, they don't belong there. Black students will feel the sting of white approbation and become ashamed. The authors imply that this shaming is the cause of high dropout rates among black
college students on white campuses. And those black students who do survive and graduate will never receive the status which would ordinarily accrue to them as holders of a degree because, quote, people will know, unquote, that they did not earn them, but were simply granted a degree because of affirmative action. That is, they will never enjoy the honor that is due them. Similar observations can be made about objections to affirmative action programs in the workplace. Here the
black worker who receives employment opportunities, which ought presumably to have gone to a white worker, will suffer the shame of doing inferior work and never receive the deserved honor of any possession that he or she occupies in the workplace. The African American conservative writer Shelby Steele in his book, The Content of Our Character, for example, argues that affirmative action programs contribute to a demoralization of black people by enlarging their self-doubt. In an even more poignant
way, Steele points to the atavistic response of many white people to black people and the resulting feeling of shame that often follows. This shame is the result of a negative evaluation of black people in the eyes of white persons. In essence, affirmative action is wrong according to this view because it exposes black people to the shame of being the lesser among equals and prevents those who believe they merit honor from receiving it. The fallacy of this
reasoning is summarized by Cornel West in his article Unmasking the Black Conservatives. He argues and he observes that black conservatives desperately desire the approval of their white colleagues and will deny that racism in any way impedes their success as a way of cementing their relationships with their white counterparts. He goes on to note that the double irony is that these very programs to which they are are largely responsible for their own injury into the middle class
and that in spite of their efforts, genuine white peer acceptance still seems to escape them. Honor and shame are more or less universal conceptual categories in human existence. Affirmative action programs have benefited white women, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups. However, what is curious is that just as affirmative action has come to mean doing something primarily for black people, the notions of honor and shame have been critically and almost exclusively refracted through the lens of race in
our culture. Before we move on to a discussion of the relationship of these concerns to an African American doctrine of grace, which we'll do tomorrow, a brief conceptual overview of recent scholarly discussions of honor and shame and cultural anthropology is in order. Honor and shame have been recognized as categories of human evaluation since at least the rise of Greco-Roman culture. These themes have been laid or manifest in almost every historical period and in almost every
society. However, their importance in the broad scheme of social evaluation in the modern era first received systematic attention in the 1950s when a group of cultural anthropologists gathered to discuss the significance of their field work among Mediterranean societies. These researchers discovered that certain systems of thought, which undergirded particular systems of social ordering and evaluation, were common to all of the societies that they studied. They found that honor and shame are social evaluations that participate in the
nature of social sanctions. What is particular to these evaluations is that they use as a standard of measurement the type of personality considered as representative and exemplary of a certain society. While these early studies focused on one particular set of societies, further research has shown that the notions of honor and shame exert a powerful influence on the societies of southern Europe, particularly Spain, Italy, and France. In these societies, the discourse of honor and shame are woven
into the fabric of the culture. However, this does not mean that notions of honor and shame are not powerful influences in other societies. As one author notes, it has frequently been remarked from early times that those people who make most use of the words honor and shame and others associated with them in ordinary conversation are not those whose lives are most strictly governed by the principles which those words express. In other words, even when the language
of honor and shame is not manifest in a given culture, that language may still function in a latent manner to influence social evaluation of human conduct. The literature on honor and shame is plentiful, complex, and broad in scope. It ranges from etymological studies on the word for honor in Spanish, Italian, and French literatures to the patterns of domestic organization in Middle Eastern peasant societies. The ideas of honor and shame have intermittently emerged as subjects for the
discipline of ethics. See Aristotle's ethics. For philosophy, see David Hume's The Rise of Arts and Sciences. Sociology, see the work of Peter Berger, for example. And political theory, the most prevalent example here being Thomas Hobbes' work, Leviathan. From this rich and fertile area of study, there are several themes regarding honor and shame which may provide a contextual framework for the central thesis of this lecture. The first major theme which emerges in the literature on honor and
shame is that they are rooted in social structures. Because honor must always be given by someone to someone else, it is inescapably social and thus depends on the norms which are socially acknowledged. In Greco-Roman societies, honor and shame were associated with the status which accompanied one's social standing relative to the aristocracy and ultimately to the emperor. In most monarchies, honor and shame was associated with one's standing relative to the crown. Medieval society was ranked in
terms of honor from the aristocracy who had the most on account of their power, their valor, and their proximity to the king to those who had none at all. And this included heretics, outcasts, those who indulged in infamous occupations or who had been convicted of infamy. In these cases, honor could be inherited by virtue of a noble birth or ascribed by virtue of meritorious conduct. Following the Middle Ages, honor and shame were associated with one's social
standing relative to the landed aristocracy. In this latter manifestation, the social codes of honor and shame came to define here, and I quote, the lives of gentlemen both in Europe and in the American South. This was especially evident in the glorification of this practice of dueling in both Europe and in southern codes of honor. In essence, honor and shame were rooted in social structures where stratification and inequality were the order of the day. The primacy of
honor and shame as modes of social organization is often related to the of commonly accepted legal structures among groups or societies. This is why the custom of the joust and the duel in their respective eras were so difficult to erase because there wasn't much other law enforcement in the land or ways to settle disputes. The relation between honor and the absence of effective legal restrictions explains why codes of honor are most obvious among urban gangs, street
corner societies, the military, paramilitary organizations, prison populations, organized crime families, and the very wealthy among others. What these groups have in common is that they exist either outside of or above the law. They tend to regulate themselves and are for all practical purposes a law unto themselves. The second major theme to emerge from the study of honor and shame is the relation between honor and power. Thomas Hobbes argues in his work Leviathan that honor is simply
one of those scarce goods for which human beings are locked in battle. Thus it is only by force that one can attain and retain honor. Indeed it seems that one only has honor if one has the capacity to defend it. This is why honor is related to the physical person or physical force. The ultimate vindication of one's honor lies in physical violence and when other means fail the obligation exists not only in the formal code of
honor but in the social milieu which admit no such code to revert to it, that is, to violence. In the final analysis when all else fails one must employ violence to defend one's honor and to avoid dishonor. The third theme related to honor and shame is the role of gender in their manifestation in a given culture. One of the persons who is one of the sort of founders of this particular school of cultural Julian Pitt Rivers
notes that male and female honor are clearly differentiated with regard to conduct. A moral division of labor operates within the family especially in Latin countries. The aspect of honor as precedence becomes according to this system of values the prerogative of the male while honor as sexual purity is restricted to the female. Hence sexual conquest enhances the prestige of men and sexual liberty defiles the honor of women. The defense of female purity however is a male responsibility
and men are therefore vulnerable to dishonor not through their own sexual misconduct but through that of their women folk. That is to say members of the same nuclear family including mother, wife, unmarried sister and daughter. Hence sexual insults that impugn the honor of men refer not to them but to their women. The irony of this situation is that a condition of social conflict is set up by the contradictory nature of the requirements of honor for women
and men. Women in this context can avoid dishonor by displaying the attributes of humility and deference. However her honor is only guaranteed by the efforts of her male protectors. At the same time a man's honor cannot in this instance be impugned by his own sexual indiscretions. In fact his honor is upheld to the degree that he is successful in the sexual conquest of other women and thus in the dishonoring of her male relatives. The symbolic representation
of male superiority in this battle for honor is centered on the male genitalia. They become signs of manliness and honor. A curious and revealing twist to this insight is that where social roles of men and women are abrogated the notions of honor and shame collapse. Once the sexual division of labor breaks down women says one author become men and where this occurs there can be neither honor nor shame. The author goes on to say that a
woman stripped of her honor becomes a man. Conversely a man who is dishonored especially by virtue of an inability to defend the women of his family or by his low social status is himself thought of as a woman. In essence because a man may be dishonored by the conquest of his woman by another man he must protect her. Because a man may be dishonored by the exercise of sexual liberty by his woman he must enforce a
system of social control which limits her opportunities. Because a woman can in this view pretend to know honor of her own the best that she can hope for is to avoid the appearance of dishonorable conduct. A fourth observation to be made concerning honor and shame is that shame is not merely the absence of honor. There is no neutral state of being without honor. One either has honor or one is shamed. Shame therefore like honor has its
own set of cultural markers and social stigmata. Shame is most often related to what I call a rhetoric of loss. This kind of discourse accompanies the realization that one exists in a state of shame. In his classic work a theory of justice John Rawls describes honor or self-esteem which is related to the esteem in which one is held by others to be a primary good. He uses the language of loss to describe shame. I want
to quote him here. Now we may characterize shame as the feeling that someone has when he experiences an injury to his self-respect or suffers a blow to his self-esteem. Shame is painful since it is the loss of a prized good. In fact it is this rhetoric of loss which distinguishes guilt from shame. He says that when we feel guilty we focus on the infringement of the just claims of others and the injury we have
done to them and on their probable resentment and indignation should they discover our deed. However when we feel shame we are struck by the loss to our own self-esteem and our inability to carry out our aims. We sense the diminishment of the self from our anxiety about the lesser respect that others may have for us and from our disappointment with ourselves for failing to live up to our own ideals. The research psychologist Sylvan Tompkins has
focused on the relationship between shame and the human neurobiological processes and he too uses the rhetoric of shame. For Tompkins to be ashamed is to lose face. How can the loss of face he says be more tolerable than the loss of life. He goes on however to make a distinction between shame and contempt. Shame has to do with the estimation of others on our value and our worth. Contempt occurs when we internalize those conceptions. In some
shame is associated with loss but not permanent loss. You can move from shame to honor. But contempt is associated with permanent loss. Shame is associated with democratic social structures and contempt is associated with the hierarchical social structures and those structures depend on the unbridgeable chasms between individuals, classes and nations. The rhetoric of loss as the discourse of shame can also be seen in broader collective terms. Julio Caro Barroja argues that notions of honor and shame during
the Spanish Inquisition were related to the idea of racial purity or what he calls the purity of blood. During this period the whole of Spain he says was dominated by a preoccupation with the concepts of purity and cleanliness of blood and of impurity, stain or blood. This purity of blood being equated with honor and impurity with dishonor. The shame was associated with, he says, having Jewish blood as opposed to gothic blood as he calls it. In
a larger context shame is in this instance defined by discourse which speaks to the loss of racial purity. The rhetoric of loss is both the mark of the ones who are shamed and their way of ameliorating the effects of shame. One writer has argued that women and other social outsiders have perfected the rhetoric of loss because it is for them the means to attain honor and those means have normally been denied to them. Along with women,
argues the anthropologist Lila Abu Lihud, along with women, mad people, idiots and children who also express the experiences of loss in an uncontrolled way are considered outside society in some sense. They are not fully social beings or proper members of society, ineffectual and dependent. They have no honor. This rhetoric of loss most often takes the form of poetry, song or some other artistic vehicle which offers a socially acceptable means of expression while providing a way of
warding off the death dealing effects of shame, social dislocation and powerlessness. Many of the particular social conditions which have been described above appear to be inapplicable to contemporary society. Precedence in modern western societies is accorded on the basis of economics these days and women are generally more independent than these descriptions suggest. Further, the avenues for winning honor through physical courage have been limited largely to sports and to war. Although the context has changed, the principles of
honor and shame remain as constant and universal social structures of human evaluation. Both the constancy and complexity of these social structures are evident in the historical experience of African slaves and their descendants in the New World. What follows is a brief discussion of some of the ways that honor and shame can assist in understanding what challenges were presented to African Americans and what responses were required of African Americans by the institution of slavery. From this it
may be possible to understand how these structures continue to influence black life. Honor, shame and American slavery. The historian Orlando Patterson has noted that the American South in the 18th and 19th centuries was an honor and shame culture. Indeed, he argues that the economic motives for the enslavement of Africans was minimal and paled in comparison to the value of the slave in confirming the honor of the slave master. In Patterson's view, the primary purpose of slavery
was to impute honor to those who held slaves. This meant that slaves and slaveholders were held together within an Hegelian dialectic of dependency and submission. I personally would agree that the requirement of honor was a large part of the system of slavery, but unlike Patterson, I would not say to the total exclusion of the economic benefits to the slaveholder. Slavocracy in the South was a society unto itself with its own laws, codes and symbolic points of
reference. The highly stratified character of Southern society, its codes of male chivalry and female reticence meant that the structures of honor and shame were more pronounced there than other parts of the United States. Moreover, notions of honor and shame can provide a way of understanding the attempts of African American slaves to navigate their environment in light of their reading and misreading of the social script of racial oppression. Orlando Patterson argues that, and I quote him here,
the dishonor which the slave was to experience sprang from that raw human sense of debasement inherent in having no being except as an expression of another's being. I would argue, however, that the imputation of shame onto slaves within the system of slavery was meant to counter the aspiration of African slaves to honor as well as to prove that they were dishonorable. Shame rather than guilt is the operative emotional response in this instance. The puritanical notion of
guilt was a central component in the religious psychological makeup of the 18th and 19th centuries in our nation, and it has received its most striking treatment in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter. The sexual liaison, if you will remember, between the Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale and Ms. Hester Prynne was an allegorical expression of the preoccupation of a certain segment of American society with a guilt brought on by sin, especially in its sexual manifestations. As Hawthorne deftly
notes, guilt has no natural external manifestation. This is why Hester Prynne was made to wear the Scarlet Letter A on her clothing. In a striking twist of the plot, the same letter mysteriously appears on the chest of the Reverend Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale. The point here is that the effects of guilt are usually private and individual, especially when it comes to men at least. While the effects of shame, which applied to Ms. Prynne in this instance, are
public and social. Because African slaves came from African social contexts of honor and shame, the puritanical notion of guilt was not as significant to them. However, the idea of shame was an effective means of social control. For the purposes of this discussion, there are three observations to be made regarding the effects of honor and shame on African slaves. First, because slaves came from traditional societies which had their own codes of honor and shame, many of them
sought to accommodate to this new social context by drawing on their cultural memory. They understood from the practices of slavery within traditional African societies that to be a slave was to be shamed or dishonored. But they also understood that the effects of shame could be mitigated in several ways. They could seek honor in limited ways through meritorious conduct. By faithfully serving their masters, they might merit a measure of honor. Or they could seek honor by claiming
it as their birthright, by seeking honor through a measure of meritorious conduct. It's interesting to go back and to reread Booker T. Washington in light of that particular attempt. Or they could seek honor by claiming it as their birthright. Some slaves, including Frederick Douglass, did claim honor because their fathers were white. The tragic dimension to this attempt is that it usually required the shaming of their mothers and that these claims to paternally rooted honor were usually
denied. Or they could seek honor as slaves did in ancient Greco-Roman culture by situating themselves as closely as possible to the source and fount of honor, that is the white slaveholding. This is the root of the form of classism prevalent on some plantations which made distinctions between field hands who labored far from the master's mansion and the house servants who enjoyed proximity to the center of power. These ways were the only avenues open to slaves
because the exercise of physical force or violence, except in a few highly publicized cases, to retain one's honor often carried too great a cost. In the final analysis, every avenue to honor exercised by African slaves was eventually revealed to be a dead end because African slaves were actually excluded from the honor and shame culture of the South. When it came to African slaves, they were not simply regarded as shamed persons, but recalling the insights of Sylvan
Tompkins, they were held in contempt. This notion of contempt as opposed to shame was what distinguished the enslavement of in the modern world from every prior form of human enslavement. Being held in contempt was the epitome of human alienation. Second, honor and shame in American slavery were associated with sexuality. Since the honor of women were symbolized by their chastity, black women in slavery could, in this view, aspire to no honor because their sexual purity was constantly
being compromised by the sexual appetites of their slave masters. Moreover, black men were dishonored because of their inability to defend their wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers from sexual assault. At the same time, myths regarding the sexual prowess of black men became a potent symbol of the possible dishonor of white men through the sexual conquest of their women by black men. The power of this symbolic association is evident in the fact that black men did not need
to actually touch a white woman to be accused of rape and brutally punished. This is one way to understand the murder in the 1960s of 15-year-old Emmett Till, who was savagely murdered for ostensibly leering at a white woman. The inability of black women to retain their honor as women in this setting and the inability of black men to defend their honor by protecting black women resulted in the symbolic masculinization of black women and feminization
of black men. In a painful scene in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, she tells the story of the sexual exploitation of black male slaves by their white captives. Third, the dynamics of honor and shame in American slavery were associated with racial purity. The shame of slavery was a lot of every person who could be proven to have one drop of African blood. It did not matter how much Caucasian blood a person had, it could not overcome the
so-called stain of blackness. When the opportunity presented itself, some slaves chose to pass into the white world in order to escape the shame of blackness. The system of honor and shame, which existed in the South during slavery, continues to affect the lives of African Americans. Although the language of honor and shame is rarely used, the deep-seated need for what the word honor represents is a permanent feature of life. Because black persons still live, in
many ways, outside the circles of influence which enclose their existence. The musical form of the blues has been the traditional mode of expressing the lament of shame. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham describes the quest of black baptist women in her most recent book. At the beginning of the 20th century, she describes their quest for respectability. Miss Aretha Franklin in the latter part of the 20th century asked for a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T. The call
for respect is the call for honor and more. It is a plea for a new system of social valuation which honors everyone, but does not depend on the degradation of anyone. I'm going to end there and we will pick up next time with the rhetoric of honor and shame in the Bible and then move on to an African American theology of Thank you. We have time for some questions. Yes. I think besides guilt being more or
less, it depends on which person. We take Rawls' comment on the difference between guilt and shame. For him, guilt implied, you can do something about your feeling of guilt because it's more internalized. Rawls would say that because shame is basically that status which is imputed on you by someone else, it in and of itself exemplifies lack of power to do anything about it. Other people have other particular twists on that. I think for me, and basically
here, I was just trying to outline the range of positions on guilt and shame. There's a whole literature, I'm sure you know, on guilt and its relationship to religion and Freud and all of this sort of thing. I think it's too complex for me to even get my whole head around, let alone summarize it all. For me, I think that shame has this kind of public social character that is associated with something that's observable in people,
primarily skin color. Although that's why I brought up the example of Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter, because in the case of Hester Prynne, the woman, it was observable in this letter that she had to kind of wear outside. Not the least to say was the fact that she had this illegitimate baby that she was carrying around with her. It's all external. Of course, if you remember that story, only about halfway through do we get the hint
that somebody else is involved here and the question is how will we know about the guilt of his own involvement. But this kind of puritanical notion of guilt is kind of being internalized. I'm saying that in honor and shame cultures, as I have read them, that shame is always external. It's always social. It's always out there because it requires the imputation of shame by someone else and it requires witnesses. You can't be ashamed by yourself. For
you to be shamed, you have to be shamed in front of somebody. I think that's the difference. That's what public whippings of slaves was about, among other things. It was just discipline. It was a matter of doing it in a way that shamed them in front of other people. I have another question. Yes. I want to go back to the film that we just did. My question is, are Blacks experiencing things because of recognizing any fallout
against the White because they are being measured according to middle class White standards and expectations based on the so-called in-level claims. Well, I was interested. As I said, I think most of the critiques that I've read of affirmative action programs are so fundamentally flawed at the outset. It's hard for me to even sort of start refuting them. For me, I was just interested in the kind of rhetoric that they used to oppose it. The
rhetoric was shamed. For Black students in the academy, Black workers in the workplace, that somehow you weren't going to measure up. Nobody really articulates what the standards are except that there are objective standards like the SATs and other things, really objective. But the question there is, why is that particular rhetorical strategy used? Well, because it is not meant to appeal basically to the dominant society. Those arguments are meant to appeal to African Americans. It's meant to
say to African Americans, you really don't belong here and if you come here, you're going to be embarrassed. You're going to be made ashamed. And even if you do succeed, everybody else will know that you only got into Princeton Seminary because of affirmative action. And that's the argument that's used. And it doesn't have to be backed up with really real fact, basically. Because it's a rhetorical strategy based on deep-seated human emotions. And it's not necessarily
based on fact. I would venture to guess that you could find research that would refute that. Yes? Yeah, it is. But the real question is who defines human work. And I'm saying in a culture of honor and shame that what we find is that a person's worth is determined from the outside. As a matter of fact, if you read the section in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan where he talks about honor, he says over and over again, he
uses the commercial model. He says that a person's, your evaluation of how much you're worth, he said, oh, that's of emotional value to you. But your real worth is determined by the marketplace. And he gives a variety of examples of how the marketplace or public opinion determines how much you are worth as an individual. So, I mean, that's the real key is where is the seat of human evaluation. And in honor and shame cultures, the reference
point is external and not internal. Yes? Yes? My question comes from a different point. First, I would ask you, do you see the extent of shame, honor, and dishonor in the afternoon, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening? Yes. Yes. So, in the misogynistic element of the place, the place of the experience, and not the community, is that the second point? The fact of shame. How would you respond to the role of the human
perspective on these services? Because you point out that that intervention theology is not just about the woman, it's about the woman. So, in that sense, it's different. So, dishonor and shame are different. How do you see that in the sounds that we use to work with that? Well, I think that, let me say, I agree that at least from the perspective of the work that I'm engaged in right now, that we would need to look at
the different ways that black women and black men have experienced oppression. And for me, honor and shame gives me a way to get in there and to explain that difference within the whole system of slavery. And I think part of the problem that we've had in terms of moving ahead in the articulation of African American experience as a source of our theology is that we have often pretended that African American experience is monolithic. And it's the
same for both men, women, both lower socioeconomic, upper, and it's not. It takes on different subtle forms within the overall context of slavery. And I'm saying that by looking at the differences within slavery, that it doesn't really drive divisions within the African American community. What it does is it lends both reality, comprehensiveness, and complexity to our analysis of our own experience. So, I think there is a difference, for example, between the ways that African male slaves
and African female slaves experience that particular institution. And that's not to say that one was less oppressed than the other, but they experience oppression in different ways. Yeah, I'd just like to jump in and talk about what is the African American individual responsibility in terms of, or emotional responsibility? Well, that's a good question. Could I address that at the next lecture? But if you would really please hold that for me, because I think that would kind
of lead me into, and also give me some time to think about it. Yes, Linda? Yes. Well, he makes, in that article, he makes a number of observations about changes within the American cultural and economic system that leads to the emergence of black concerns. But relative to this particular point, his argument is that black conservatives seek the approval of their white colleagues. And that part of that is their own attempt to avoid what they feel is
a kind of sense of shame of being associated with black people. So many of the denials relative to the influence of racism on the life chances of black people are related to an attempt to forge a kind of solidarity with one's white peers. I mean, that's his perspective on it. Let me make it clear that I'm summarizing, I'm paraphrasing his article on that. Yes? Kind of ostracized by her own community, especially through this fact that she
was very sexually active on her own. So here you can see the pariah of the community, the civil rights movement that comes to Selma. The change is too near in this movement. And I'll never forget, he says, at one point, the movement was kind of almost dying out because people weren't participating. I think he said King asked her to come to the president at a meeting. Everybody was saying I was dirty, everybody was saying I was
nothing. But I was thankful for the movement, so I was a dumbass. I'd like to ask if there's so many questions about relationships that define dignity and kind of work. What's the relationship between dignity and honor? It kind of points to one of the ways in which people can overcome the status of shame. It's basically through, in a sense, what we call kind of meritorious conduct, to use that phrase. Meritorious conduct, however, in the arena of
this liberation struggle, if you put it. So there are ways in which people can overcome the imputation of shame. But I think it requires that we somehow get out from under the hegemony of those terms as they're externally defined. And sometimes that's a difficult thing. Dr. Whitaker? Yes? You were talking about honor and shame in terms of the white community, the black community, with the white community terminating the status of the black community. Is there background
information on how honor and shame worked within the black community to have its own structure of honor and shame, rather than independent? Well, as I indicated, there were systems of codes of honor and shame in most African traditional societies. They had their systems of honor and shame, and they had their systems of slavery, if we want to call it that. But the difference was that honor and shame were not associated with skin color. It was only
when they were made slaves in the New World that honor and shame became associated with something that was a permanent part of their own being, their skin color, which they could not change. And so the overcoming and the moving from the status of shame to honor became much more difficult in the New World. Now, in terms of within the African American community, the internalization of those codes certainly happened. It happened, and that's Cornel West's issue relative
to the black conservatives. He says it's still happening, that there's still a kind of internalization of the dominant external codes of honor and shame. And his point is that when those codes of honor and shame are internalized within the African American community, then you get certain sorts of self-destructive behaviors and ideologies. So in terms of studies, in my research, I have not yet come across any extensive studies on how honor and shame work within the
African American community. We have one more question. Okay, yes. I wonder, when it does work in situations where it's just saying, I think of a professor who might take his name as being a pedagogical tool, but maybe a white professor or student or parent who thinks that they can teach their children well by saying that, I wonder if it's essentially similar to what you're saying that others who have the same thing, or is that really something
that is not dependent on something that's external? I would think that there are limits to how you can understand honor and shame when shame is not associated with a particular biological characteristic like race or gender or height or shortness or something else. I think as long as shame is associated with a set of actions or behaviors rather than a physical characteristic, then you can change your action or behavior. The problem is you can't change the physical
characteristics. Well, I think we want to thank Professor Evans very, very much. Thank you. And let me remind...