Racist people are not “total monsters.” Here’s what they are. | Chloé Valdary
Theory of Enchantment is an organization that I created in 2018. It is an anti-racism organization and its three founding principles are: treat people like human beings, not political abstractions; criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy; and try to root everything you do in love and compassion, unlike other more traditional D.E.I. programs.
The Theory of Enchantment really encourages people and invites people to explore the deep complexity and diversity of their own beings. There's so much diversity in a single human being, let alone an entire group of people. And if we can learn how to get in right relationship with that, we'll be less likely to project our insecurities and the things that we don't like about ourselves onto others. We'll be more likely to see diversity within ourselves as a source of wonder, as opposed to a threat, and seeing it within our neighbors as a source of wonder.
In 1965, James Baldwin had a debate with William F. Buckley. He tells a story of a young black woman who is physically assaulted by a sheriff in the deep South, in the United States and Alabama. He describes the sheriff in a particularly striking way. He says, “Now no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I'm sure he loves his wife, his children. I'm sure that no, he likes to get drunk after all one's got to assume, and he is visibly a man like me. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle crawl against a woman's breast, for example.”
What happens to the woman is gaslit. What happens to the man who does it is, in some ways, much, much worse. What Baldwin is observing in that moment, I believe, is the inner psyche of the human being. The inner psyche that drives a person to project elements about themselves that they do not know and that they do not like onto another person, such that they are moved to such cruelty.
What he is essentially calling us to start to be aware of, is to start to be aware of the inner dynamics within our own lives, within our own identities. Start to bring consciousness to our own identities such that we will be less likely to be impulsive in that way that that sheriff was. If you scale that up, if an entire society is not in right relationship with their inner being, you will see racism and other forms of hatred and cruelties occur on a massive scale that will be that much more difficult to deal with, and to ameliorate and to heal in the long run.