A CHOICE OF DESCRIPTIONS: SELF, RACE, AND GRACE IN CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION1 DONALD H. WACOME Associate Professor of Philosophy Northwestern College (IA) The moral significance of describing What human beings do is closely connected to how they describe things, including themselves and their actions. The justification of an action is grounded, one way or another, in an appeal to a description of how things are. However, the task of describing reality is not straightforward; things can be correctly described in a great variety of ways. Even on the assumption that all true descriptions of things are commensurable with one another, an action that appears to be justified when things are described one way may turn out to be unjustified when things are described in another way. An action that might seem morally right when described one way, e.g. ÒIÕm defending my possession of the property IÕve legally acquiredÓ or ÒIÕm exercising my right to privacy and reproductive freedom,Ó may turn out to be wrong when described in another way ÒIÕm keeping my slaves from getting away,Ó or ÒIÕm having the fetus IÕm carrying killed.Ó If an action is wrong under one true description then its appearing right under another true description is morally irrelevant; it is morally wrong. But we human beings have the power to push aside and make ourselves unconscious of the descriptions we donÕt want to know about. An important but not well-understood feature of our moral psychology is that we have the ability to choose not only what descriptions we employ in our public attempts to explain and defend what we do, but also which ones we are fully conscious of in our private practical reasoning. Human beings have a deep- seated inclination to see themselves as justified in doing whatever they do. It is rare for a human being to admit even (and perhaps especially) to himself that what heÕs doing is wrong. Instead, we persistently pay attention to descriptions of our actions under which they appear to be justified. Traditional attempts to understand the human problem as simply volitional, in terms of a radically corrupt will, or as intellectual, so that wrongdoing is a result of ignorance, fail to focus on this crucial feature of our predicament, i.e. our ability to be evasive. The Judeo-Christian conception of Òoriginal sin,Ó on which there is a universal human desire Òto be as gods,Ó knowing and thus controlling goodness and evil, partially explains this pervasive human evasiveness. I know of no other account that comes even this close to explaining this fact about us. In this essay I focus on a particular kind of choice of descriptions, viz. those human beings apply to themselves, rather than to their actions or to things other than themselves. More specifically, I consider those ways in which we describe ourselves that involve categorizing ourselves as belonging to certain groups of human beings. I explore some of the ways in which choosing to categorize oneself as belonging to a particular human group is morally, and ultimately theologically, important, especially as these choices shape a personÕs self-conception, and thus the person herself. My reason for examining our choices of categorical descriptions of ourselves is to draw some tentative conclusions about the possibilities of forming genuine multi- ethnic Christian communities. It is trivially true that every human being belongs to an indefinitely large number of categories, groups, classes, or sets of human beings (henceforth, IÕll use these terms interchangeably), and it is equally obvious that there are in principle as many categorical descriptions available to a person. No one could possibly use all the true categorical descriptions that could be truly applied to him; there are many more than he could conceivably think of in a lifetime. The vast majority of descriptions of a person that are true are unimportant and uninteresting. It is, for instance, true that I do not being to the class of prime numbers, but in most contexts this is not a particularly interesting description of me. I can correctly describe myself as belonging to the class of people born on a Wednesday, the class of people having brown hair, the class of people living west of the Hudson River, and so on, yet I would not normally take these ways of describing myself as significant. But it is in one way or another important to me that I can correctly describe myself as a male, a philosopher, an American, a Red Sox fan, a Protestant, and so on. I identify with the others who belong to these groups and I identify myself as belonging to these groups of people. What is important, interesting, or significant, is very sensitive to context. If the government decided to send all brown-haired males born in the 1950Õs to fight in Bosnia, that I belong to this group of human beings would suddenly become a very significant fact about me, even if I had never consciously entertained this complex categorical description of myself before. An characteristic feature of human beings is that what each of us is depends in part on how we describe ourselves to ourselves. Not because thinking something is so generally makes it so, but because each human being is the sort of thing that has a self-conception and the possession of this self-conception is, from various points of view, an important and interesting fact about that person. Whether or not Jane actually is a genius, the fact that she conceives herself as one is a significant fact about her. Whether or not Arnold is in fact fatally attractive to the opposite sex, the fact that he imagines himself to be is an important fact about him. By a self-conception I mean the collection of ways in which a person habitually describes himself to himself, where those self-descriptions function as justifying premises in his practical reasoning and play a role in his explanations of why other people act toward him the way they do. An individual describes herself in ways that have a decisive influence on how she chooses to act, and she thinks that other people act in certain ways because they conceive of her in these ways. We may distinguish the set of descriptions that constitutes an individualÕs self-conception from the much larger set of descriptions that he accepts as true of himself. Also, a personÕs self-conception is different from the manifold of ways in which he imaginatively describes himself. For example, ArnoldÕs fantasizing about being a great lover is not the same as him conceiving of himself as a great lover, even if this happens to be a false description of him, i.e. even if his self- conception in this respect is illusory. Presumably, each human beingÕs self-conception is partially, but not completely, true. It is not clear how, and to what extent, we are free to select our own self-descriptions, and thus free in the formation of our self conceptions, yet it is is a morally important fact about human beings that we are to some extent free to do so. The lives we live, and thus the persons we become, are importantly shaped by the self-conceptions we hold. As expressions of our freedom, our self-conceptions are subject to moral appraisal. That someone sincerely describes himself a certain way is not, in itself, subject to moral evaluation, on the assumption that what he believes is not directly in his control. Nonetheless, there is a place for moral evaluation here, because someone having a particular self-conception may be a result of his having selected certain descriptions over others, deciding to keep certain descriptions in conscious view rather than others, choosing to constitute himself in one way rather than others. Certain choices of self-description are good, others are bad. Some institutional arrangements may be conducive of good choices; others may be conducive of bad choices. Crossing the boundaries Consider a simple abstract model of different ways people see reality. Think of the structures of this world, its partition into various kinds of things and into things of the various kinds. Reality is not an undifferentiated blob; it is replete with boundaries. Speaking very generally (and thereby glossing over all kinds of qualifications and exceptions) people fall into one of two camps with respect to their attitudes toward the worldÕs boundaries. Those who are moved by what IÕll call the ÒconservativeÓ impulse want to clearly delineate, maintain, and defend the boundaries. So far as they are concerned the differences between things are good and important and should not be ignored, moved, or destroyed by human beings. If they think boundaries have been obscured or breached their desire is to redraw the lines and put things back where they belong. The conservative mind fears the dissolution of the world by the forces of chaos which, given their way, will break down and obliterate the boundaries, dissolving the worldÕs structure, destroying the differences between things and erasing their individuality and reality. Nowhere is the conservative frame of mind more pronounced today than in resistance to feminism, where we find conservatives defending the belief in deep, natural differences between women and men, and warning of disaster if we violate them. The other basic attitude toward the worldÕs boundaries, structures and differences is what I will call the ÒliberalÓ attitude.2 While the conservative finds meaning and security in the boundaries, the liberal finds them arbitrary and stifling. Boundaries, on the liberal view, are to be ignored, changed, and at best, removed. The liberal looks eagerly ahead to new forms, new permutations, envisaging a future in which the arbitrary constricting structures of the past have been obliterated in favor of freedom to create, explore, and inhabit new possibilities. In contrast to the conservative, the liberal is sympathetic to feminism, disposed to believe the claim that the current differences between men and women are superficial and accidental, products of an unfortunate history and now, at last, subject to change. The liberal and the conservative attitudes both manifest deeply rooted ways of caring about the world. For fallen human beings there is probably no end to the conflict between the two perspectives. We should always be wary of attempts to define a Christian Òthird wayÓ between competing viewpoints. Sometimes they logically exhaust the possibilities. Sometimes one of them is right. Often, the attempt to find a Christian middle way amounts to seeking an incoherent compromise position between the two sides, rather than a perspective authentically informed by the good news of Jesus Christ. To articulate a distinctively Christian position is to illuminate the partial or distorted truths contained in the competing non-Christian perspectives by introducing a new truth that explains and integrates the other viewpoints. So far as the conflict between what IÕve called the liberal and the conservative attitudes toward the boundaries is concerned, the intervention of the word of God achieves this. Liberals want to remove the boundaries that conservatives want to guard. The Christian view is that boundaries exist in order to be crossed.3 Consider again the issue of feminism. What is in question here is a pervasive, important structural difference, a boundary between very different kinds of thing (males and females). The conservativeÕs concern is that the boundary between male and female be kept distinct, that members of one sex not intrude on the role of the other, and that there be no blurring or mixing of the sexes. The public acceptance of homosexuality and of women assuming traditionally male roles appear as profound aberrations, ultimately threatening the order of the human universe. (This helps explain why people who seem to have no immediate practical interest in these issues can react to them in such emotionally intense ways.) On the other side, the liberal sees the defense of the male/female boundary as an attempt to force individuals into social forms with which the conservative is comfortable, and which support traditional distributions of wealth, power and prestige in society. At the extreme the liberal says: ÒSociety creates authoritarian dualism between males and females. We want to open up new terrain for ourselvesÓ4 In contrast to both stances, the Christian approach perceives the difference between male and female as profoundly important, and cherishes it, not for its own sake, but because it is a necessary condition of the boundary crossing that is involved in rich, complex relations of love and difference. The point of keeping the boundary distinct is to keep alive the possibility of crossing it, i.e. the possibility of love between men and women. At the same time, as it becomes clear that the boundaries do not exist for their own sake, but in order to make possible love between persons who are truly different from one another, the demarcation and defense of the boundaries cannot be justified except in accord with their own inner logic, i.e. by appeal to that for which they exist. So, from an authentic Christian perspective it will not be acceptable to defend reserving certain social roles for men and others for women on the basis of an appeal to natural or divine order, without reference to how doing this might effect the chances for human beings of one sex to cross the great boundary so as to know, and be known by, the strangeness that is the other. This will be no more acceptable than to try to erase the boundary and pretend there is such a thing as sexually undifferentiated humanity, neither male nor female but merely generically human. The ultimate boundary crossing lies at the heart of the Christian confession. God himself crosses the boundary between God and man, between the Holy and the unholy. God does not separate himself from us, nor does he dismiss as insignificant the barrier between us and him. He crosses over to us so as to transform us and have fellowship with us. He expresses his holiness in the very act of identifying with the wicked. A human conception of divine righteousness would have it that God has nothing to do with us, closing himself up in the eternal glory of heaven. Human desire would be to destroy the barrier between this God and man, as human beings become little gods themselves, self-engrossed, self-righteous, and complete in themselves, denying the reality of the wholly Other. But God chooses to be together with those who are different from him. His choice for human beings is that they not be separated from him, but that they know him as he who crossed the greatest of boundaries for them. Faithful Christian action reflects and witnesses to this crossing of boundaries. Racial Boundaries The idea of crossing boundaries that are real and valuable simply because without them there is no crossing of boundaries, no love and knowledge of that which is other than oneself, should occupy a central place in Christian thought about human relations. There are deep differences between groups of human beings, especially between different ethnic groups. (These are the differences that are popularly but mistakenly called Òracial.Ó) In the absence of good empirical evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to suppose that the biological differences are superficial. If the differences between ethnic groups was merely biological, racism would not be the intractable problem for human beings that it has been. Different ethnic groups have different histories, different ways of life, different values; they embody different cultures. These cultural divergences are not mere differences, i.e. they are not simply the different ways people dress, dance, eat, and talk, etc. If these differences were the only boundaries between groups of people, members of one group probably would view those of others as interesting and picaresque, not as threateningly alien. The differences between ethnic groups in fact are often deep moral differences. Ways of thinking and acting that one group of people prizes as morally valuable another may consider morally suspect. Things that one group sees as important another group sees as trivial. In the moral imagination of one group the positive features of something may loom large, while in that of another group, which has had different experiences with it, its negative features may be salient. Each culture assumes implicitly that its evaluation of things is correct, and that those of other groups exemplify fundamental moral mistakes. Take something as important in a culture as attitudes toward work. Americans conceive themselves as having a reasonable and balanced view of the role work should play in an individualÕs life and in the life of the community. Unlike, say Mexicans, we take work seriously but, unlike the Germans and Japanese, we arenÕt obsessed with it! Each group of people makes its way through life in a fallen world. Each culture grasps some fragmentary truth about how human beings can best live, but each also embodies a great deal of moral error. The supposition that the differences between cultures are merely dissimilarities, so that the question of better and worse doesnÕt come up, trivializes the problem of the boundaries between ethnic groups. A great deal can be at stake at the interface between cultures. Crossing the boundary from one ethnic culture to another, i.e. living in openness and harmony with strange people, can be difficult and painful, requiring a re- evaluation, and perhaps a relativization, of some of our conceptions of what is good and bad in human life. However, God intends neither that the different kinds of people be kept apart, nor that they merge together and become indistinguishable, but that being different they will yet be together. The boundaries between peoples exist so individuals can move across them to share and rejoice in their differences. Education for free and responsible self-describing Christian liberal arts colleges in the United States have traditionally been dominated by representatives of the majority culture, which is white and middle class. We face the question of how to open ourselves to students and colleagues of Afro- American, Hispanic, and Asian backgrounds. Boundary crossing, rather than the effacing or closing of boundaries between these minority cultures and the majority culture, is the ideal that should be motivating us as we make curricular and extracurricular policy. It can only be a matter of acute shame if a Christian liberal arts college, operated by those who are allegedly self- consciously trusting God in their private and professional lives, can only cope with their minority brothers and sisters by keeping themselves separate from them, or by forcing them to assimilate, so they become only superficially different from the predominant ethnic culture. The goal for the Christian college is to grow into a community of profoundly dissimilar people who overcome, but do not destroy, the differences that separate them. The goal of fellowship across the boundaries is easy to state, but it is not always clear how to go about trying to realize it. One way it is helpful to think about this is by examining the choices people make as they describe themselves. Certain ways we describe ourselves and one another are good, insofar as they encourage the crossing of boundaries between ethnically diverse people, while others are bad because they lead us to try to close off, or to obliterate, the boundaries that separate us from one another. Christian educators need to deliberately encourage students to avoid spontaneously and uncritically including categorizations of themselves as members of particular ethnic groups in their self-conceptions. Our proper aim is that our students freely and responsibly choose their self-descriptions. A liberal education, over against the various forms of training and indoctrination, enables students to look within and to responsibly form their conception of themselves. We should not, of course, try to get them not to believe that they belong to whatever groups they do in fact belong to; that would be absurd. We should encourage students to conceive of themselves as individuals first, and to categorize themselves a members of some ethnic (or any other) group only insofar as they freely value their membership in that group. Christian college faculty can foster a choice of descriptions that is really a choice of descriptions, not something imposed on the individual by a desire to conform to either the majority or the minority culture, or for that matter the dominant religious culture. Students need help to conceive themselves as individuals who take responsibility for being what they are, learning that what they are is not ultimately a matter biological, social, or cultural determination, but the result of responsible choice before God. It is currently fashionable to denigrate ÒindividualismÓ and to emphasize the fact that human beings are in part the products of particular traditions and cultures, not purely autonomous, self-created entities who can become whatever they choose. The idea of the splendidly rational, isolated self that arose out of early modern epistemological, political and economic theories is now perceived as itself a cultural product, one that is in many ways seriously inadequate. Nonetheless, a core conception of ontological and moral individualism is correct, and it is inseparable from the Christian faith. We are finally responsible for ourselves before a God who knows each of us as individuals. Further, it seems obvious that individualism is what all of us, Christian or not, really accept. Anyone who doubts that the human individual is not the proper primary focus of moral judgment should ask himself what he thinks of cultures in which someone can be considered guilty and worthy of punishment simply in virtue of belonging to the same ethnic or national group as someone who did something wrong (cf. the terrorists who think any American is fair game because some other American has treated him, or people like him, unjustly). Anyone who doubts that the individual is the proper primary locus of moral judgment should consider what he thinks of cultures in which marriage partners are selected by parents, or those in which occupations are selected by the state. Anyone who says the individual is not the ultimate bearer of moral worth should consider the view that one innocent person may properly be sacrificed so as to maximize group utility. It is all too clear that the modern Western European tradition of liberal individualism has culminated in too many individuals who exhibit little or no concern for others and for their communities. Nonetheless, this state of affairs is pointed out to free individuals, on the assumption that they have it in their power to do something about it. We live in an allegedly highly individualistic culture, yet many of us have powerful urges to create an identity by describing ourselves as parts of something greater than themselves. People categorize themselves as belonging to some socioeconomic class, or some nationality, or some ethnic group, and conceive themselves as superior to those who donÕt. People irrationally attempt to acquire a sense of self-worth by means of group affiliation.5 One way to think about racism is to see it as a case of oneÕs making it easier to focus on oneÕs own appealing descriptions of oneself by focusing on unattractive descriptions of other readily-identifiable individuals. Fallen human beings, motivated by the desire for god-like transcendence, make it easier to conceive themselves as they want to conceive themselves by describing others as less than fully human. Racism is a particularly compelling way to do this because it is automatic: I need only see the other person to describe myself as superior. To conceive oneself in this way is to create a barrier between oneself and the rest of humanity. In doing so one forsakes others for what looks and feels like oneself, thereby making it impossible to cross over to those who are different from oneself. The key issue is not whether someone includes an ethnic categorization in her self-conception. Indeed, with Robert Bellah and the other authors of Habits of the Heart, we may hope to see Òan individualism that is not empty but is full of content drawn from an active identification with communities and traditions.Ó6 Excluding ethnic awareness from oneÕs self- conception is probably impossible and surely not desirable for someone living in a society where social, political, and economic differences are coextensive with ethnic differences, so that belonging to oneÕs ethnic group is of genuine practical significance in the attempt to live oneÕs daily life, and thus not something she can safely ignore. Our self-conceptions are subject to moral appraisal, but not because we can constitute them at will. Certain facts about the categories to which one belongs may be impossible to ignore and may thrust themselves into oneÕs self-conception independently of what one wills or desires. In some cases, our freedom with respect to our self- conceiving is limited to how one ranks the different self- descriptions that shape oneÕs behavior. It seems reasonable, on both a priori and experiential grounds, that there is some sort of priority ranking of our self-descriptions within the overall conceptions we form of ourselves. Some ways in which we describe ourselves are more important to us than others. A rough behavioral criterion for such rankings will suffice here: If in my practical reasoning my belief that I belong to group A inclines me toward doing action x, while my belief that I belong to group B inclines me toward doing action y, then, all things being equal, my doing x indicates that I rank my being an A more highly than my being being a B. I thus take myself as an A who is also a B, not as a B who is also an A. The way in which someone orders her self-descriptions in her self-conception reveals what she cares about. It shows where her ultimate loyalties lie and how she envisions her place in the world and among her fellow human beings. Our educational responsibility includes helping our students grasp that they have some degree of freedom in how they rank their different self-descriptions, even if they donÕt have an absolute freedom to be influenced by them, or not influenced by them, at will. The education of a human being as a free and responsible individual involves equipping him to see that there is more than one way to look at, and weigh things, and thus more than one possible course of action open to him. The responsible selfhood we help our students achieve results, in part, from our leading them to develop the habit of exercising critical, imaginative powers of self-description. The alternative to freedom in describing and conceiving oneself is fatalism and irresponsibility. When someone thinks, e.g., ÒBlack people are like this, I am a black person, so I must be like this,Ó she is accepting a self-description as determining her actions and describing herself as powerless to resist her fate. To actually achieve freedom of self-conception may be very difficult. As a dimension of significant human freedom it comes in degrees that depend on the discipline of the imagination, the emotions, the will, and the intellect. As we recognize that human individuals have the power to choose their own self-conceptions and value the exercise of that power, we also must recognize its vulnerability. There are other ways someone can acquire a self-conception. Ways others people describe a person, especially when they are used pervasively by a dominant majority that controls the universe of public discourse, can be very difficult to escape. If everyone thinks IÕm lazy, shiftless, and dumb, it may be extraordinarily hard for me to avoid believing this and acting accordingly. Perhaps only if I am exceptionally hardworking and bright will I be able to reject the imposition of this description. Similarly, if everyone tells me I am a victim, it may be very hard for me to assume responsibility for my own life.7 It may be much easier to simply accept the descriptions that oneÕs culture, or the dominant culture within which one finds oneself a minority, induces in one. The theoretical ideal of the human individual as freely selecting and ranking her categorical self-descriptions is in constant need of support, especially in college-age students, who are at a crucial stage in the process of constructing their identities. But this support can be hard to come by. Not only does the pervasive human tendency to give up oneÕs freedom of self-description so as to gain a spurious sense of self-worth by conceiving of oneself as part of some large group work against the realization of this freedom, but the way people describe and categorize one another can also make it difficult to escape the seductive pull of fatalism. The human mind simplifies in order to understand. We are so constructed that it is impossible for us to pay equal attention to the differences and similarities that are actually present in what we experience. When we encounter things that are different from what we are used to, their differences from that with which we are familiar are salient; their differences from one another are relatively hard to notice. Thus the Òthey all look alikeÓ phenomenon, i.e. the inability to easily individuate people belonging to ethnic groups much removed from our own. For what are intrinsically innocent epistemological reasons, a white, suburban-bred professor may find it difficult to see his black, Asian, or Hispanic students as the unique individuals they are. If others tend not to conceptualize a person as an individual, but instead implicitly conceive of her as a generic Afro- American, Asian-American, or Hispanic-American, this makes it difficult for her to internalize the lesson that she is an individual, free to make what she will of her ethnic background. The fact that our failures to treat minority students as individuals can be a matter, not of unconscious racism, but inherent constraints on human information processing, does not excuse us from the obligation to make an extra effort if this is what is required to treat a student with the dignity and respect that conceiving him as an individual entails. Given our traditional focus on the moral importance of principles, and even our more recent re-discovery of the moral significance of the virtues, the moral centrality of vision and imagination is often neglected (cf. the work of Stanley Hauerwas and Iris Murdoch on this aspect of the moral life). It takes time, patience, and grace to see people as individuals. Familiarity is the mother of individuation. Individuals can be known only one at a time. What we must occasionally say and frequently show about the value of human freedom and individuality has little effect unless we actually treat students as responsible individuals. Part of the difficulty in relations between members of ethnic minority groups and representatives of the majority culture lies in the fact that no human being wants to think of himself as completely different from, nor as exactly like, those with whom he lives and works. One naturally seeks descriptions of oneself which one shares with others. On the other hand, no one normally wants to be exactly like anyone else. We value our differences from others as well as our similarities to them. One wants to belong to the majority under some, but not all, descriptions. Belonging to a community involves some happy or unhappy tension between these desires. The person who belongs to some easily-identifiable minority group, particularly one that has been, and perhaps still is, subject to hostile, pejorative descriptions, achieving a satisfactory balance of sameness and difference may be problematic. A member of a minority group may justifiably resent differences being noticed; there is, after all, a legacy of discrimination based upon a recognition of differences between people like him and the majority. But he may also resent the ways in which he differs from most of those around him being ignored. Some of these differences may be features which figure prominently in his self-conception and of which he is justifiably proud. To ignore these is to ignore him. Part of the damage of racism results from people like him being ignored and treated as something less than the unique human beings they are. That someone who is trying to cross the boundary between ethnic groups and function as a member of a minority group in a situation where the majority culture predominates exhibits these paradoxical responses should not be surprising. Such a person can frustrate those who with good will seek his development as a free individual in an environment free from prejudice. Those who interact with him can come to regard him as ÒtouchyÓ, Òhypersensitive,Ó Òhaving a chip on his shoulder,Ó and so on. Once the possibility of racial prejudice becomes salient, even where it is neither actual nor probable, there is often no easy way back to normal human relations. Those who belong to minority groups may have no ultimate moral claim for others to pay attention to, or to ignore, the ways in which they differ from the majority. The final moral claim someone who belongs to a minority group has against her majority-culture classmates, friends and teachers is that she be treated with honesty, gentleness, and fairness, i.e. that she have her basic human dignity respected. But here is a case in which Christianity calls for something more, something that may involve setting aside our ordinary moral responses. In the freedom we have in Christ, we are invited to Ògo the extra mileÓ and to Òbear one anotherÕs burdens.Ó Anyone for whom the last word is that this student has no right to special treatment, that she hasnÕt really been the victim of racism, at least at our hands, and that she should therefore shape up and get along has, so far as I can see, fallen from grace, caring more about being right, and being in the right, than being rightly related to a fellow human being. This attitude of counting as unimportant the question of the legitimacy of othersÕ moral claims on us, and counting as irrelevant our moral rights not to be manipulated or mistreated by them, should characterize all relations between Christians. Consider a possible case. A fellow Christian who is an Afro- American tells us that all, and only, white people are racists, and that racism is especially virulent among evangelical Christians. These claims, letÕs suppose, strike us as clearly false, if not downright absurd, but an initial attempt to disabuse him of these notions goes nowhere and serves only to reveal an underlying hurt and anger. Others, who recognize no claim of Christ on them, may be able to just walk away, dismissing the proceedings as pointless, or to carry on the disputation, insisting that this personÕs claims are mistaken in the hope of proving to him, or to some larger audience, that he is wrong and they are right.8 But our confession of Christ commits us to sharing in this personÕs painful situation, without worrying about being right, or about being in the right, or about the fact that he is trying to generate guilt feelings in us. In this situation it is hard simply to listen and honestly hear the other personÕs anger. It is difficult not to impatiently ask ÒWhat do you want us to do?Ó I have no doubt but that individuals who belong to ethnic minorities put up with all kinds of things of which those of us who belong to the majority culture have no inkling.9 Many do, I imagine, quietly bear all manner of burdens for us. If they arenÕt, there is an analogous word for them, prescribing forbearance, patience, and burden bearing, but it is not the task of those of us who are in the majority to speak it to them. The Christian college is, or ought to be, a place of healing, where we enter into and take up one anotherÕs pain and anger, as well as a place of learning, because it is a community where the good news about GodÕs reconciling action in Jesus Christ is given preeminence. Choosing to belong to the universal culture Closely related to the goal of engendering within our students a realization that who they are depends in important ways on how they freely describe themselves is the goal of inviting them into a universal culture, one that transcends the particularities of ethnicity, geography and nationality and incorporates what is most valuable in all human cultures. ÒWestern civilizationÓ as an idea shaping the curriculum of higher education is extremely controversial. There is, however, a large area of common agreement that higher education has as a primary purpose the liberation of students from parochialism, of showing them that what is worth caring about is not restricted to what is familiar, to the narrow, comfortable culture of their childhood and adolescence, and thus that there are things with which all human beings as such should identify. To become liberally educated is to be drawn out of the confines of what one and others similar to oneself already know and love, and cross the boundaries to what those who are strange to oneself know and love. Our question is how to make this possible for our students. Do we build a curriculum around the intellectual, aesthetic, and political achievements of Greek-Roman-Western European-American civilization, even at the cost of ignoring achievements of equal or perhaps even greater value in other civilizations? Or do we recognize the parochialism of Western civilization and thus downplay it, constructing a curriculum that pays much greater attention to the achievements of non-Western cultures? Academics engaged in this great debate may come to it not with the interests of their students primarily in focus, but with their own political agendas, whether of the Left or the Right. For Christian higher education, where the focus is service for the sake of the kingdom of God, the urgent question is what will be the effect of curricular strategy on what students can freely become. A great deal can be said on this issue, most of it lying beyond the scope of this essay.10 Let us focus on the central issue relating to the education of students whose ethnic background is not that of the dominant white, middle-class culture. What appears to be the main difficulty here is that we have not been entirely loyal to the ideal of a universal human culture. The universality of the putatively universal culture is always at risk because its nominal supporters are prone to identify it with narrow class, national, or ethnic interests. Our loyalty to Western culture does not lie in its being Western culture, but in its aspiring to be a universal human culture, open to all human beings and to all valuable human achievements, irrespective of their ethnic, national or cultural provenance. All of us, no matter our birthplace and background, must choose to identify ourselves with the universal human culture, describing ourselves primarily as citizens of it and only secondarily as belonging to the local categories into which we were born. Different people experience different difficulties in crossing the boundary from what is familiar and friendly to what is universal. A white male born in Cambridge, Massachusetts of professional, upper-middle class parents must overcome the easy assumption that the universal culture, ÒWestern civilization,Ó belongs to him and to people like him. He, and people like him, do not own the universal culture that gathers into itself the best of humanityÕs thoughts, feelings, and actions. He must realize that his sex, his social class, his ethnic group, and his nation are not paradigmatically human. He, and people like him, need to resist and repent of the patronizing assumption that people from other backgrounds are inevitably circumscribed by their backgrounds and can at best be junior members of the universal human culture, never among its most important representatives and practitioners. Fortunately, people from the margins will continually challenge this arrogant identification of the universal and best with what is ours. Once the homeland of Western civilization was Greece. Once it was Rome, then later Amsterdam, Paris, London. Today it is New York and Los Angeles. It may be Tokyo, Shanghai and Nairobi in the future. It would be wicked and absurd to convey to students who belong to ethnic minority groups that because they arenÕt of Western European descent they canÕt authentically identify themselves with Western civilization but should instead conceive of themselves as belonging to African cultures, or to Asian cultures, etc., since these, not Western culture, are their cultures. Only some fantastic, fatalistic theory of biological or cultural determinism could justify this. Our being Christians, rather than pagans, does not prevent us from identifying with the culture of ancient Athens. The fact that we are Protestants, rather than Roman Catholics, does not keep us from identifying with the cultural achievements of Renaissance Italy. The fact that my ancestors lived in Western Europe rather than in Africa or Asia is of no ultimate relevance to my conceiving myself as, and thus as being, a part of the universal human civilization. It is wrong to tell minority students they can have no home in the cultural world of Plato, Calvin, Mozart, Newton and Einstein and that they must instead describe themselves as member of some more parochial culture. We may be tempted, e.g. to encourage a black student of music believe that because she is black, her music must be soul music, or gospel, or jazz, and that music in the classic European tradition cannot truly belong to her, that she ought not to describe herself as a musician in that tradition.11 This is a temptation we ought to resist. This student should be encouraged and enabled to learn about, care about, and ultimately to love things that initially may be alien to her. She needs to be empowered to choose her own self-description as a musician, and to create an idea of herself that is not determined by her ethnic history but one for which, before God, she can be responsible. However, precisely because it is her personal growth into a free person that we care about, we must not push her into the belief that she must abandon the particularities of her ethnic musical heritage. We should also encourage and help her to know, care for, and love the musical heritage of her cultural tradition, realizing that in this case it may be her task to teach, and ours to be taught. Recognizing that there is much of value that has not been integrated into the culture that aspires to, but has not realized, universality, we may hope that, as she crosses the border from her minority Afro-American culture to be with us of the majority culture, she may also be pointing toward the future of Western civilization, when it will incorporate values and achievements that lie outside our current experience and beyond our present sensibilities. Just because we are serious about the ideal of Western, i.e. universal, civilization, we need to create as many opportunities as we can for students (and colleagues) from minority ethnic groups to share the riches of their cultures with us. When we help a student use his freedom we are empowering him to cross the boundary that separates him from us. We do not want to leave him closed off, alienated from the rest of the human community. We do not want the boundaries between him and us to be insuperable barriers. Nor do we want to destroy those boundaries. We have, I hope, no desire for him to lose whatever of his distinctively Afro-American, or Hispanic, or Asian way of being in the world he freely chooses to make his own. Our hope is that he will not choose to become just like the individuals who belong to the majority culture, as though the crossing of the boundary entailed the erasing of deep differences between people. Nor do we hope that he becomes a Òrootless cosmopolitan,Ó identifying with no particular way of life and its historically contingent, idiosyncratic ways. Our hope for him is that he will freely choose to constitute himself as a human being first, a child of God, identifying with the great achievements of people like himself as well as those of people very different from himself, and that it will be these descriptions, and not his conceiving himself as black (or male, or American, or white, or Korean...) that decisively shape his life. GodÕs description of us The Christian college needs to question itself: are we ultimately committed to individual human beings, to educating them one at a time, to helping them know themselves as unique free individuals known and loved by God? Institutions tend to acquire other sorts of commitments. Institutions to the defense and propagation of a particular culture and to the comfort, self- satisfaction and specious sense of safety that comes with that. Some institutions are (but will rarely admit to being) contrivances for socializing students of a particular social class, making for the smooth and safe transmission of power, wealth and prestige from one generation to the next. Even institutions that are officially Christian can turn out, on inspection, to exist mainly to defend the boundaries around a specific religious subculture, rather than to empower its students to become free in the knowledge of God, themselves, and his world. These values, in powerful, if not always obvious and direct ways, influence the particularities of who, how, and what we teach. A college dedicated to the human individuals God loves will make curricular and extracurricular decisions that will sometimes be interestingly different than those other colleges make. A Christian college that takes seriously the challenge of guiding students toward the free and responsible choice of self- descriptions may make curricular and extracurricular decisions that other colleges, with a focus on material well-being and thus on professional and vocational preparation, would be regard as inefficient and wasteful. A Christian college striving to be itself will be a community in which everyone, whether members of the local ethnic majority or a minority, will feel they are accepted unconditionally, valued because they are at once like and not like everyone else. They will be accepted unconditionally, but by people who care very much what they are, do and become, by faculty who insist that they accept responsibility for how they conceive themselves and who invite them to cross the boundaries between themselves and others. Human beings are typically quite bad at doing both things wholeheartedly: We tend either to accept one another conditionally, ready to reject and discard people if they donÕt turn out the way we want them. Or we accept them no matter what, because at bottom what they do or turn into is not very important to us. The Christian attitude, the attitude that reflects GodÕs attitude toward us, is to accept without condition while passionately caring what the person we accept does and becomes. All human beings have had their sense of self-worth deeply injured, in part because of their own God-defying, self- destructive behavior, in part because of the sinful behavior of other people. Racism is one of many symptoms of our underlying condition of sin. Jesus ChristÕs probing word of reconciliation is the same for those who try to create self-worth by practicing racism and for those whose sense of self-worth has been destroyed by racism. Despite ourselves, God describes us as valuable to him, and this description, because it is the word of God, is a healing, enlivening word. Describing ourselves as fully acceptable to God, as loved unconditionally by him, and yet as cared about by him in the sense that what we do and become matters immensely to him, is a transforming, empowering description of us. It is not empty, wishful thinking; it is the word of God. Is it possible to apply this description to oneself in a way that doesnÕt make all other descriptions secondary and relative? Must not this description of ourselves as the objects of GodÕs unconditional love, assume the primary place at the center of our self-conceptions? At the center of any enterprise that can honestly claim to be Christian higher education is the focus on the self-conception that is a pure gift of grace, and yet one we help one another to freely accept. Within God himself, and between God and man, boundaries between persons are always there, always fully real and yet always crossed in love for the other, for it is GodÕs freely chosen nature to love that which is other than himself. The situation in which we find ourselves on our Christian college campuses, with all its frictions, difficulties, problems and pain, holds an abundance of opportunities to share in this great crossing of boundaries. Notes 1. The original version of this paper was written for a conference on racial patterns in American life held at The KingÕs College (NY). I wish to express my thanks to my fellow participants from KingÕs and from Gordon College, and especially to Paul DeVries, the conference organizer. 2. I do not suppose the distinction I am using the terms ÒliberalÓ and ÒconservativeÓ to mark corresponds in any systematic way to the familiar social-political division. 3. This is only one of various ways in which we might use the metaphors of boundaries to explicate Christian belief. There are contexts in which we can properly describe God as breaking down the boundaries that artificially and harmfully separate people. And, as my colleague Robert Spender has pointed out, we can also speak fruitfully of God as the one who preserves and protects us by maintaining the boundaries of creation. 4. Activist quoted in The New Haven Register, August 23, 1990, p.2 5. Cf. Anne Wortham, The Other Side of Racism, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). I owe more to WorthamÕs analysis than this single reference suggests. 6. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Tipton, Ann Swindler, Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 163. 7. As Shelby Steele has argued, describing oneself as a victim can be debilitating. Cf. The Content of Our Character (New York: St. MartinÕs Press, 1990). 8. There may, of course, be occasions when showing him he is wrong becomes a legitimate priority, as in the context of formal academic argument, the intimate context of spiritual direction, or in a policy-making forum where the well-being of others is also at stake. 9. For intimations of what minority students attending predominantly white Christian colleges endure see the dated but still valuable Handbook for Black Christian Students, ed. Ruth Lewis Bentley (Chicago: National Black Student Conference, 1975). Also of value in this regard are several of the more recent essays included in Ethnic-Minorities and Christian Colleges, ed. D. John Lee (Lanham, MD: University Press of America/Christian College Coalition, 1991). 10. The reason it makes sense to refer to the universal culture that ought to be the framework of education as ÒWestern cultureÓ lies in the fact that it is only in the historical contingencies of this culture that the concept of a universal humanity has clearly emerged, in large part because it was in this culture that GodÕs self-revelation in Christ gained its strongest foothold. (Given GodÕs well-known tendency to elect for his purposes human individuals and peoples that are weak and unworthy we ought not to be too proud of ourselves about this!) 11. I owe this example to my colleague, Herbert Johnson.