Gomes' Confederate Memorial Proposal Succeeds in Forgiveness But Fails in Reciprocity

I liked the character of Rev. Peter Gomes' portrayal of the ideals and higher norms underlying the proposal he initiated--in recent years at least--for recognition by Harvard University and our community of those sons of Harvard who died to defend the perpetuation of American slavocracy. Who died, that is, under personal fidelity to the secessionist government of the Confederacy and to its anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian values and beliefs that formed the rationale and soul of American slavocracy.

I liked the character of Rev. Gomes' portrayal because at its core is a belief-and-goal that the world we live in must at some point-in-time achieve and institutionalize. Namely, the goal of Christian forgiveness.

Without this goal, Rev. Gomes is telling us, there can never be and will never be on this earth anything approaching a viable humanism among the myriad contending groups who inhabit this earth--ethnic and racial groups, religious groups, linguistic groups, nationality groups, gender groups, etc. There is no notion of a viable humanism shaping the interrelations in today's world between contending groups like Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Jews and Palestinians, Tutsi and Hutu, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants (in Northern Ireland), Turks and Kurds, etc., without the reign of Rev. Gomes' goal of Christian forgiveness. And he formulates this awesome ideal deftly in regard to the proposal to memorialize here at Harvard a recognition of the Confederate dead:

"A memorial is not merely an artifact of the past. By its very nature it is a key to the future, a means of moving on from beyond the shadows of the past. Not only does it speak of what was, but it aspires to speak of that which ought to be. In our case, such a memorial speaks of a country once tragically divided which now aspires to an authentic reconciliation, an elusive goal always ahead of us, always in the future."

So for me there is no hesitancy whatsoever toward that awesome goal of Christian forgiveness, toward the character of Rev. Gomes' proposal. But I break with Rev. Gomes in regard to operationalizing this goal in the form he proposes. Why this opposition? Because there must be a principle of reciprocity at the very foundation of any serious endeavor by any of us to institutionalize that awesome goal of Christian forgiveness. The millions of injured souls--of spiritually ravaged and smashed human beings--victimized by the white Americans who controlled and benefited from American slavocracy, have no moral obligation to, as it were, make the first move on that complicated road toward Christian forgiveness.

Rev. Gomes thinks that the first move toward forgiveness is blacks' moral burden. This is terribly wrong. Wrong because it fails to understand the reciprocity imperative. Those who perpetrate evil and human devastation on the scale of American slavocracy have a prior duty to assuage their wrongdoing, to redeem their transgression against the human souls of African-Americans.

From where I sit, this redeeming process on the part of the white South in particular and white America in general is still in its nascent state--some 131 years since the end of the Civil War, mind you--a tragic yet necessary event without which neither I nor Rev. Gomes would be arguing these matters here today at Harvard University. Precisely when that mature stage of a redeeming process vis-a-vis whites' maiming of black souls through American slavocracy will be fulfilled, is anyone's guess. My intuition tells me that it certainly has not been reached in our era any more than a mature stage of a redeeming process vis-a-vis Germany's genocidal violation of Jewish souls by the fascist German state can be said to have been realized.

Perhaps the fulfillment of the redeeming process required of white America for the ravaging of blacks' humanity through America slavocracy--followed by six generations of institutionalized white supremacy or racism down to the 1960s--is still another century away. This, I fear, might sound rather un-Christian on my part--a great-great-grandson of African Methodist Episcopal clergymen--but I don't mean to sound that way.

It just so happens that, in the real world of grievously injured human souls like the Jewish souls smashed by Germans' genocidal state and the black souls smashed and ravaged by American slavocracy and racism, the time required for the violators of Jewish and black souls to fulfill a viable redeeming process has not yet transpired. The proposal to memorialize those sons of Harvard who died to keep slavery in place treats this redeeming process just a bit too cavalierly, I'm afraid.

The committee of the Harvard Alumni association that brought this proposal to the Harvard Corporation for adoption exhibited a grievous lapse in its humanistic awareness. it failed to understand that the humanity of black folks--and by extension of other systemically ravaged modern peoples such as Tutsi folks, Jewish folks, Armenian folks, etc.--should not be trifled with. --Martin Kilson   Thomson Professor of Government