The Wound Is No Longer Hidden

In their new book, Learning and Teaching While White, my colleagues Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler Ward reference Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound, a book-length reflection on race in American first published in 1970 — with a couple of updates since. As they note, Berry was one of the first white writers to deeply examine the effects of modern-day racism on white people. At the time of The Hidden Wound’s publication, most whites generally thought of racism and racial inequities as a problem affecting people of color only. Whites working for racial justice saw it mostly as a matter of offering more opportunities for blacks in particular. There was little effort given to examining the historical and ongoing negative effects of our racially divided nation on white people themselves.

So Berry makes the central point crystal clear at the start of his book:

“If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not so simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost is perhaps greater than we yet know.”

This passage has been referenced often in subsequent books and articles on antiracist work. And indeed, it’s quite prescient in its observation of our culture. The years to follow would prove Berry correct. Racism has hurt us all and continues to do so today. The effects vary by race, gender, and individual experience, but the damage is clear all around. The decades of slavery, the era of Jim Crow, and the ongoing racism and racial inequity may have made life relatively easier for white people than for people of color, but they have nevertheless damaged everyone in this culture in various ways.

Contemporary research has proven this point over and over — and, indeed, Berry’s essay has been foundational in future studies of whiteness and white identity in American society and underscore the argument that all of us have an obligation and interest to engage in antiracist work.

But re-reading The Hidden Wound recently, I had a sense that few of us, myself included, have dug deep enough into Berry’s argument to understand exactly how wide and deep the wound actually is, then and now. It’s not just the immorality embodied in a system that favors some over others. It’s not just that it’s wrong to participate in the suffering of others. It’s not just that the inequities by race keep us from fulfilling our collective democratic principles. It’s not just that racist laws, practices, and perspectives divide us and have kept us from learning from each other. It’s not just that the white power structures have denied opportunities to black people and other people of color that might otherwise have led to greater discoveries and contributions to society. For Berry, it is all these things. But it’s also that racism has led us to create a badly misshapen society that is driving us toward ruin. It has enabled a hyper-focus on economics to dominate our democratic society in unhealthy ways. It has supported and encouraged the maintenance of a power elite that has created and sustained an underclass and has used the poor for its personal gain in ways that have made ours the most economically inequitable nation in human history. It has corrupted the key spiritual concepts of Christianity and moral living. It has undermined our ability to build and maintain a thriving community life. It keeps nearly all of us anxious and uncertain about our place in society. And it has been a key factor in our separation from the natural environment — enabling us to wreak unprecedented havoc on the natural world and refrain from taking action that would prevent future damage.

Driving home this latter point, Berry reminds us that native populations in North America lived in a kind of sustainable harmony on this land for 10,000 years or more. We’ve trashed the place in less than 300. 

If you are staring at any of the above points with questions or doubts, I encourage you to read The Hidden Wound. Berry’s points are well presented and defended. That the majority of white people can’t see these wide-ranging effects clearly, Berry argues, is due to the fact that, in order to maintain unjust structures, we are encouraged not to examine them. “However conscious it may have been,” he writes, “there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional.” And the point of this ongoing obfuscation? To “shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism.” Part of this obfuscation, of course, is how we’ve imagined and taught our history in school for generations. “As a people,” Berry says, “we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.”

Change is inevitable, of course, but the kind of change we need only comes about with greater clarity of vision and purpose. In much of Berry’s writing — in The Hidden Wound and in many of the other 50-plus books he has written — the central argument is a moral one based on principles that underpin our democratic founding but that have never managed to take center stage. The book encourages nothing less than the reimagining of our democracy — with greater attention paid to environmental ethics and local communities.

I see elements of Berry’s argument in the efforts of educators who are working for more racially equitable educational systems and programs. But I think it’s worth looking more deeply at what exactly we’re hoping to achieve — and how our push for racially equitable schools is connected to other essential changes in our democracy and how we talk about those changes in our schools. Beyond the question of academic content, it’s also worth thinking more deeply about the need to protect students from the kind of academic and social structures that aim primarily to create a system of winners and losers — a system that has been at the heart of racism and economic exploitation since the start. 

In rereading The Hidden Wound, I found myself wincing at Berry’s choice of language in places, but I admire his willingness, especially in context of the late 1960s, to examine his life and work closely and consider the broader implications. As he puts it, “Once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.”  

It's telling to me, too, that writer bell hooks — a Black writer and activist for gender, racial, and environmental justice — was a fan of The Hidden Wound and of Berry’s life and writing more generally. In fact, in her early academic career, hooks taught The Hidden Wound in her college courses — and would go on to reference Berry’s work steadily in her own writing over the years.

For all of us white educators who work in schools and care about the future of this nation, it’s important that we keep Berry’s perspective in mind. It’s important that we engage in, and encourage others to engage in, greater personal reflection on the development of better community and cultural practices. In doing so, we can see the connections more clearly. We can, for instance, see the intersection of antiracist work and environmental advocacy. We can examine the way racism has undermined our religious lives and our sense of spirituality more generally. We can understand the need in schools for real balance between academic achievement and multicultural community development. As the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the question of the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, Berry’s essay can help us come to a clearer understand of what diversity is, how it functions in schools, and how it contributes to community and national health and happiness.

Wendell Berry’s wide-reaching exploration of racism asks a lot of us — but his aim is the kind of moral outcomes we all seek and yet seem to struggle so hard to achieve in this nation. In a conversation with Berry, bell hooks once asked him about the complex threads of connections he makes in his writing. Berry responds, “Well, we are under obligation to take care of everything and you can’t be selective if you are going to take care of everything.”

Michael Brosnan is the Senior Editor at Teaching While White. He is also the author of two books of poetry — The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018) and ADRIFT (2022). More at www.michaelabrosnan.com.