On Being a White Male, Part II

When friends learn that I'm writing (what will hopefully someday be) a book on American views of Africa, they often bring up the celebrated writer Barbara Kingsolver, author of a widely read novel set in Africa published in 1998, The Poisonwood Bible.  The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and, on the face of it, seems very  sensitive to black Africans, particularly those who lived in the Congo during and after independence.

The story features a patriarchal missionary father, his long-suffering wife, and their four very diverse daughters.  The father is a cardboard figure, the sort of rigidly domineering figure that so many white liberals imagine conservative male Christians to embody.  But black Africans from Prime Minister Lumumba on down are also described with little nuance.  They all--save for those corrupted by western imperialism--appear to be completely noble.

Of course one could argue that Kingsolver is performing a necessary corrective for Americans who grew up with images of morally perfect westerners, from Tarzan to Dr. Livingston, trying to straighten out savage black Africans.  And certainly the U.S. role in deposing and killing Lumumba and then supporting the brutalities of President Mobutu should be both exposed and excoriated.

But I have two sets of objections to Kingsolver's oversimplications.  First, they are distortions.  Many black Africans will tell you that western missionaries were often useful, even admirable, and Americans who set about telling Africans otherwise are often reprimanded.  Second, if missionaries were not simply evil, nor where black Africans simply saints.  Books like The Poisonwood Bible distort the nature of human nature and of evil.  Asserting or implying that evil can only flow from white or western sources is itself a form of racism, in part because it robs people of color of their full humanity and complexity.  Second, this conflation of evil with white males and innocence with black Africans can lead to a sort of paralysis.  Indeed, the lead character, Leah, seems to believe that she escape this dilemma by becoming black.

I have noticed that this desire on the part of liberal or radical white people to somehow change their color, their racial identify, is far from rare.  Next week I'll discuss why I think this desire commonly distracts white men, in particular, from the sobering work of doing something about the considerable damage we have wrought.