Q: But don’t many spiritual teachings tell us that white is symbolic of purity, and black is symbolic of evil?
A: That is a supremely Eurocentric conceit that has led many a spiritual “thinker” astray. As shared fantasy, myth draws its power from how old and how widespread it is. But it’s still a fantasy. We’re here to get over any lingering confusion around the difference between light and shadow, which is a useful concept, and black and white, which isn’t. In fact, we might say that the difference between these two concepts is like night and day—and we are not here to be benighted.
Q: But isn’t it natural for human beings to divide into groups, however they define them, and then be loyal to their group and hostile to others?
A: In a classic “2000 Year Old Man” exchange, Mel Brooks explains to Carl Reiner that way, way back in the day, the people lived in numbered caves, and the national anthem of his cave, Cave 76, was “Let ’em all go to hell except Cave 76!” Some of our near relatives among the great apes form groups—usually hierarchical to a greater or lesser degree—that may be murderously antagonistic to other groups of the same species. But the Sufis say that if you were meant to be an animal, you would have come to this world in the form of an animal, and if you were meant to be an angel, you would have remained on the angelic planes; but you were not meant to be either animal or angel, you were meant to be a human being. So yes, what some scientists tactfully refer to as “groupness” is “natural” to human beings if we confine our consciousness to our animal attributes and ignore the real nature and deep longings of our souls. The same goes for hierarchies—“natural” to some animals, but not to fully human beings. We have the capacity, as Pir Vilayat Khan used to say, to “change the hardware with the software”: we can actually rewire our brains.
So let us pay no attention to the people who say that White racism is intractable and we’ll never get over it—those ones who insist that we’re always and forever a hot mess, and there’s precious little we can do about it. Of course we’re a hot mess—it’s the human condition—and there’s plenty we can do about it. That’s just one of the things that make human beings so adorable.
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