Guilt and the Arc of the Moral Universe

There's A Crack in Everything- That's How the Light Gets In

In May 2020, in the midst of our Covid plague, as I sheltered in place in front of my television screen, I observed the televised murder of a black man by a white policeman charged with serving and protecting the public. I could not believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. Of course, I had been cognizant of the injustices that seemed intrinsic to the status quo, but in my day to day existence I tended to dismiss them with a “yes, but…” Yet something in the experience of watching George Floyd being murdered by “the law” on national television broke through, and left me with an “Oh my God, what have we done” reaction to not only what we were doing to African Americans, but what the “American we” had done to the native Americans who had lived here for thousands of years before us.

Over the past few years the word “woke” has achieved currency as an awareness of a crack in the American myth of liberty and justice for all and the recognition that our country was built on a foundation of racism that remains embedded in our structure. Of late, the term has become invested (some might say infected) with the intense affects stirred up by the culture wars that characterize contemporary American life. As a psychoanalyst, I love the term. The idea of achieving awareness of something that had heretofore been out of reach reminds me of another word, insight, that's been part of our psychoanalytic culture from its earliest days. Insight can help us make sense of our inner lives and give shape to the way we live them. Similarly, “wokeness” can help us make sense of our history and holds the potential to shape it according to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Of course that requires us to face our demons, the painful truth of our origins as perpetrators of slavery and genocide, and the ways in which we perpetuate racial “othering” in our society. It's a perfect word to