Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. I’ll subscribe you via Mailchimp for the weekly or email you directly for the daily (your choice). Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone.
Thursday
How is it that diversity, equity and inclusion are now spat out as epithets by large swatches of the population and that “woke” has become an insult? In the words of that old hymn, set to music by Bach and alluding to Jesus’s parable about the sleeping bridesmaids, now more than ever we need to wake up:
“Sleepers, wake!” A voice astounds us,
the shout of rampart-guards surrounds us:
“Awake, Jerusalem, arise!”
Midnight’s peace their cry has broken,
Their urgent summons clearly spoken:
“The time has come, O maidens wise!
Rise up, and give us light…
Diagnosing our condition with pinpoint accuracy is Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” which my faculty reading group discussed last week. Although it was written in 1964, it very much captures the class and race resentment that roils our current moment.
In its amazing ending, however, it also lays out the promise that is America—which is to say, DEI. In O’Connor’s Catholic telling, that promise comes as a moment of grace in a fallen world. Sanctimonious pride gives way to a humility that accepts people of all races and classes.
The story begins in a doctor’s office and is mediated through the mind of Mrs. Turpin. While smugly satisfied with her privileged place in the social hierarchy, Mrs. Turpin is beset with class and race insecurity. This can be seen in the way she obsessively categorizes people:
Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus, please,” she would have said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.
The categorizing gets even elaborate as the sleepless night continues on:
Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the homeowners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white face cattle on it.
This reflecting ends with the horrific vision of all difference elided, as it was for the Jewish community in the Holocaust, where it didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor:
Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.
A more positive DEI vision will conclude the story.
We watch the class dynamic play out in the doctor’s office through the interchanges between the patients. Being of the home-and-land class, Mrs. Turpin feels that she can take the high road and patronizingly looks down on the others. At one point she all but echoes the Pharisee in Jesus’s parable who thanks God “that I am not like other people—cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I’m certainly not like that tax collector!” Here’s Mrs. Turpin:
“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! It could have been different!” For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.
While there’s one other woman of her standing in the office, there’s a third—”not white-trash but common,” in Mrs. Turpin’s assessment—who senses that she is being judged and strikes back. When Mrs. Turpin talks about hosing down their confinement-raised hogs and providing water and rides for their African American workers, she receives the following response:
“One thang I know,” the white-trash woman said. “Two thangs I ain’t going to do: love no niggers or scoot down no hog with no hose.” And she let out a bark of contempt.
To which response Mrs. Turpin exchanges a knowing glance with the other woman of her class:
The look that Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant lady exchanged indicated they both understood that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things.
This being the segregated south, there are no African Americans present in the office—they show up later in the story—but there is a girl who is back home after attending Wellesley College. Think of her as the northern liberal—an elitist “libtard,” as MAGA Trumpists like to say—in the story. So repulsed is she at Mrs. Turpin’s air of smug superiority that she can’t stand her anymore but flings a textbook at her head and goes for her throat:
The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.
At first Mrs. Turpin believes that she can dismiss the college student because she’s obviously a lunatic. Her words strike home, however, because, despite all Mrs. Turpin’s apparent self-assurance, her identity is actually quite fragile. We see her uncertainty when, after leaving the office, she turns to her African American workers for reassurance, even though at some level she knows they will tell her (if they know what’s good for them) what she wants to hear. When one’s sense of oneself is based on putting others down, especially in a country with a founding document that asserts that all have an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, there is bound to be a crisis of identity.
One sees this same kind of instability in the characters in Faulkner’s novels, where everything seems to depend on rigid race lines that are actually quite porous. I suspect if one really gets down to it today, status anxiety is the major factor driving a significant portion of the electorate. This goes a long way towards explaining why we chose a white supremacist male over a highly qualified black woman in the 2024 election.
The story ends with a different vision, however, as Mrs. Turpin looks at the sunset and imagines a rapture-like event:
A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from die earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
“Even their virtues”—the white middle class values that endow Mrs. Turpin with her sense of superiority—have burned away in this moment of truth. The Declaration of Independence and the Christian vision that all are equal in the eyes of God come together.
Will someone who has defined herself according to this system of social stratification change her behavior, whatever momentary vision she has? It’s sobering to realize that more white women voted for Donald Trump than for Kamala Harris. The only consolation that O’Connor offers us is that somewhere, deep in these ingrained beliefs, there’s uncertainty. And while that uncertainty can lead to the fear that fascism feeds on, it can also break through to DEI revelation. Not everyone stays stuck in the old tribal patterns.
