Honor, Shame, and the Gospel in the American South, Part II
From Covenant, the blog of the Living Church
In “Honor, Shame, and the Gospel in the American South, Part I,” I identified several challenges that the mimetic rivalry that race-based slavery and segregation presented to the violence perpetuated, and violence avoiding, culture of the American South. Fundamentally, the oppression of slavery and later, Jim Crow, could only be maintained through violence. This violence was justified by the threat of greater violence should the system be brought down. So strong was the threat of this violence — the idea of a race war, or the softer threat of losing what one had (for poor Southern whites), one’s personal or family status being diminished, or simple alienation from family and neighbors — that it drove the sense of the necessity of violent reprisal to slights real or perceived. To not respond to insults or transgressions of the social order — to not attempt to reestablish the settled equilibrium — was to invite violence or exclusion upon oneself or loved ones.
Jackson Wu, whose comments about sharing the gospel in honor-shame cultures sparked the thoughts for the first essay, offers this instructive Chinese idiom to explain issues of “face”: “People want ‘face’ like a tree wants bark.” Consider what benefit bark is to a tree. Bark protects the tree and makes it identifiable. Likewise, face or honor serves to protect the more vulnerable aspects of personality. Wu writes: “One’s ‘face’ refers to how people value him or her.” So honor and respect do what we would readily conceive, i.e. bringing praise to the person who receives them, but they also do something we might not expect: they offer protection of some sort for our deepest selves. Consider how this reflexive need for self-protection might play out in an honor-shame culture like the American South, with the issues of race added to the mix.
In part one, I shared Gary Ciuba’s observation that “Honor made self-estimation into nothing but an imitation of how the southerner was esteemed by others. And since southerners desired such mimetic validation, they copied the desires of the other so that they would regard themselves as especially well-favored in the looking-glass of communal approval. The result was that the community of honor was a network in which each member was at once a model for everyone else and a disciple of everyone else” (Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction, 21). The construction of this community of honor required that everyone’s behavior, and especially behavior touching upon race, was tightly controlled with transgressions triggering violent responses.