oppression and humiliation

When I was young my fundamentally evangelical parents reminded me, time and time again, of the characteristics of that most problematic virtue, longsuffering. It’s not one people consider a virtue in mainstream Western society; if you’re suffering, it’s a sign something is wrong, and that trouble should be sought out and corrected. To my parents, one builds character by keeping patient in the fate of persecution or hatred, as well as providing a witness to the quality of one’s character. It’s the kind of “virtue” that can easily be coopted by the cynical and manipulative, I fear. In Malraux’s 1933 novel of the Chinese Revolution, Le Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate or The Human Condition), one reads an excerpt of a “lecture” remembered by a character in the grip of crisis (330):

“A civilization becomes transformed, you see, when its most oppressed element—the humiliation of the slave, the work of the modern worker—suddenly becomes a value, when the oppressed ceases to attempt to escape this humiliation, and seeks his salvation in it, when the worker ceases to attempt to escape this work, and seeks in it his reason for being.”

I thought this sounded true, and yet disturbing, as I gather it was meant to be. Still, I troubled over it. Why did it seem like a half-truth? I agreed with the idea that a people is indeed transformed when it succumbs to oppression, as this seemed to assert. The paragraph seemed like the objective, cold prose equivalent of the sorrowful truths a spiritual admits in subjective, feeling poetry. My pride revolted at the idea, however. What were the devil’s details? I didn’t like its characterization of work, carelessly equating it to involuntary slavery; this is a backwards-thinking proposition, I thought, but the entire statement seemed too tightly wound up for me to unknot alone.

Help arrived in the form of Taylor Branch’s masterful 1988 biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the first volume, Parting the Waters, readers are introduced to the hard-grinding, up-and-coming character of the Rev. Vernon Johns. Vernon Johns stirs up the comfortably cloistered and pretentiously bougie African American Montgomery church to which he is called to preach, and from almost the first instant. When his Jim Crow-era congregants reacted negatively to his labor and sales outside of the pulpit, Branch writes, Johns “accused them of persisting in the white man’s view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression, not labor, that demeaned them. On the contrary, the desire to avoid labor had enticed whites into the corruption of slavery” (17). This pulpit criticism by the Rev. Johns seemed to answer pointedly, in part, Malraux’s damning assertion. It is not the “work of the modern worker” that settles him or her into humiliation as if it were a “reason for being,” but rather, as with the slave, the oppression that oppresses him. Any other explanation than this one of identity does the plantation master’s work of persuasion.

I needed a hopeful note, though. I needed more help. How does one interpret Malraux’s fictional lecturer? In contemporary terms the blue-collar worker in the United States and overseas has suffered under oppression as well as the confusion and insult perpetrated by those who conflate their labor with their oppression. Labor ought to be a source of pride, in my mind; bowing to oppression one of humiliation. When Martin Luther King spoke to the first rally in support of Rosa Parks, he spoke for the crowd when he told them, “there comes a time . . . when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression” (ibid, 139). The ring of familiarity was strengthened by King’s elaboration: “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair” and added “we are here because we are tired now” (140). The echo of those troubling words, “oppression,” “humiliation,” harmonized with my memory of Malraux’s proposition.

Why had Malraux expressed such a statement, and why in the manner he did? I know not yet, but I know better know how I feel about particular elements of his statement in terms of a context with which I have more familiarity. King put Malraux's oppression in the larger context of justice, and I felt the mental knot loosening.

My childhood questions about how long one must really remain patient in the face of suffering remain unanswered. Today I believe no God will reveal the meaning behind longsuffering’s valorization. I find myself more sympathetic with the mainstream on this question, but the necessity or otherwise of longsuffering is still unaddressed by any of those mentioned in the quotations I’ve found. What is addressed is a particular component of character: courage or bravery, perhaps.