Last Wednesday, Batten Professor Isaac Bailey gave a lecture entitled, The Black Sheep of the Black Sheep: Reporting on (and Loving) People Who Do Awful Things.
We do not expect a speaker to have a stutter—he even said himself he was excused from giving a speech in grade school because the teacher said that given his stutter, he would never be able to be a public speaker.
We also do not expect a speaker to be open about his PTSD, not in a world where for so many mental health struggles signify weakness. We certainly don’t expect him to tell us that his PTSD made him think about killing his wife, not in a world where people are so quick to fear and distrust as it is. Not in a world where people are especially quick to fear and distrust people who look like Professor Issac Bailey.
And we don’t expect better from people who have lived up to their stereotypes. I mean, that’s what a stereotype is, isn’t it: our expectations for a person on based a given defining factor? The devoutly religious hate homosexuals, those from the Middle East hate America, and low-income black men are simply full of hate and capable only of violence. And we can tell ourselves that we don’t believe in stereotypes because we have evolved beyond that, but when someone lives up to it, we don’t expect better from them. This inability to expect better was the most important expectation shattered at Professor Issac Bailey’s lecture.
For Professor Bailey, when his hero older brother was arrested and convicted—rightfully—of homicide, the shame was overwhelming. Families like his are the families people point to when they are making generalizations about people of color. Families like his are “the seed of truth that feeds the stereotype,” he says. “The black sheep of the black sheep.”
Families like his also never get the chance to process, the chance to deal with the grief and hurt that hits them when someone they love is taken out of their lives—because that person they love has done something horrible. No one wants to hear anything in the defense of a murderer. Not that he stepped in between his mother and his violent father, not that he was a hero to his kid brothers, not that he has kindness in him, goodness in him, pain that needs addressing. Not that if he had only been born fifth instead of first things could have been different. All they want to hear is the length of his sentence.
As for the families, they remain quiet, confused, ashamed. Among Professor Bailey’s words that resonated with me the most was the idea of “what grows out of the seeds of our shame.” We so rarely seek depth in the idea of shame; shame is a negative, unpleasant emotion and so we want to mitigate it where it is undeserved and heap it on where we feel it has been earned. But what about what shame feeds? For Professor Bailey it turned into a PTSD so severe that he was becoming a threat to his family. For his brothers, it grew into a hungry consumption of whatever the rumor mill had churned out about their oldest brother’s downfall: the victim attacked first, the mob was just setting him up, and all manner of other tall tales that lead them down ultimately the same path their oldest brother walked. So we need to address people’s shame not just out of compassion, but out of a real understanding of its ripple effects.
So how do we reconcile this complicated mess of emotion? How do we balance these real victims who deserve justice with these real people who exist beyond one terrible hour of their lives? How do we give the legal system its due diligence while acknowledging that we can still look for, and even expect, better from people? How do we balance the fear that someone will repeat their offenses with the fairness owed to their humanity?
How do we break our expectations when it is so much easier to live comfortably within them? I’ll leave in answer Professor Bailey’s closing remarks:
“What I want people to know, what I need people to know, is that if you can see good in me, then I also want you to see good in my brothers. If you can see me as a fully complex human being, then I want you to see my brothers in the same way. We don’t make excuses, all we are asking for is for somebody to stand up for people like us…when families like mine don’t get that help, more victims are created. Find the courage to help us…take our hands and walk with us.”
Start by working through your own expectations, and then stand up and help others break theirs. Not everyone has the privilege to go to a school like Davidson, to hear speakers like Professor Bailey, to live in an environment fierce enough to challenge our expectations and safe enough to let us explore them. So stand up and pass it on.
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