What I'm Reading #18: The Hidden Wound (Wendell Berry)

The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry

Before I dive into talking seriously about this book, I have to point out that The Hidden Wound was the first book I read in its entirety on my Kindle. I still don't know how I feel about the general idea of an e-reader, but it worked for me this time.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer, and this book was no exception. He argues that in oppressing black, whites inflicted upon themselves a hidden wound that has not healed with time but has become hereditary. Unsurprisingly for Berry (most of whose writing has something to do with agriculture), part of the current racial divide (which he acknowledges is now further divided along socioeconomic lines) is due to our separation from the land. Whites, he says, did themselves a disservice by placing blacks between themselves and the earth, forcing them to learn skills that whites were actually worse off not knowing themselves. After slavery, many blacks had the ability to hold small farms, and even if they were poor, their poverty was manageable because they had the talents to make do, to improvise with the resources they had. As blacks moved into the cities, an entire agricultural skill set became useless, and people could no longer "make do" because they became wholly dependent upon the money-based economy of the concrete jungle.

I'll admit I was a little skeptical when Berry first made the agricultural connection. I wanted to say, "Seriously, Wendell Berry? I read Jayber Crow. I get that you think farms are awesome. I read this book to get your perspective on race." But, particularly in the epilogue, Berry offers an extended critique of our current economic situation. To summarize roughly (and therefore do injustice to) his argument, he claims that our current image of economic stability—an executive office position and a sizeable income to go with it—is actually as unstable as it gets. Anyone who's been paying attention the past couple of years can see that clear as day. Berry argues that your typical "executive" generally does not do anything tangible; even if he or she is part of a company that produces a physical product, the executive may never come into contact with the product and certainly doesn't make it.

Our society's move toward intangibles means that we place less and less value on the kind of work that Berry calls "n***** work" (I decided a long time ago I would never use that word, but now I feel foolish marking it out like that)—in his context, that's not a racial slur but a socioeconomic connotation by which certain kinds of people, black and white, imagine themselves to be "above" certain kinds of work—often very practical, necessary work without which our society would collapse, like collecting the garbage. And the irony is that the main job of many executives seems to be to produce trash in today's disposable economy. The Hidden Wound was written in 1970, the afterword in 1989. How much more true are Berry's words today. The afterword reminded me of a recent Newsweek article called "Dead Suit Walking," in which the plight of your typical upper-middle class white man is described as nearly hopeless. The part that struck me was when a survey conducted as part of the article showed that 58% of white men have turned down a job they thought was "beneath them." Berry says himself that it is dangerous to make another human being do work you think of yourself as too good for—perhaps we need to think hard about what that means for class and racial divisions today.

There is far more present in this book than I can helpfully convey here, but I will surely return to it in the future. In the meantime, I recommend it to anyone wondering how we got to where we are in terms of persistent racial tensions and a desperate economic situation.


Favorite Quotations

"If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself."

"The question of how best to live on the earth, among one's fellow creatures, was permitted to atrophy, and the churches devoted themselves exclusively and obsessively with the question of salvation."

"It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other."

"...we are one body, and the division between us is the disease of one body, not of two."

"Whites fear what they feel, secretly or otherwise, to be the righteousness of the anger of the blacks; as the oppressors they feel, secretly or otherwise, morally inferior to those they have oppressed."

"No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse."