The Crucible Effect

Copyright © 2006, W. David Tarver

First Published: Two River Times, December 1, 2006

Well, it has happened again. Yet another media personality has erupted in a racist tirade. No, I’m not referring to Mel Gibson, although that incident is still fresh in our minds. I’m referring to the former Seinfeld player, Michael Richards. Mr. Richards, during a comedy club appearance in L.A., ranted for several minutes at some black audience members, calling them the N-word and saying that "50 years ago you would be hanging upside down with a fork up your a__". Wow.

I heard CNN’s tease about the incident for a whole day before I saw the video. Apparently someone in the audience had their cellular phone video recorder running. Too bad for Mr. Richards. I must say that the video surprised me – the vehemence, the meanness. These weren’t just a few offhand comments – this sounded like a hateful, intentional tirade. The supposed trigger for Mr. Richards rant was the heckling that he received from some audience members. Subsequent to the event, Mr. Richards has said that he felt attacked and under pressure as a result of the heckling.

While I was, as I say, surprised by these developments, I was by no means taken aback. I understand quite well what Mr. Richards went through, and I have seen it before. It is something that I call The Crucible Effect.

Back in the late 1970s, when I was a young engineer at Bell Labs, we had a management development program called The Urban Minorities Workshop. The intent of the workshop was to sensitize the managers at Bell Labs, most of whom were white males, to the issues facing blacks and other minorities. I was asked to attend one of these workshops as a resource person, one who could vouch for the authentic feelings of black folks. Many of my white colleagues, and most of the black ones, attended this workshop at one time or another, and I must say that it was an eye-opening experience. The workshop was led by a fellow named Tim Harvey, and it took place at a hotel in the heart of Newark. Mr. Harvey’s method was to create a crucible for human behavior right there in the hotel conference room. Tim. Harvey would create the conditions that would lead to expressions of racial bias or conflict right there in the room, and when such expressions occurred he would pounce:

"Don’t you recognize your racist behavior?" he would say. "That’s exactly what you do to blacks in the workplace! That’s exactly what you and other whites have been doing for your entire careers! That’s why blacks just can’t get ahead. You are standing on their necks and you won’t get off! Admit it. You hate blacks, don’t you? Admit it!"

Needless to say, the atmosphere in the room was caustic. The white managers would insist that they were not racists, and would rationalize their behavior in a thousand different ways. Tim Harvey would not back down. He kept pushing and cajoling and insisting, until one by one, those white managers started saying, "Yes, I hate black people!" Some of them even used the N-word. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here were my engineering colleagues, the cream of the crop from the very best industrial research facility in the world, and one by one they were saying that they hated people like me.

When we left the workshop and went back to our jobs at Bell Labs, I could not look at my white colleagues the same way – even the ones who had not been at the workshop. The question floating in my mind was, did all of my colleagues harbor deep-seeded feelings of hate against people like me? Could I have a future at Bell Labs if this is how the white managers felt?

As time went on, I began to wonder about what I had witnessed at the Urban Minorities Workshop. Were the feelings expressed by the white managers real, or were they an artifact borne of intense pressure – the "crucible" created by Tim Harvey?

That is the question that was in my mind as I watched Michael Richards’ tirade. It is the same question I asked a few weeks ago when I learned of Mel Gibson’s Jew-hating rant. Are these people expressing their true feelings, or is pressure or intoxication making them say things that they don’t mean?

Well, I concluded a long time ago that many people have biases that they don’t express in their day-to-day interactions with others because it is impolitic for them to do so. Still, I feel that their deep-seeded attitudes often guide their behavior toward blacks and other minorities. I fear that this is simply a sad fact of life, one that we will be dealing with for a long, long time. I think that, rather than protesting "I am not a racist" or "I am not an anti-Semite" and "I don’t know where those hateful words came from", we would all do better to confront our racist demons and try to deal with them. Some healing may be in order, but I am afraid that surgery is needed first.

I know that the popularity of encounter sessions like the Urban Minorities Workshop has waned over the years. These days, we would rather pretend that racism is dead and gone, because that would mean that no remedies for the effects of racism are required. We have only to look at The Crucible Effect, and to the rants of people like Michael Richards and Mel Gibson, to realize that we still have much work to do.

David Tarver

November 28, 2006

Between Cozumel and Grand Cayman (and blessed!)