Aesthetic Realism Explains Where
Racism Begins– & What Can End It!
By Alice Bernstein
As reports of racial hatred — including the horrific
murder of a Texas man — are so vivid in everyone's mind, it
is urgent that people everywhere know that Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy
founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel, the great American educator and poet, explains
the cause of racism and can permanently end it. The cause is contempt,
defined by Mr. Siegel as “the addition to self through the lessening of
something else.” Contempt, I learned, is ordinary: a child teasing another
child; a wife sarcastically interrupting her husband; a man thinking he
is smarter and more sensitive than his neighbor. And it is the basis of
our economic system in which a person's labor provides profit for someone
else. Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the cause of every injustice
— from ethnic slurs and ridicule to the deadly forms of racism, bombs,
war.
Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, explains
in the international
periodical, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known
why, in America’s failed economy, racism is on the rise:
| “A person who is white looks at a person whose skin is
darker and feels 'I am better than you' for one reason alone: people want
to think well of themselves, and an easy way of seeming to think well of
yourself is to make less of what is not you. Because contempt for a person
looking different is always contempt for a world we dislike, racism can
be more flagrant as people are made to worry about jobs and money....The
big thing people have not known about racial prejudice is that it does
not begin with race. It begins with the world itself, and how one sees
the world.” |
And Ellen Reiss explains the fight in a representative
girl, Heather, about how to see the world:
| “The purpose of Heather's life—what she, as a tiny baby...
was born for—was to respect the world, like it. That means, to feel things
and people in all their difference from her were related to her too: they
could add to her, make her more herself through wanting to know and value
them. But within Heather and all of us there was and is another possibility:
the false, hurtful dealing with sameness and difference which is contempt.” |
Here Ms. Reiss describes how a girl becomes a racist:
| “Heather heard someone use a crude, demeaning word about
a person of another race. That word appealed to her. And the first time
she used it...she had a thrill...of feeling that in one swift utterance
she had put in its place not only a person but the world different from
her.... The horrible way Heather saw black people continued because her
desire to have contempt for a world not herself continued. Now she is 15.
With some friends, she has spray-painted ugly words on a church attended
by African-Americans in her town.” |
The only alternative to contempt is in this mighty principle
which Aesthetic Realism is based on: “The world, art, and self explain
each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” I am so grateful
that as a person learns to see the world and himself as having a structure
of opposites, the difference of others is seen as friendly; something to
know and be fair to. Learning from Aesthetic Realism how to criticize contempt
and to see other people's feelings from within — as real and vital as ours
are to us — is the most thrilling, scientific education on earth! When
people learn to see in this way, new kindness will exist, people will feel
honestly proud; and racism will end.
This fact, I am infinitely grateful to say, is true in
my life. As a child, without knowing it, I hoped to be important by feeling
superior to others and this desire made me unkind both to people I knew
— like my sister, whose looks and manners were different from mine — and
people I didn’t know. I deeply regret that I once called a little boy an
ugly name because his skin looked different from mine. The memory of his
pained face fills me with shame even after all these years. I don’t know
how my life would have gone if my parents had not begun to study Aesthetic
Realism, but I thank reality with all my heart that they did.
What my family had the honor to learn in lessons conducted
by Eli Siegel, men, women and children are learning now in consultations
in person and by telephone worldwide, from the faculty of the not-for-profit
Aesthetic
Realism Foundation in New York City: that our deepest desire is to
like the world honestly, and every person is a rich opportunity to do this
— a new chance for self-respect.
In these magnificent sentences, Eli Siegel shows the exciting
and beautiful relation of sameness and difference in people of all races:
| “The very great technician, Nature, while working in
a space of not more than twenty-five inches or so—that is, the human face—has
come to have so many faces, feminine and masculine, child and adult. They
are all different. We can assume that every Paleolithic face was different,
also Neolithic, also Roman face, Chinese face, Greek face, Mesopotamian
face; and just how it's done is remarkable. Any person trying to imagine
five hundred faces will find it very hard, but somehow Nature has been
able to have a tremendous...inconceivable variety.” |
And Mr. Siegel so exactly and kindly explains the essential
likeness in all humanity:
| “It will be found that black and white man have the same
goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way.
The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.” |
I love the study of Aesthetic Realism for enabling the
kindness and justice of these words to become alive, real, warm, in every
home and street; in every human heart. This is the education that can make
the horror of racism a thing of the past. And so I urge everyone to contact
the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, at 141 Greene St., New
York, NY 10012 (212) 777-4490; and see the website at www.AestheticRealism.org
to learn how this can occur as soon as possible. *
Alice Bernstein has written on Aesthetic Realism as the knowl-edge
that can end racism, including in relation to apartheid in South Africa
and films by Euzhan Palcy of Martinique; and also on how Aesthetic Realism
answers the deepest ques-tions about love and the family. She is married
to photographer David
Bernstein, and together they are honored to study in classes taught
by Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism. |
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