Thanks for reading. I try not to judge dad, really. I think he’s a good person deep down, and to me, that’s the tragedy of it all. Good people can be made to do bad things or to consent to them.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, a considerable amount of scholarly effort went into studying Nazi leaders and the German people as a whole to see if there was something peculiar to their character or psychology that led them to go down that route.
There really wasn’t. Hanna Arendt wrote about this in her book The Banality of Evil. There were many Nazis who were “good people,” which is to say they were good fathers, husbands, friends and members of their community, but the racist, antisemitic Nazi system created classes of unpersons— “life unworthy of life”—which caused otherwise “good people” not to see others as people at all.
And I think while my dad is growing and coming to see black people as his friends and neighbors, he’s also caught up in the us vs. them politics of his party, which regards immigrants and Muslims as a threatening Other.
People don’t exist as individuals in a vacuum, which is the point I was making with the reference to WEB Dubois. The good part of dad has to contend with the part of him created by the legacy of white supremacy, and that part is sustained because it is useful to those in power.
If you’re interested, I wrote another piece from the same trip a few months ago about a different conversation with my father that brings this contradiction more into focus.
