Breaking out of our bubble

Published online on Monday, Nov. 09, 2009

The Rev. Peter Storey says we Americans live in a bubble.

We know that, but he's worth listening to because, as a white South African who fought apartheid, he knows the harm of being blind to other perspectives.

Storey has been crossing the Atlantic for decades, seeing our similarities and differences.

He earned a doctorate from Ohio Wesleyan, and recently taught at Duke after retiring from his church leadership roles in South Africa. He was in Seattle at the invitation of Seattle University's School of Theology and Ministry when I spoke with him last week.

"I draw some parallels between the dynamics of the relationship between white South Africans and the rest of the continent, and the United States and the rest of the world," he said.

They've both suffered from ignorance and arrogance, "the stuff that happens between the powerful and the less powerful, or the powerless."

During the years of apartheid, he said, "Most white South Africans lived in a bubble of privilege ... in which it was possible to be very nice people" without giving thought to their impact on people whose sweat allowed the bubble to exist.

"They knew everything about the whites, they even knew the color of their underwear," he said. But most whites knew nothing about black lives.

The U.S. relationship to the rest of the world is often that way, according to Storey.

"Our societies are profoundly impacted by (the U.S.), from the television we watch to policy decisions by the White House."

The impact is not all bad. He praises the many Americans he sees who engage with the world, but said, "There is a disconnect between the decency and caring of ordinary Americans and the way (American power) is expressed in international policy."

Barack Obama's election offers hope of bridging that gap.

"A lot of us are excited because President Obama has had some experiences outside the bubble."

The transformation that gave Storey's country its first black president was helped along by white people, like him, who saw outside their bubble.

Usually, he said, they had two things in common.

First, they had absorbed some kind of value system that put a high value on human rights and social justice.

Second, they had a direct encounter with the pains of oppressed people, which leads them to act on their values.

Storey was a leader in the church struggle against apartheid, and was chaplain to Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners.

These days, he said, "We are really struggling as whites to know who we are, and that is true regardless of which side you were on."

There is a cultural vacuum for white South Africans. National holidays used to be dates important to white South Africans. Now they are days important to black South Africans.

"There is a grieving process," he said, even for people who celebrate the end of apartheid.

And he wonders, "If I as a South African can experience grief at the loss, what must it have been like for a people who were always celebrating someone else's culture?"

We should think outside ourselves that way if we hope to better understand the rest of the world.

(Contact Jerry Large at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.)