MEAD: Yes, that’s different. I think the responsibility for what can happen, which in a sense is good guilt — which is sort of a nonsensical term —
BALDWIN: Yes, but I know what you mean. It’s useful guilt.
MEAD: Responsibility. It is saying I am going to make an effort to have things changed. But to take the responsibility for something that was done by others —
BALDWIN: Well, you can’t do that.
Mead illustrates the perils of confusing responsibility and guilt with an exquisite example from her own life as a mother, from the time in the mid-1940s when she was heading a university initiative to foster cross-racial and cross-ethnic relationships:
MEAD: I was walking across the Wellesley campus with my four-year-old, who was climbing pine trees instead of keeping up with me.
I said, “You come down out of that pine tree. You don’t have to eat pine needles like an Indian.” So she came down and she asked, “Why do the Indians have to eat pine needles?” I said, “To get their Vitamin C, because they don’t have any oranges.” She asked, “Why don’t they have any oranges?” Then I made a perfectly clear technical error; I said, “Because the white man took their land away from them.” She looked at me and she said, “Am I white?” I said, “Yes, you are white.” “But I didn’t took their land away from them, and I don’t like it to be tooken!” she shouted.
Now if I had said, “The early settlers took their land away,” she would have said, “Am I an early settler?” But I had made a blanket racial category: the white man. It was a noble sentiment, but it was still racial sentiment.
With an eye to this demand for responsibility in the present rather than guilt over the past, the conversation once again reveals its contemporary poignancy:
MEAD: The kids say — and they’re pretty clear about it — that the future is now. It’s no use predicting about the year 2000.
BALDWIN: No.
MEAD: It’s what we do this week that matters.
BALDWIN: Exactly.
MEAD: That’s the only thing there is; there isn’t any other time.
A 1573 painting by Portuguese artist, historian, and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s, from Michael Benson’s book Cosmigraphics. They revisit the subject of guilt, with its perilous religious roots, and the complexities of forgiveness in discussing the crime of slavery:
BALDWIN: I, at the risk of being entirely romantic, think that is the crime which is spoken in the Bible, the sin against the Holy Ghost which cannot be forgiven. And if that is true —
MEAD: Then we’ve nowhere to go.
BALDWIN: No, we have atonement.
MEAD: Not for the sin against the Holy Ghost.
BALDWIN: No?
MEAD: I mean, after all, you were once a theologian.
BALDWIN: I was once a preacher, yes indeed.
MEAD: And the point about the sin against the Holy Ghost is that —
BALDWIN: It is that it cannot be forgiven.
MEAD: So if you state a crime impossible of forgiveness you’ve doomed everyone.
[…]
Look, there have been millions of crimes committed against humanity. Millions! Now, why is one crime more important than another?