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Howard Thurman and Segregation

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Please provide critical reflections upon Howard Thurman's strengths, limitations, and weaknesses relative to the topic of liberation?

How can Howard be challenged in his thoughts regarding liberation?

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Solution Summary

Howard Thurman used the experience of segregation to challenge black people to alter how they perceive the world. They possess a truth that only the oppressed (of any race) possesses. They see the system from the outside.

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Segregation and its experiences is what brought Thurman to realize the nature of morals and liberation in all aspects of life, not just race. Of course, as a successful author and Ivy League professor, claims to "discrimination" ring hollow.

Liberation to him was a rejection of the brute realm of fact. This is not to deny reality, but to deny a strictly empirical view of the world. Knowing that sin often alters human perception, "reality" looks different from the point of view of the oppressed.

As I've said elsewhere, Thurman appropriates an ancient argument and calls it his own. It's important nonetheless: Adam and Eve sinned. The nature of this sin was the desire for empirical knowledge over intuition. Put differently, logic became more significant than the reality those concepts signified. Thus in a very general way, this is his doctrine of liberation.

Why is this "liberation"? Its because there are hidden connections among things, events and people that empirical thought alone cannot understand. That there is a "scientific" justification for racism makes the empirical mind suspect. The "brute reality" is not the world. This "reality" is also a product of perception. Race and class, just to name two, filter experiences. Blacks see whites as eternally hateful of them, while a handful of whites see the black man as incorrigibly violent. In both cases, the "givens" of reality are ignored and prejudice is permitted to function in their place. Assuming one of the above ideas means that everything that person will see is thus colored by it.

He writes,

I know that a man must be at home somewhere before he can feel at home anywhere. Always the sense of separateness that is an essential part of individual consciousness must be overcome even as it sustains and supports. This is the crucial paradox in the achievement of ...

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