The Refusal to See

From Marilynne Robinson's Lila to Pam Bondi's Hearing Room

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila, an aging pastor looks at a woman the world has rendered invisible. Lila was a drifter, a survivor of abuse and exploitation. But Pastor John Ames sees something different. “I did know you. I do know you.” His eyes fill with tears. She shrugs and turns away.

Lila doesn’t know what to do with being truly seen. What she knows is invisibility. When she has been seen, it was only her body that mattered: in the fields for her work, in bed for someone else’s pleasure, in the way as an inconvenience to be moved aside. No one had ever gazed upon her countenance and seen a soul worth knowing.

Robinson writes of Lila’s terror at genuine recognition: “the injured fearfulness that comes when anybody at all might do you the worst kind of harm, just by the way they look at you. This old man is beautiful and kind and very patient, she thought, and if he looked at me that way I might just die of it.” To be seen, to have another person recognize your humanity, is both what we most need and what can make us most exposed. Not used, not categorized, not erased, but known.

Refusing to See

So what happens when those in authority exploit this basic need? Or when they ignore it? Or turn this need on its head?

There is a photograph that encapsulates how the current administration answers these questions. The picture captures Attorney General Pam Bondi sitting before a congressional committee with her back to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.

At one point in the hearing, Bondi was asked to turn around and apologize to the survivors. As The Hill reports, “After a back-and-forth, Bondi said she wasn’t going ‘to get in the gutter with these theatrics.’” One of the survivors, Marina Lacerda, described what that moment meant: “Multiple victims cried after that exchange, and they almost felt ‘embarrassed that we even stood up and she couldn’t turn around and apologize to us.’”

She never acknowledged their presence.

To the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, the human beings standing within feet of her were reduced to props in what she dismissed as “theatrics.”

Perverse Inversion

This was only one of several exchanges that should unsettle any conscience. Bondi’s refusal to simply look at Epstein’s survivors denied their presence and worth. But she went further: she inverted the very identities of those who challenged her.

Officials typically come to such proceedings with formal remarks, legal precedents, and background information on the key stakeholders and other critical details. According to reports and camera footage, Bondi came with what appears to be a “burn book:” Quick references for those she saw as enemies on the panel, ready to shout names and accusations.

In one exchange, Bondi accused Representative Becca Balint of antisemitism. The inversion was grotesque: Balint is Jewish, and her grandfather was murdered in the Holocaust.

Balint stormed out of the hearing room.

Say My Name

We’ve seen this before. And it is never theater to those who endure it. To the victims, this is all too real. Throughout history, those in authority have weaponized these tools of dehumanization. To be seen is to be human. To be known by one’s name is to be valued.

“What’s my name!” That was the roar of Muhammad Ali during his 1967 bout with Ernie Terrell. “What’s my name! What’s my name, huh!” Three years earlier, after defeating Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship, Ali had renounced his “slave name” and taken the name Muhammad Ali. But Terrell refused to use it, calling him Cassius Clay throughout the fight. Again and again, “the greatest” thundered over him. “What’s my name!”

Ali demanded to be known by his name. Not on someone else’s terms. Not by the names others assigned to him. But on his terms. By his name.

The Dignity of “Man”

Just as a heavyweight champion insisted on being called by his chosen name, jazz musicians engaged in a subtle yet significant act of defiance in how they addressed each other: “Man.” Today, we hear the word so frequently it almost gets lost as background noise.

But in the 1940s, calling someone “Man” carried social markers that couldn’t be missed. The norm was for white men to call Black men “boy.” So when African American jazz musicians began addressing each other as “Man,” it was a declaration of respect the world hadn’t yet afforded them.

For Louis Armstrong to call Dizzy Gillespie “Man,” for Dizzy to call Charlie Parker, for Bird to call Miles Davis, for Miles to call John Coltrane “Man” was to insist on dignity in a culture whose default was denial.

The Weapon of Anonymity

Yet Bondi wouldn’t even look at those justice is called to protect.

What appeared in that hearing room is mirrored elsewhere. Because the refusal to see has a companion: the refusal to be seen.

Other images have come to symbolize this administration: armed, masked officers covered in suits of modern warfare, often without badges or other identifying insignia. While Bondi heads the Department of Justice, these agents act with impunity in the Department of Homeland Security. The irony is cruel.

Dave Lapan, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served as Pentagon spokesman and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under both parties, observes a sinister pattern: “While the federal agents are able to hide behind masks and cloak their names/identities, the names and faces of those being oppressed are known, from videos and media coverage. But the government is also killing alleged drug traffickers in small boats while refusing to reveal their identities, therefore those humans are reduced to ‘drug dealers who get what they deserve.’”

The pattern is clear: those with power choose who remains invisible and who is exposed. Federal agents hide. Those they detain are photographed and named. Those they kill are reduced to nameless labels. As Lapan concludes, “...this administration uses anonymity only when it serves its purposes.”

Erecting Idols of Oneself

Meanwhile, Trump himself craves the opposite. There has been a series of moves to display the president’s name and likeness in ways that echo Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. Circumventing congressional authority, Trump placed his own name above John F. Kennedy’s at the Kennedy Center. There are attempts underway to rename Dulles Airport. The administration “also announced a new fleet of U.S. Navy vessels to be called Trump-class battleships,” as reported by The Week.

Then, just last week, Reuters reported: “A banner of U.S. President Donald Trump has been unfurled outside the headquarters of the Justice Department in the latest effort to stamp his identity on a Washington institution.”

Again. The Justice Department.

The contrast is stark: the elevation of one person’s name against the daily infringements on the humanity of countless others.

The Automatism of Power

Václav Havel, the Czech poet and dissident who was to become president after communism’s fall, understood how authoritarian systems operate. He wrote about “automatism,” the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention. While there appears to be conscious thought and intention in Trump’s orbit, it’s worth questioning whether there is conscientious thought and intention.

Havel wrote that the posttotalitarian system “serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it,” and that “an individual’s desire for power is admissible only insofar as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system.”

In such systems, people are given agency only to the degree that it aligns with its own aims, preferences, prejudices and whims.

Mother Teresa’s Touch

We currently have an administration that refuses to see the vulnerable. It would be understandable to resign ourselves to the notion that this is simply the way of the world. Yet for almost half a century, Mother Teresa did the opposite: she gazed upon the unwanted, touched the untouchable, and dignified the discarded, the sick, and the poor.

In a region overflowing with the unwanted, unloved and uncared for, Mother Teresa’s touch didn’t necessarily heal the lepers, the sick, and the outcasts. But perhaps her touch was of even more eternal value: it acknowledged another’s humanity, that person’s soul.

The saint among us taught: “...those who are a burden to society, who have lost all hope and faith in life, who have forgotten how to smile and no longer know what it means to receive a little human warmth... If we turn our backs on them, we turn our backs on Christ.”

The Practice of Seeing

It doesn’t require sainthood to heal what’s broken in our democracy and the world.

“People are social animals,” writes David Brooks in How to Know a Person. “People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance… the gaze that says ‘I respect you…’”

Being seen in a way that says, “I respect you.”

Seeing. Naming. Beholding. These are not symbolic gestures but the small, daily acts that form a moral culture. There is sanctity in the mundane act of simply seeing one another.

We Chose This

But here we are. More than half of the American electorate chose this president a year ago. Not only that. More than two thirds of white Evangelicals continue to support this administration.

As a Christian, that last statistic is difficult to reconcile. How do my brothers and sisters in the church support what I’m about to describe?

An Attorney General refusing to acknowledge the presence of the victims of unthinkable crimes. Accusing a Jewish congresswoman, whose grandfather was murdered in the Holocaust, of antisemitism. Federal agents with no badges or identification, hiding behind masks as they violate the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. A Secretary of Defense ordering lethal attacks and then refusing to reveal the identities of those killed, reducing those lives to labels. A president so enthralled with his own name that there is no building, airport, program, or award he hasn’t tried to claim.

This inventory is brutal, and it is hardly exhaustive.

I Am…

None of us can singlehandedly reshape national politics, but we can choose how we see one another. We can look upon each other the way John Ames looked upon Lila. We can look into each other’s eyes with loving acceptance. We can call each other by name. We can provide a little human warmth to those who’ve been forgotten, unseen and cast aside. We can turn around and see those this administration will not.

We can remember what Reverend Jesse Jackson shared with children on Sesame Street:

…I am black, brown, white.

I speak a different language.

But I must be respected,

protected,

never rejected.

I am God’s child.

⁣I am

Somebody!