“And for the first time I felt my nakedness.”

For several years I lived in what seems to me now to have been a very general way. My major aim was to keep writing, and I had done so by taking advantage of random opportunities, traveling here and there, living a year or two in one place and a year or two in another. And then in the spring of 1964 I turned back on the direction I had been going. I returned to Kentucky, and within a year bought and moved onto a little farm in my native part of the state.

That return made me finally an exile from the ornamental Europeanism that still passes for culture with most Americans. What I had done caused my mind to be thrown back forcibly upon its sources: my home countryside, my own people and history. And for the first time I felt my nakedness. I realized that the culture I needed was not to be be found by visiting museums and libraries and auditoriums. It occurred to me that there was another measure for my life than the amount or event the quality of the writing I did; a man, I thought, must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world. I began to want desperately to learn to belong to my place. The test, it seemed to me, would be how content I could become to remain in it, how independent I could be, there, of other places.

– Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound.

Here Berry is making the important connection between race and place. In a book about his own coming to terms with racism and its psychological and spiritual impact on all Americans, but especially white Americans, Berry finds that his own healing depends on his willingness to submit to place, to stop living, as he describes elsewhere, as “urban nomads.” The reasons for this connection are many and Berry gets at some of these, mostly related to culture and economics, but he misses what I consider to be most fundamental, that race was created as a means to sever people from place. As Willie Jennings has pointed out, by granting the pseudo-scientific construction of race the power to define bodies, European colonialists (and their descendants) detached themselves and those they sought to exploit from God’s creation. No longer was the earth itself – with its cultures and histories – the lens through which peoples were encountered and understood (or understood themselves), now the warped veneer of race could be conveniently applied to those whose labor and bodies were desirable for profit.

Deciding to reject “ornamental Europeanism” for a local life submitted to place did not immediately lead to wholeness for Berry, but it did expose his racial nakedness and from that honest place he began his journey toward a more humane life.