I am canoeing down a lake, feeling great. I’ve been paddling lots this summer and I’m strong; after twenty-five years of paddling a canoe, this is easy! How could anyone think this is difficult or exhausting? Weaklings!
And then I realize: I have a lovely following wind, pushing me along. Not a huge wind, just enough to give me that extra power. If I don’t turn around and look, I wouldn’t notice it at all. I feel like I’m a strong paddler, and this is so easy.
Paddling with a following wind: this is the best illustration I know for white privilege. I’m oblivious to it, work comes easy, I feel great. What could possibly be the problem?
But for those paddling into a headwind, our brothers and sisters of color, it’s different.
A friend of mine—who taught mainly white youth workers—lectured about this. Finally, she took her students to the college track and lined them up. “On your marks. Get set… wait.”
Then she would shout out a list. “If you grew up in a home with a working computer, take one step forward.” “If you grew up, knowing that if you went to buy a card in your local shop, the person on it might have your skin color, take a step forward.” “If you are in the first generation of your family to get to college, take a step back.” “If your family was forced to rent rather than buy their home, take a step back.” “If there was no grocery store with fresh fruit and vegetables in your neighborhood, take a step back.” “If you were pulled over by the police, and felt no fear, take a step forward.”
By now, students were spread out. “On your marks. Get set. Go!” Then the true reckoning could begin.
The problem with white privilege is that it is invisible to us unless we choose to (or are forced to) see it.
The problem with blind spots is that we are blind to them.
We don’t want to see! During World War II, good people in Germany spoke of niggling concerns at all the freight cars going by, but was it their business? Our venerable founding fathers spoke of liberty for all while enslaving people. What are we not seeing?
God knows we need help to see: I believe that, as a country, we are being offered a chance to awaken.
What helps us to wake up, to see?
Prophets wake us up, and you can tell true prophets (according to scripture) from false ones, by this: true prophets make us feel uncomfortable, telling us what we don’t want to hear.
Who are our prophets?
Some are biblical. Read the book of Amos, where God says, “Take away from me the sounds of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5: 23-24).
Other prophets?
Football players taking the knee. Church leaders like Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Rev. Dr. William Barber from The Poor People’s Campaign. We can open ourselves to books and movies—like The New York Times 1619 project, Ibram Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist, the book and movie of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. In Grand Marais, Stacy Drouillard’s book, Walking The Old Road, pushes us to see what we’ve done to this land’s original inhabitants.
“But, this makes me feel bad!” we say. That’s good. We need to see our complicity, to face the truth that white supremacy is America’s great sin, in all its forms: enslavement, Jim Crow, boarding schools, segregation, redlining, imprisonment, and police brutality.
It’s very hard to let go of white privilege and its perks. I believe we can understand the vandalism of BLACK LIVES MATTER signs, the waving of Confederate flags, people claiming “all lives matter”—as the dying throes of the fearful, of those who want to hold their place as special and important simply because they are white.
Jesus is our most important prophet. In his life, he speaks truth to power, making religious authorities uncomfortable by faulting them on their treatment of the vulnerable.
We see in Jesus’ life, and especially in his death, the high cost of truth-speaking. In his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Black theologian James Cone points out that many of us white, western Christians have emptied the cross of its power: either by entirely personalizing it to ‘save me,’ or by seeing it as too bloody and manipulative.
Not so to our Black brothers and sisters. The cross is central, it is God’s love to and for suffering humanity; God’s answer to the deadly cycle of violence and hatred. Jesus, killed as an insurrectionist, becomes the locus of divine revelation, a reversal of expectations and conventional values. As Howard Thurman puts it: “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight, the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”
We, in this time, can wake up, hear the prophets around us and respond, not with fear and a sense of scarcity, but to the abundance of love revealed in Christ. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Love on a societal level is named justice.” Please, God, wake us up!
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
Leave a Reply