“I don’t think of myself as a white person; I just think of myself as a person.”
This is what a parishioner told me over a decade ago when we were talking about race. To his credit, he had grown up in a town in Connecticut that was basically all white and he continued to live in that region into his adult life. The only people he had ever encountered who were not white were those who worked for him in a Fortune 100 company. He was a grown man and a leader in a major multinational corporation and he had really never had to negotiate his racial identity — ever! Having never been in a situation where this was needed, he had no idea that this lacuna in his life was privilege.
This is why so many white people have a negative reaction to the concept of white privilege — they have no idea that they experience it every day. Add to this the demise of the middle class in America, and the negative reaction to white privilege by white people is only heightened — “If there’s white privilege, then why do I struggle so much just to pay the bills” or “If there’s white privilege, then why isn’t my life easier than what it is?” These economic questions are legitimate, but are not a rebuttal to a racial fact. The intersection of race and class, however, complicates the reality of white privilege for many white people — especially white people who are poor.
White privilege is mostly a non-experience for white people. They are not profiled, not pulled over, not etc., because of their race. White people are not criminalized because of their race, which is why a white man can carry an AR-15 in public and only receive a qualified response from police officers, who are then rebuffed and reminded of the 2nd Amendment, while unarmed African-American men and boys are killed (and generally blamed for their own deaths — Skittles, cigarettes, CDs, nothing). I imagine that all of the African-American men and boys who have been killed in the past five years have never said, “I don’t think of myself as a black person; I just think of myself as a person.”
I think it is important for white people to acknowledge — or, at least, become aware of — their racial identity. What does it mean to be white in America? How does that benefit someone and how does it cost someone? These questions are not new for non-whites in America. Non-whites have always had to negotiate racial identity in the public sphere exactly because they were not white. This is the importance and significance of Black Studies, Latin@ Studies, Asian American Studies, etc. These fields of academic inquiry probe these questions in depth because the non-white experience is precisely not the standard or, to use an even more loaded term, normal. Critical race theory makes space for White Studies or Whiteness as a way for scholars to analyze whiteness as a category of human identity, which begins to show what exactly whiteness is and what it produces and what it privileges and what it diminishes.
The continual killings of African Americans in America is not a black problem; it’s an American problem that goes back to America’s original sin — slavery. Scholars do a good job unpacking racism and racial discourse in classrooms but fail to bring that work into the public sphere. Too few white Americans participate in racial discourse because it makes them uncomfortable and many feel like it’s not their problem — their kids and fathers aren’t the ones getting killed (for the most part). This is where churches and denominations (and denomi-networks) in the United States can make a serious impact on our country and help white people enter into the conversation. We are the institutions that can create a place and space for this discourse to happen. And when I say discourse, I really mean relationship.
I am amazed at how few white people actually know someone who is African American. This is one major reason white people don’t get involved in the protests and feel the anger that comes with the latest killing(s) — they are simply removed from this affecting their lives. Almost every white person I know who is involved in racial reconciliation or racial discourse has a significant person in his/her life who is non-white. Race isn’t an issue for them; race involves someone they love. This is why segregation continues to be one of the greatest factors in white silence or inactivity — these things just don’t happen to them (but they do). The love commandment seems to be a mandate (literally) for churches to intentionally make space for racial discourse and multi-racial relationships to be fostered. Search for the New Baptist Covenant to figure out how to make this happen in your local church!
This spring I was at a conference where I heard Angela Glover Blackwell (president and CEO of PolicyLink) speak to a room full of social entrepreneurs. It wasn’t a religious conference, but what she said sounded pretty religious to me. Her whole speech revolved around helping the most vulnerable. She said that when society helps the most vulnerable, it helps everybody. Her illustration was curb cuts on sidewalks. Curb cuts are a result of people with disabilities whose advocacy forced cities across the country to create curb cuts so that the differently abled could have access to sidewalks. When this happened, it didn’t just help people with disabilities; it helped everybody — people pushing strollers, people pushing heavy carts, etc. When you help the most vulnerable, you help everybody.
Then she seemingly shifted focus and said that we all needed to help the white community because of the heroin epidemic among young white kids. She said that too many kids were dying and we needed to figure out how to solve this problem. There have been multiple heroin overdoses in my (very white) town in Connecticut, so I was shaking my head in agreement — we all were, because it is an epidemic that’s killing hundreds of white kids across America. Then, she spoke another truth. In the 1980s when the crack epidemic was killing the black community, had everybody (whites included, whites especially) come together and said, “There is a crack epidemic in the black community. We’ve got to fix this problem! Too many of their kids are dying” — if that had happened, we would already have an answer for the heroin epidemic in the white community. If we had taken care of the most vulnerable in our society then, we would have an answer for our heroin problem today.
We didn’t. We criminalized the black community for crack and sent thousands to jail and prison. Now, our white kids are dying and we have no answer.
If we are going to truly be a multicultural society with liberty and justice for all, white people must come to terms with their own whiteness in ways that are life-giving to everyone and enter into the conversation.