What does it cost in America if your skin isn’t white?
In 1996, I was a summer missionary in the Philippines. I had no idea how much that summer would change my life. One night my partner and I stayed out too late visiting friends in the nearby city of Dagupan. It was a short 15-minute drive from where we stayed in Bonuan but too far to walk at night. The problem we faced was simple: almost all the public transportation had stopped running. The streets were barren and we were faced with a long (and possibly dangerous) walk back to our flat.
Then we heard what was music to our ears! The sound of a motorcycle and side car (called a tricycle in the Philippines) came bursting through the city streets and we knew we were saved. The tricycle was a common form of public transportation. We flagged the driver down, but before he would let us into the sidecar, he demanded 20 pesos from each of us. We were dumbfounded! We had taken that ride in a tricycle numerous times and we knew it only cost 2 pesos.
We resisted and told him he was immoral for charging us 40 pesos. He smiled at us, revved up his engine, and began to take off. We nearly pulled him off the tricycle trying to stop him. He laughed at us, then said, “It will cost you 40 pesos or you can walk.” Enraged, we threw 40 pesos at him and jumped in the sidecar. At that time the pesos to U.S. dollar was 25 to 1, so it cost us $1.60 — and we were utterly outraged by this injustice.
The next day we told our friends about our experience with this shady tricycle driver and how he took advantage of us. Our friends laughed and told us it was a skin tax. They said he would have never done that to a fellow Filipino, but since we were white, he charged us extra — a skin tax. Our friends were sorry that we had that experience but told us they were glad we got home safely. It could have cost us much more than 40 pesos if we had walked home.
Skin tax. One time in the summer of 1996 it cost me 80 cents to be white in the Philippines. What does it cost to be white in America in 2014? What kind of skin tax do white people pay in modern America? That’s not necessarily a rhetorical question. The question is important for a couple of reasons. First, it forces white people to actually think about their whiteness rather than imagine themselves as raceless — which usually makes whiteness normative (this is how white privilege is both invisible to and taken for granted by many white people).
Second, it forces white people to associate a cost with race. How much does it cost to be white? If that is a hard question to answer for white people, it may be because it doesn’t cost much if anything to be white in America. This is an incredible position of privilege. It is a matter of privilege for your race not to cost you anything.
What is the skin tax for African Americans or Latino/a Americans in modern America? That question has a radically different answer. Is there a skin tax in modern America when your skin is not white? Most white Americans are completely isolated from people of another color, so they assume that their racial experience applies to everyone else — because so many white Americans simply do not know someone from another race. Since all their white friends enjoy the same racial privilege, then they only hear about racial inequality in various media outlets. There is rarely a chance for white Americans to engage in racial dialogue in a multiracial and multiethnic environment where they are sitting in a group of real flesh-and-blood people who are different. It may be truer to say that white Americans simply don’t seek opportunities to have racial dialogue — it’s uncomfortable to many.
For this reason, intentional diversity needs to be a high value in congregations, denominations/denominetworks, and other religiously based organizations. Church provides a perfect place where people from diverse backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and other characteristics can gather and have meaningful conversations about skin taxes and how people of faith respond to such awful taxation. Church provides sacred space for all of us to come together and have healthy conversations about pressing issues related to race. White people need to have a sacred space to hear from another non-white brother and sister to learn about the sinful skin taxes that have cost them in their own country. In contrast to the skin tax that I paid in a foreign country, so many non-white brothers and sisters pay skin tax in their own country of origin. The cost for many has been certainly higher than 80 cents. As we have seen in recent events across our country, young African Americans have paid with their lives.
The New Baptist Covenant is one way for all of us to gather together and build relationships across racial divides. The work that this organization has done for the past several years has provided a terrific way for congregations to bridge the racial gap in America in ways that benefit everyone. As the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship moves forward, I would personally love us to be intentional about diversity in the way we hire staff and nominate people to serve in our new governing structure. This could provide a great example for our Fellowship churches!
Making diversity a high priority puts us in proximity to difference and makes our face-to-face encounters with flesh-and-blood people a reality that is mutually transformative. Without making diversity a priority in everything that we do, we (white people) are all prone to blindly accepting our white privilege as normative and thereby increase the skin tax burden on our non-white brothers and sisters across the country.
This is one tax no one should ever have to pay.
This column was originally published Dec. 19, 2014.