Why is it, on the days when you most need to be getting stuff done, you can’t seem to get anything done or be in the mood to do anything? That seems to be the day I’m having. I have to finish an article for Church and Society before I leave for Thailand tomorrow, and it seems nearly impossible right now. So I’ll try to give you a pithy blog today (hah!) so that I can move onto some heavy-duty writing.

David passed on an article from Australia’s The Age newspaper today about race relations, particularly between whites and African Americans in the United States. It basically comments on how, 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, we are still a largely segregated society… and not just along race lines. Middle class black communities have their own version of “white flight,” living in areas far removed from the turbulence of the inner cities. Even then, however, middle class whites and African Americans don’t mix much outside the workplace—only five to ten percent of Americans live in integrated communities, and public schools are almost completely segregated. And all the while, poverty in this country deepens, eliminating the opportunities that civil rights gains have provided in the past for people of color (as programs continue to wend their way to the federal budget shredder, too).

A couple of thoughts to throw out there, as a white woman. First of all, it is time for whites (or European Americans, or whatever you want to call this group) to start really examining the privileges that they hold in this world. This goes beyond the subtle gains of being racially in the majority, though. It goes back to being a citizen of the world’s only superpower, a person with a college education, a person often of middle or upper class background. There are so many layers of intersecting privilege that build barriers as whites attempt to dialogue with people of color, as well as people from other nations, the working poor, and others. No one can always eliminate these things, at least not in the short term. But when white people start to notice, they can start to act.

An example, just from this blog post right now—as I was going back over what I wrote in that last paragraph, I realized that I kept using the pronouns “we” and “us.” As a white woman, I was referring to white people, of course. But then it dawned on me how off-putting this subtle language would be to the women of color who read this blog. Because what I had just implied was that the “in” people in NNPCW are the white women. Women of color come out sounding like the “other,” part of the Network but not quite part of the Network in the same way that white women are. I did change the paragraph, by the way. Yet if we’re ever going to have a fundamental shift in race relations in this country, whites in particular must start realizing how often they subconsciously exclude people of color.

And for those of you who are about to say that the “us/them” dichotomy exists regardless of racial ethnic background, yes, you’re right. But the majority group has historically held the power and advantage in this country, and needs to think about how they continue to distribute that power to others. While we all need to think about privilege and how it manifests itself, this is particularly crucial for people of European descent. As Robert Jensen of the University of Texas says in an article from the Baltimore Sun in July 1998:

“I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve my job, or that if I weren’t white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great.”

Once all Americans have started to address the issue of privilege—realizing what each of us has that might be harder for someone else to get—perhaps then we can get down to the business of the segregation issue. Because at that point we might be in the place to honestly discuss what separates black and white, and engage together in advocacy on behalf of the poor in this country. Because as the article I read points out, the collective amnesia in this country about issues of race and poverty comes from the middle class—both black and white.

Frankly, there are no easy answers. Perhaps all we can do at this point is realize what God has blessed each person with, and the responsibilities that go with it. We are God’s servants with the talents, and God condemns those who don’t use, or don’t acknowledge, what they have for God’s justice and righteousness.

“For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” --Matthew 25:29

Kelsey