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What This Year Taught Me About My Privilege

From the moment my feet stepped onto Broad Street in Center City Philadelphia thirty years ago, I started to realize I’d been missing something.

Like most young, cisgender, white Christian guys living in America, I’d always thought my experiences were everyone’s; that anyone living in my country essentially had the same opportunities, struggles, obstacles, and advantages that I had. America, (I grew believing) was the home of Liberty and Equality where personal freedom was simply a given—and I wanted to believe that story. And since nothing in my reality argued otherwise, I did believe it.

It was only when I stepped out of the safe confines of my story that I saw the truth. As I started living in a place of greater diversity, I began to recognize the reality of my privilege; that my skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation all afforded me advantages that made my life far easier than if any of these variables were not present. I kept listening, kept asking, kept learning.

Ten years later when I became a pastor, I saw the way that these imbalances are magnified in organized religion; how privilege had shaped the Church into a place controlled largely by straight, white men who, convinced God was both American and a dude—were subtly or overtly twisting the Scriptures to their advantage. The deeper I walked into church leadership, the more aware of the sickness I became and the more committed I’ve been to pushing hard against it. I’ve been outspoken in support of LGBTQ rights, advocated for women in the Church, asserted the inherent value of black lives, and condemned the Christian Church’s vilifying of Muslims.

All this to say that up until November 2016 I thought I was a pretty progressive guy who understood my privilege, and some of the pain and frustration of marginalized communities—and I had no freakin’ idea.

Seeing Donald Trump’s message of exclusion and open bigotry take root in so much of my country disheartened me in ways I can’t quite quantify. Watching so much of the American Church so gladly participate in elevating a man as unlike Jesus as anyone I’d ever seen, revealed a layer of racism and misogyny and Nationalism in the Church that were shocking even to someone who thought they’d seen it. Without qualification, temperament, or intelligence, the man was simply being awarded the priceless things which he desired, despite the most reckless, vile behavior. I saw more profoundly what privilege affords us.

As Donald Trump has taken office, and with one horrible decision after another proven himself to have total disregard for all but the wealthiest and whitest, and the professed Christians who’ve suckled at his bloated bosom, I realized that what for me and other white people is an unparalleled disastrous moment in History—for many of those in marginalized communities is just another day in America.

A couple of days after the election a good friend of mine said, “Welcome to being black. This is life for me.” She reminded me that the same sense of hopelessness, the same burning anger at injustice, the same agonizing feeling of not being heard that I felt for the first time on any real level—is a daily existence for those who are truly marginalized. To feel like those in power have contempt for you is all some people have ever known.

Over the past few months I’ve lamented the fact that I never really appreciated the pain of people of color, the LGBTQ community, Muslims, immigrants, the women in my country—even when I thought I had. I regret the ways that what felt like empathy was still insulated by the fact that I am not parts of these communities. I regret the times I thought I’d listened deeply, thought I was self-aware, thought I was properly burdened with injustice, thought I was helping.

And I know this is always going to be an obstacle for me and other cisgender, white, Christian guys like me, as committed as we are to being part of a better, more diverse, more equal world. 

I know I’ll never be able to see my privilege fully, never notice all my blind spots, and never truly be able to step into the shoes of someone who has lived every day without the advantages that come to me simply because of how I look and how I love. This is the barrier of all privilege. 

I certainly haven’t suddenly become part of an oppressed community either. I haven’t and never will experience true marginalization, but Donald Trump and this election and the sheer horrible absurdity of it all have at the very least, given me a few blood-boiling, raw-throated, life-altering, faith-shaking days, when I caught even a momentary glimpse of the feeling so many live every single second with as their working reality. In this way, maybe Trump’s astounding inhumanity has actually allowed a deeper level of affinity for Humanity.

It all reminds me that I have so much growing to do.

It also reminds me that we have so very far to go.

Guess I’ll keep walking; listening, asking, learning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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