I Am Privilege: A Spiritual Reckoning

Gated Communities are for Me 

“I was in my own neighborhood Jeff. I was on the hood of a police car for running through my own neighborhood.” As he said it, I could hear two competing voices in one sentiment. The first was the frustration and disbelief of having to again tell that story, to again relive that moment in that particular setting. The second voice was one of compassion and graciousness as he sought to explain an incident to a person for whom it would make little sense.  

 Let me back up to the moments that led to this conversation, to the moments when something shifted for me. Let me back up to the moments in which everything changed.  

I was taking a class at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Racial studies. It was a course within a series of courses that was requisite for the degree I was pursuing. I had to check the box on the “race thing” before I could get to the classes I really wanted to take. I’m not overexaggerating here to say that I was less than convinced that I needed such a class. I had never considered myself a racist. I embodied the progressive ideal. I loved “everyone.” I tried not to “see color.” I made friends easily. Though I grew up in a 99% rural Ohio area (a story to which I’ll return later), I’d also attended college and successfully navigated military life, spending hours with women and men of different nationalities, races, and backgrounds.  

I was convinced that race was a problem. I just wasn’t convinced that I was part of the problem. 

I attended the course and did what I’d been trained to do. I spoke up. I had something to say. I was contributing to the conversation, or so I thought. (I’d later come to realize that my contribution was really domination.) We read books that spoke to the nature of “white normativity,” which speaks to the reality that whiteness and the prevailing cultures of whiteness are the normative expectation for full participation and acceptance in our Euro-centric, white male dominated systems in America. I found it academically stimulating but lacked the necessary existential connection with the material that often elicited emotions from my classmates that I couldn’t understand.  

And my contributions, i.e. conversational domination, wasn’t appreciated or affirmed. No one congratulated me on my astute observations. In fact, more than once I’d hear, “Jeff, can you just sit there and listen for a moment and let us talk?”  

I was appalled at the gall of people who spoke so passionately about the inclusion of voice in the conversation to so blatantly exclude my voice. The hypocrisy…I chuckle writing this even now. To make matters worse, the professor didn’t like me at all. (In his defense, as a professor now I don’t think I would have liked 2009 Jeff – especially in a class on racial issues.) Dr. Forrest Harris was an adjunct at Vanderbilt and was currently serving as the President of American Baptist College in Nashville. A distinguished scholar, proven leader, valued educator, and champion for social justice, Harris was less than impressed with my espoused expertise on a subject to which I’d just been introduced. Harris was tolerant at first, aggravated midway through, and annoyed nearly every time I opened my mouth. I felt discouraged, devalued, and dismissed.  

I was in the minority in the class and felt treated as such. I felt it was unfair. Notably, this was the first time in my life I’d been in the position where my “being in the world” didn’t afford me the privilege of speaking first, often, and last. It was perhaps one of the most important moments in my life (though the weight of it would take time to negotiate.)  

It was in that setting, probably after one of my naïve comments shaped by an unrealized, unconfessed privilege that my classmate told his story. It was a story I will do my best to relate as factually as I remember and one that continues to exercise an impact on my life in nearly every new scenario I find myself.  

“Jeff,” he said, “one time I’d come home from college. Now let me give you a little background. My father is a physician and we live in a gated community. I grew up in that community and at the time was attending a private university. I’d come home to visit my parents and made a terrible mistake. You know the mistake I made, Jeff?” I shook my head. “Jeff, the mistake I made was thinking that I, a physically fit black man with dreads could run through my own neighborhood in the daylight for exercise and expect to be treated as though I belonged there. Instead, as I ran a police car came up alongside of me, pulled up and cut me off. The officer jumped out of the car and demanded that I tell him why I was there. When I tried to tell him that I lived in the neighborhood, I was met by utter disbelief. There was no way someone who looks like me could possibly live or belong in a place that looks like this. He put me up against the car to frisk me. This went on until I could prove to him by taking him to my house that I lived in that neighborhood. I was in my own neighborhood Jeff. I was on the hood of a police car for running through my own neighborhood. I was the son of a physician who lived in a gated community going to a private university and still I was reminded that I don’t fit, this world isn’t for me. Jeff, do you think you’d ever have that problem, no matter what neighborhood you ran through. Truth is Jeff, the only time you’d have a run in with the cops running through a neighborhood is if you were running through the “wrong neighborhood” and cops stopped you to tell you, you are unsafe.”  

This was the moment, a moment when I heard two voices speak, the voice of heartache and the voice of compassion that something shifted within me. I can’t fully articulate all that changed that day. But in that moment, I shut up. I listened. At the end, there was no rebuttal. There was no defense. There was no justifying my place in the world. Maybe, had this experience been the anomaly for a young black man in the United States I could have validated his experience and yet refuted its implications. But I couldn’t.  

I’ve never been stopped and frisked. 

I’ve never been followed through a department store to ensure I didn’t steal anything. 

I’ve never had someone lock their car doors when I walked past their car in a parking lot. 

I’ve never had to shrink so as to look less scary or intimidating.  

I’ve never had to wonder if my hoodie would be viewed as a threat. 

I’ve never had someone cross the street as I approached.  

I never had to have “the talk” with my father nor with my sons 

I’ve never been dismissed from a conversation because of my color or my gender. 

I’ve never had someone look at me shocked when I told them I attended a private university. 

I’ve never been forced to carry the burden of invalidation either because of the pigment of my skin, my anatomy, my sexual preference, or my ethnic background.  

I have never once had an anxious moment when I had to decide if the sign outside locker room I was entering matched my internalized gender identity 

I’ve never had someone automatically defer to my spouse because they thought she was the professional and I was the stay at home parent.  

There are many, “I’ve nevers” that I could share because who I am means that I don’t have to deal with much of what others are forced to deal with. I am privilege.  

Gluten Free Apple Pie Anyone?  

I am privilege. This means I am in fact the iconic American Emblem. I couldn’t be any more American than Apple Pie. Of course, as a celiac sufferer that apple pie would have to be gluten free. But even there my privilege comes through. I’m privileged to shop at stores and frequent restaurants that can cater to my peculiar dietary needs. That aside, how about a bit of a biographical picture as a set up for  our discussion as to what I mean when I say “privilege.” 

I was born a white male, to a middle class family, who would have loosely associated with the term Protestant in semi-rural Ohio. I say semi-rural because I lived in the bustling metropolis of Bolivar – a community made up of neighborhoods, people who often drove 10 miles north to Canton for work or 10 miles south to Dover and New Philadelphia. I wasn’t rural, but I knew many. We were at the heart of WHITE America. I mean we had a black family, soooo…that made us diverse right? And we all loved them, soooo… that means we weren’t racist right? Race wasn’t a problem for us because race wasn’t our problem. Likewise, we didn’t deal with pesky immigration issues and the homosexuals stayed firmly locked in their closets to stay safe from the ensuing mistreatment and teasing that would have been their lot.  

And I was one of the “us.” Shoot, I was our poster child. 

I’m going to do this quickly. I will share how my experiences, accomplishments, and associations shaped my perspectives, formed my implicit biases, and served my privilege, because I believe confession matters. For the White American Male Christian, confession matters. When I say confession, I don’t mean confessing to the culpability of societal ills and systemic brutality and domination that came long before I was born. What I mean by confession is an act of recognition, acknowledgement. Confession means coming to terms with my “white privilege,” a term often weaponized or misunderstood, but that simply means that like the wake left in the water long after a speed boat passes, white privilege is the wake left in the water after centuries of intentionally created, supported, and defended public policies of systemic racism. Confession recognizes that the wake doesn’t disappear in a few decades, especially when the injustice has moved places of inherited traumas, social inequalities in education, criminal justice, and housing, and sustained implicit biases sustained by unconfessed undercurrents of racialized thinking. Confession is the means by which we come to terms with the “taken for grantedness” of our existence. Confession is the spirit-led conviction that I right now am both participant in and benefactor of systems designed for me, that have and continue to privilege me over others. Confession acknowledges privilege, not as a misnomer that I’ve not had to work hard for what I have, but that I’ve had less arbitrary and unjust obstructions than those who do not share my place in the world, had less obstacles to cross, less barriers impeding my movement, less threats to the fruit of my labor. So first I say, confession matters. What I share now is the confession that I am the emblem of the White America.  

• I am a white American male. 
• I grew up in Rural America. 
• I rode my bikes up and down safe streets from sun up to sun down every day we weren’t in school. 
• We lived in a four bedroom, 2 bath home with a large yard and 2 dogs.  
• I was surrounded by other white kids. We left our bikes out overnight, didn’t pick up our basketballs after a good game, traded baseball cards. 
• We vacationed nearly every summer. 
• My parents both worked…very hard.  
• We had wealth but weren’t rich (a distinction necessary to make.)  
• We were a common sense family. You paid for what you bought. You paid bills on time. You drove cars until you couldn’t drive them any longer. You avoided debt. And you worked really hard.  
• I can’t remember my parents ever missing a ballgame, choir concert, or play. 
• Oh yeah. I played football, wrestled, sang in the choir and was in all the musicals. Again, this is no joke, I was literally Curly in Oklahoma, Professor Harold Hill in the Music Man, and Danny Zucko in Grease.  
• I was salutatorian of my High School class. 
• I was recruited to play Division 3 football at a private university that was made possible through a half-tuition scholarship for my academics. We took out loans for the rest (loans the Army would pay for me later – but I’ll get there.)  
• I was an All-American football player in college. 
• I was an English Literature major, binge-drinking, fraternity joining, football player. Ok. Pause…get the stereotypical image in your mind. Yep – that was me.  
• I joined the Army after graduation (of course I did.) I served honorably in the United States Army as an Arabic Linguist for almost 5 years before exiting due to a severe back issue. 
• I’d married my college sweetheart two weeks after graduation from college and two weeks before Basic Training.  
• I became a Christian while in the Army. 
• I’m starting to feel like a cliché…a straw man that is a real man.  
• We have two boys (both of whom attend a primarily white, private institution that I teach at.) 
• I was called to the pastorate as I was leaving the Army. I’ve served churches in a military town in Tennessee, a small rural town in Tennessee (when I say small, I mean the town was 2000, the county 8000), and a 98.7% white lower middle class community in Illinois.  
• I now live in the heart of Chicago in one of the wealthiest communities in the Chicagoland area. (NOTE: Not because I am rich, far from it, but because I work for an organization that has owned a condo in that area for nearly 30 years that pays me with a place to live. My monthly salary from teaching is probably the weekly salary of many of my neighbors.) 
• I write this sipping on coffee in a chic coffee shop in Lincoln Park.  
• Currently, I’ve been married for 21 years to the same woman. I have two sons, two dogs, 3 vehicles (none of which work well), live paycheck to paycheck (though I’ve little fear the next one won’t come) and benefits (for the first time in a really long time – which is a game changer). I stand 6’3, weigh about 280 pounds and dress like a dad that tries way too hard to be trendy.  

 I am privilege. I’m the emblem of the American assumptions. This country was designed for people just like me. I carry in my body the constant affirmation that my white, protestant, straight, successful, middle class, married, educated self belongs. I fit. I belong. I don’t have to fight to affirm my place. I am privilege.  

Confession Matters 

To say that I’m the American emblem is not to suggest this is what should be or what could be, but unfortunately a confession of what is. Throughout much of my life, I didn’t realize or understand the implicit and explicit benefits of my “being” in this world. By “being” I mean the affirmation of existence. I know, I know…we all “are,” right? Are we? I know that physically we occupy space. However, from a place of identity, we live in a world and specifically a country where that “being,” the affirmation of existence, the “taken for grantedness of who we are,” the right to live into the identity that is most natural to a person often falls on a spectrum. I sit at the extreme end of the spectrum of “being.”  

“I am” without question.  

My “being” is taken for granted, anytime I walk into a room, lead an organization, or sit at a table. My “I am-ness” is never called into question. Now, I realize given the current political landscape, there are some that would suggest that the “white male’s” right to “be” has been called into question or is threatened, but that is absurd. That very statement and the political power to insist on the continuance of that being is a sign of tenacity of this perverse ideal. In her helpful book, White Fragility, Robin Diangelo compellingly offers significant statistical evidence of the while male’s place at the head of most tables of influence. From her research, I’d say we are doing pretty well, hardly a marginalized, threatened minority. “I” as a participant in a collective group of “We” are doing pretty well.  

Quick note: We ought not equate privilege with success. The ongoing nature of white privilege doesn’t mean that I’ve risen above in success, education, or financial prosperity those that don’t share in that privilege, for there has historically been success stories that break through the ceilings the system has established. Instead of an individualist approach, it’s collective recognition that generally speaking whites (especially white males) in America fair better in terms of opportunity and access to opportunity than those who don’t share in that privilege.  

Further along that spectrum, there are those who have “being” but with caveats. White women have being, as long as they still recognize their place in the work force, in the pay structures, in the church, or in families. Racial identity and socio-economic status impact one’s place on the continuum of being. Sexual orientation is a great determiner of one’s place. Then there are those for whom our country is in no way designed, those whose “being,” affirmation of existence, is always threatened or dismissed. Imagine being a poor, gay, dreamer trying to live in the affirmation of existence. They are the opposite of privilege. Their existence is the locus of a constant battle for validation and affirmation.  

The field isn’t level.  

The assumptions are limiting.  

Affirmation is denied. There are those that are often considered an unfortunate problem rather than recognized as the “taken for granted” bearers of the Image of God.  

But it MUST go Further… 

Confession as a necessary spiritual discipline can only take the White Christian Male in America so far. And it is a spiritual discipline. In some respects this act of confession serves as a form of breath prayer, that Ancient Monastic practice that repeated a single phrase literally hundreds of times a day until it becomes subconsciously present in one’s life. “I am privilege,” is that breath prayer. It orients, or maybe reorients me, in every setting I find myself, in every conversation I have, in every role I lead through, in every neighborhood I travel, and in every interpretation of news story and statistic that I hear. This breath prayer goes a long way to make me aware of the implicit biases already operative in the way I carry my “being” into the space of others and the ways in which I receive them into my space.  

However, confession is by no means an end. It is only a beginning. Living out this privilege has also afforded a well-constructed narrative of self-efficacy, self-sufficiency and self-actualization. Who I am is by no means a gift from any one or any group. I am not who I am as a result of any one’s welfare or any form of entitlement. Who I am and who I am becoming is through the exertion of will, tenacity, hard work, and determination. Privilege affords the illusion that we are self-made individuals who through some heroic fortitude build our own lives, only politely and disingenuously tipping our hats to those to whom we are thankful. Privilege affords us the illusion that we all start on a relatively common ground and that anyone who works hard enough can succeed.  

However, for the Christian male, this hubris is met head on each and every time we come to the table of the Lord, as participants in Communion, the meal of our Lord. It’s at this table, and not as a quarterly – make sure we fit this in kind of practice, but as a regular act of spiritual formation, that the charade of my rugged individualism is revealed for what it actually is, a denial of God, a refusal to live in the absolute and utter fragility, need, and dependence that according to Genesis is the constitutive ground of my being. It is at that table, a table at which I arrive and am reminded that I can never “take” the elements. As someone who suffers from privilege, I’m used to taking what I will and what I want. Instead, at the table we can do nothing but receive. I’m forced to live in a posture of reception, receiving the gift of my life, my being, as an extension of God’s grace afforded to me through His sheer benevolence, charity, and compassion. At the table I am reminded, humbled, by the truth that my life, my being, my hope is the result of the body and blood of a poor person of color from Middle Eastern descent shattered and emptied for me.  

In addition, if I would take heed of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 and refuse to eat of this meal unworthily, I must through confession as recognition, acknowledge my sister and brother at the table, acknowledge my sister and brother not at the table, and refuse to wield my privilege as entitlement to a place at the front of that table. I must learn to see us earnestly and honestly. I must acknowledge that the field is not level, the assumptions are limiting for many, and the affirmation of existence if often hard to come by. Yet, it’s at that table, stripped of my bravado, that I, coming off my culturally constructed high horse can look my sister and brother, as well as those who fall on the spectrum of those gender binaries,  in the eye and recognize that we are only, ever, the Image of God if everyone and anyone is afforded the grace-infused gift and validation of our “being.” 

Just Stop Talking…or at least Learn to Listen First 

In that class, my fellow classmates had asked me to “let them speak.” Though offended by what I felt was unfair exclusion and the bracketing out of my voice, I’ve actually come to understand that what they were teaching me was an essential spiritual practice that emerges from both confession and communion. Though each of these are essential in the journey of living into the collective image of God for the white, American, male, Christian, neither of them quite go far enough. Both confession and communion can be done and yet still leave the concrete realities of the privileged status quo untouched. They are prone to both privatization and spiritualism. The formative practice my classmates taught me was a way of enacting the fruit of these discoveries in concrete ways. They were teaching me that as privileged, I must learn to live kenotically.  Deriving this from Paul’s great hymn in Philippians chapter 2, kenosis is the self-emptying posture of Jesus toward the world he sought to redeem, refusing the privileges legitimately to be afforded the One who was in very nature one with God, vacating the powers of coercion, manipulation, domination and exploitation, and taking on the role of Servant.  

Kenotic living will demand that the privileged not only come off their high horse but that they would be willing to step aside, away from the head of the line or the front of the table, and faithfully take up a basin as an act of intentionally seeking to level the field. It will mean refusing the assumed role of speaking first, often, and last. It will mean ensuring that contributions from across the wide spectrum of “being” are valued, affirmed, and respected. It will require an act of self-suspension, one’s capacity to listen intently to the voice of the “other” for whom I am “other” and embracing empathy as imperfect erasure of dividing lines. It will require one’s willingness to defer to those who have often been disregarded. It will mean recognizing that though privilege will trail us, especially for the time being, that privilege is not something to leveraged for our own self-interest, but to be leveraged for the sake of others, on behalf of others, as empowerment to others. It will require sacrifice, yes. It will require less concern that I will be pushed out from public spaces but instead that I would give that energy to the work of building bigger spaces more inclusive of all voices.  

I understand that as I write this that I am using the first person, often to be avoided in academic settings. However, for the context of this article it is entirely appropriate. I am not speaking abstractly. I am not theorizing. I am not pointing fingers or shaming a group of people. I am speaking plainly, an art that bigots, racists, and xenophobic populists and pundits have perfected but that as academics we often lose. I am speaking for me. I am part of the privileging problem. I am the one who lives in the socially constructed blessing of my “taken for grantedness.” I am the one that requires a formative set of practices that will reorient me in ways in which I can participate faithfully in the collective Imago Dei.  

I am privilege.