The following is my Op-Ed from the October 1, 2020 edition of The Orlando Sentinel
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As our fractured nation continues to deal with unending controversy surrounding issues of race, police practices and social justice I have found myself pondering where people like me fit into the equation of equality – or the lack of it – that dates back to the first forced enslavement of black people from the continent of Africa.
I am a 54-year old heterosexual Christian white male. That places me in at least five categories that currently subjects me to implied – and sometimes overt – accusation of being privileged to the point of not being able to comprehend my status as such, nor able to understand the plight of people who do not fit within the same profile I benefit from.
After all, everything about my station in life – race, sexual orientation, age, religious affiliation and gender – pretty much matches up with the people who founded our nation on the principles that we are all created equal while slavery, the political degradation of women, gays and non-Christians went hypocritically unchallenged.
Since that time we have seen what people like me would call “great progress” even though there should have never been a need for progress to begin with. Had our Founders truly believed in the concepts they so eloquently shipped off to the King of England we would not have witnessed the battle for equal rights that so many disenfranchised groups have had to wage in our lifetime and in the lifetime of people who are not even born yet.
Yet, I am troubled by an assumption – that often borders on accusation – that I am not sure about.
That assumption is that I, by virtue of being white, have inadvertently benefited from a legacy of white supremacy that I am oblivious too. I have been told by some of my colleagues that we white people suffer from a form of cancer that dates back to 1619 and that until we reach a true level of higher conscientiousness we will be part of the ongoing problem of racism in this country.
I was born in Germany. My mother and her mother were too. My grandmother was bombed out of her home during WWII, wrapping her children in wet blankets to keep them from being engulfed in flames. My mother was born without her American father ever seeing her. She grew up in horrific poverty and depended on care packages from a family in New York to avoid starvation. By 14 she was working full-time to help support her mother.
My father’s mother died when he was two. His father was murdered when he was four. He grew up an orphan being shuttled around from home to home until he ran away from an abusive house, eventually dropped out of school and joined the Air Force.
When he and my mother moved back to the United States they had no money and fed me with the free milk our milkman would drop off on our doorstep in Hugo, Oklahoma.
Hugo is the poorest town in one of the poorest states in America.
I grew up in a white household but based on the economic conditions I saw – and experienced firsthand – I am not sure how the word “privilege” fits in.
I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school and attend college. My parents did not have the money to pay for this so I worked jobs ranging from construction in West Texas to land clearing; grocery bagging and more.
When I graduated from college my first job application as a college instructor ended up with a department head telling me that I was the most qualified applicant but that due to “affirmative action considerations” I would not be hired. I did not feel that this was something I should feel privileged about.
For nearly 30 years now I have taught my students that the long history of economics has proven a few things to be immutable facts.
One of them is that there has always been –and always will be – people who are too stupid to stop engaging in the irrationality of bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and more. I teach my students that to practice these awful “isms” not only denies other human beings their natural right to life, liberty and property, but it places the person engaging in these acts of hate in the unproductive condition of failing to maximize the value that comes from serving your fellowman without regard to anything other than the mutual gains from trade.
On behalf of other white people who did not grow up privileged – and teach others how to treat everyone with dignity – I would like to ask the “white privilege” accusers to judge us the same way you would like to be judged.
