This is a story I have written for the storytelling group I belong to, Tenx9. We meet every month and have a different topic. Nine people have ten minutes to tell a true story from their lives inspired by the topic. Since going online we are advised to write our stories and, although I usually just tell mine, I have found the discipline of writing it really helpful to me.
Our topic for this month is “Privilege” and apparently many people have offered a story. I do usuallly tell a story so I don’t mind if this month I don’t share. ‘Tis topic is timely and challenging for me on so many levels.
I usually dictate my story on to the iPad and then tidy it up a bit, making sure I don’t over run the allotted ten minutes. Once I’ve posted this I’ll pare down the story for telling on Friday to keep to the time.
So, here goes.
I’ve been challenged over the last few weeks about my whiteness, my white privilege, white supremacy and how I behave. I don’t mean I’ve been challenged by people but by events.
A few of my friends and I doing a course organised by Quakers called “Black Lives Matter: Whiteness and Racial Justice Learning for Quakers” That will be the last mention of Quakers because what I am learning and what I want to write about is my personal experience of my white privilege.
I’m on a real learning journey, I’m only at the beginning of the journey and have absolutely no idea where it’s going to lead. So what I’m offering here is the first step for me on the road less travelled.
To me, my most obvious examples of my white privilege are when I’ve been abroad. Just to summarise quickly, I spent two weeks in Cameroon and six months in Madagascar where I was teaching English. Although in Cameroon the children called “Long Nose” out after white people, it was affectionate and not malicious. In Madagascar there is a word which means “white foreigner”, “vazaha” This was a little more problematic but very good for me because I was identified solely by the colour of my skin. I even heard other sisters in the community refer to me as “La Soeure Vazaha”Again no prejudice or persecution was there but it did give me pause for thought.
Returning from Afghanistan my three friends and I were at the airport in Turkey, at a desk asking for help, Two African men came up also needing help to find their flight, like ourselves. We noticed with acute embarrassment how the officials behind the desk treated us with respect and the African men discourteously.
I think these examples are quite simple for me to understand but now I’m going to talk about my time in the United States.
I was living and working in communities which worked with vulnerable people, giving hospitality to those in most need and sharing food on the street. The communities I worked with were in Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York and Baltimore.
Nearly every community member, no matter which city, was white. Many of them had lived in those communities for decades and I am in great admiration at their commitment and fidelity but now when I think about it those communities were places of white privilege. We couldn’t have joined those communities if we didn’t have a load of security behind us. One example for me is the fact that I have had a British passport for forty years which means i can travel nearly everywhere without let or hindrance and have never been refused a visa. Hence I was able t spend two years in the States with no problems. (Actually, there were one or two problems but that was because I got arrested several times and that’s another story!)
In Los Angeles and in Washington DC most of the people who received our food and our hospitality were either African-American or Latino. In many ways I was naive, I did ask myself why are some people so disadvantaged and others privileged including myself, but I never really connected that with race.
Two examples, one of my time in Washington DC and the other of my time in Baltimore stand out for me.
As well as giving hospitality the communities I belonged to, Catholic Worker communities, did a lot of non-violent direct action and one of our friends was in DC jail. Myself and a young member of the DC community, Liz went to visit him. We joined a very long queue of visitors waiting to be admitted. Imagine our embarrassment when a guard came up to us to take us to the front of the queue. Everybody else in that queue was African-American or Latino. To be fair, perhaps if we had both been young it might not have happened and of course I did have my white cane. They insisted that we be processed quickly and taken up to visit our friend, Gary. After our visit as we left the visiting room and went down the stairs, we passed several people who had been in the queue waiting with us. Many of them greeted us in a really friendly fashion and asked us if we’d had a good visit.
My second example is from Baltimore, West Baltimore to be exact, made famous by the TV series “The Wire” The community, Jonah House, was again all white and again people who had given their lives to the service of others. They still do.
Each week food was collected are donated and we made up food parcels. On a designated afternoon people from the neighbourhood came to collect their parcels. All of them were African-American. The community members always greeted their neighbours with graciousness and friendliness and that particular kind of old fashioned courtesy so typical of Americans of a certain age. It was a warm autumn afternoon and we stood in the yard with our parcels handing them to people as they arrived. We had the radio on and there happened to be that afternoon a programme about the civil rights movement and the music it inspired. Having this in the background, reflecting on what had been achieved in the civil rights movement and yet being confronted for several hours by poor African-American neighbours in need of food and other products, is an experience I shall never forget.
Over a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, decades after the civil rights movement, it was still white people giving from their abundance and the poor African Americans receiving.
As I say, I do not know what to make of these experiences, It will take time for the injustice of my white privilege to sink deep within me and for me to discern what to do about it. Also I am very aware that this journey is taking place in my own country and it is in the British context of injustice to our black brothers and sisters that I’ll need to work. I trust God will show me what I’m meant to do.i
Live Adventurously 