Privileges
“What a friend we have in Jesus… What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.”
The movie “Hidden Figures” depicts three actual African American women – Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson – and their behind the scenes crucial roles in NASA’s early 1960’s first manned space launches.
Such women, black and white, were crack mathematicians, called the ‘computers’, pre-IBM computers. The math whizz women’s’ calculations of orbit trajectories were life-critical for getting astronauts Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn back to earth safely. Yet, they were in reduced pay and recognition positions, in comparison with the men, all white.
Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary encounter the subtle/not so subtle racism of that time. Patronizing treatment by white co-workers, big coffee urns for whites, small coffee pots marked ‘colored’. Katherine, when chastised for taking long bathroom breaks, explains the sprint required across several parking lots to the only building with a colored restroom.
Vivian (Kirsten Dunst), the white HR person, gradually, grudgingly recognizes Dorothy’s (Octavia Spencer) competence, gives her the supervisor title, for a job Dorothy was already doing. In a closing scene, in the no longer segregated women’s restroom, Vivian, magnanimously within her limits, says: “You know, Dorothy, I really don’t have anything against y’all.” Long pause, slight smile and nod, Dorothy responds: “Thank you. I know you probably believe that.”
Recently, in saying goodbye to Mary Tyler Moore, we saw replays of the classic scene in which Mary Richards calls attention to her sit-com boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner) that men at the TV station doing her same job get higher pay. Cluelessly, Lou ‘explains’, “that’s because they are men.”
Funny, not funny, the terms we have now for such as the above are ‘white privilege’ and ‘male privilege’. Across time, white men especially have had benefits of pay and job access, even the benefit of the doubt when our eligibility and/or competence were in question…until only in recent years afforded to women and/or non-whites.
Occasionally we hear the term ‘angry white men’ or ‘angry old white men’. I am three of those four things – white, man, and aging…still hard to use the ‘old’ word…but not so much angry. Yet, I think I have a clue to the anger of a number of aging white guys.
Many white guys – though pretty much across the years having jobs, insurance, pension benefits and the like – have a sense of never quite selling for what we perceive we are worth. Even with so-called white, male privilege they feel they have worked hard, seen colleagues no better than them, seem to do better than them. And then comes the ‘perception’ that what came hard for them is being fast-tracked to women and/or non-whites.
On the other hand, though I realize I will never totally get what life is like for people of color and/or women, I do have more of a gist than before of the challenges they face. In the making of pastoral appointments, I am aware that equal access to church appointments traditionally for white men is improving for women and people of color…but has a long way to go.
White guy peers, even white female colleagues, I commend to you TEARS WE CANNOT STOP: A SERMON TO WHITE AMERICA, by Georgetown professor and minister Michael Eric Dyson. This is not for the faint. You may not agree with or even ‘get’ it all. Still, he helps us understand the subtleties of the use of variations of the N-word, the uneasy relationship many blacks experience with police (no indictment of all police here), the need not so much for whites to feel guilty but better understand the legacy of racism in our history and daily life.
As Christians we sing about the privilege all of us have to take our struggles to Jesus in prayer. Amen. Yet, there is another side of the way privilege has operated in our world. Not sure who said it: “Guilt is not a Christian response…repentance is.” The literal meaning of New Testament ‘metanoia’, repentance, is going beyond the mind you have. In other words, a new understanding that changes not only our minds, how we see the world, but also our hearts and behavior.