A White friend of mine from Oregon met with African American civil rights leader Tom Skinner years ago in Washington, D.C. During their conversation, Mr. Skinner asserted that my friend was a racist. His response, “Tom, how can I be a racist? I don’t even know any Black people!” As he recalls it now, my friend chuckles. He realizes how foolish his response sounded: just because we who are White might not know any Black people or have not consciously engaged in racist activity, still we may be racist. Moreover, Washington D.C., where my friend lived, was 80% African American at the time. How could he not know any African Americans, as Tom Skinner asked? And for what it’s worth, one could make a case that historically Oregon (where my friend is from) was by and large intentionally White for quite some time. That encounter impacted my friend. In addition to meeting regularly with Tom Skinner at that time, he now meets regularly with a very diverse group of friends of diverse backgrounds, several of them African American. He understands how important it is to cultivate diverse relations. One must be intentional to expand one’s exposure to ethnic diversity through diverse friendships, or one will reinforce pre-conceived cultural barriers.
Our concerns over what is most important may also reflect racial convictions. Take for example a talk I heard last year on bioethics. The large Evangelical audience was largely White, as was the speaker. The waiters and waitresses at the dinner gathering were mostly African American. The speaker gave a talk about the current state of bioethics. As I recall, the two most pressing issues for him were the state of the human unborn and end of life care, specifically abortion and euthanasia. He received a rousing ovation from his audience. But I wondered: what kind of ovation might the African American waiters and waitresses have given him if they had been listening, and were offered an opportunity to respond? In reflecting on his talk with others later, including an African American friend, they felt that his concerns were far too narrow.[1]
While I agree that the two issues highlighted are pressing ones, the speaker’s chosen emphases also reflect long-standing White Evangelical convictions. It was as if I were set back in time to the 1970’s with Roe vs. Wade. Certainly, in our increasingly commodifying society, human dignity is increasingly up for grabs: those who don’t benefit the market and consumer happiness (including certain unborn and elderly) are easily discarded. But going back to the 1770’s, Black people’s dignity was always up for grabs to the highest bidder on the slave block. We still have not accounted well for many pressing ethical issues that affect them, including the ethical disparities in health care, as well as education, employment, and income disparities, among other things. Take for example the Pew Research Center’s recent study on race relations in the U.S. The wealth gap between Whites and Blacks increased since the Great Recession. Wealth disparities, which are often connected to long-standing structural inequities, affect health care for African Americans, as do other factors.
Black History Month is almost over (also known as African American History Month), but the historic divisions and disparities are not. As we return to White History Year, White people like me need to be intentionally White. In other words, we need to be attentive to how White we are culturally so that we can become more sensitive to our ethnic and racial blindness.
Here are three simple ways we can grow as White people in our awareness of how White we are, perhaps even intentionally White we are. First, intentionally cultivate friendships with people of African American descent, as my friend from Oregon noted at the outset of the post has done. Second, ask our friends of African American descent open questions, such as why they view matters the way they do rather than challenge them at every turn to defend their positions. While there is not a one-size fits all view among African Americans, we who are White may find that what African Americans prize as important may differ at key points because of life experiences, and which can reflect our own cultural blindness to White privilege. Sometimes we simply need to sit with their answers rather than defend ourselves for our own positions. Third, we also need to read broadly, including authors of African American descent, on such subjects of sociology (Christena Cleveland, Disunity in Christ, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith), law (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow), applied ethics (Mae Elise Cannon, Lisa Sharon Harper, Troy Jackson, Soong-Chan Rah, Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith, John M. Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down), history (Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C. Harrold, African Americans: A Concise History 5th ed.), literature (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man), and theology (James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account). This cannot end with Black History Month.
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[1] See for example: http://practicalbioethics.org/files/members/documents/Calloway_11_2.pdf;
http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/african-american-bioethics;
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tt5n2;
http://academic.udayton.edu/health/05bioethics/slavery05.htm;
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