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Empathy is a profound religious virtue. It is the effort we make to try to see the world from another person’s perspective.
Sometimes empathy could use a little boost. Suppose, when it comes to racism, that I as a white person had some glasses that would help me see the world, and be seen, as an African American. Would that help build empathy and the compassionate conviction to make change?
Let’s see. I mean, let’s really see.
Chicago Theological Seminary has made a video, seen above, to show what happens when you put on your #WhitePrivilegeGlasses and are able to see what happens when you are not white.
Oh, no, you may say. I’m past all that. I don’t even see race. That is a common reaction among White Americans when the subject of White Privilege comes up.
Maybe you don’t see race, but one clear message of the CTS campaign is, “Race sees you.” Who I am as a white person occupies every social, political, economic, religious and personal space I occupy. And trust me, whether I want it or not, my whiteness takes up a lot of space.
So? I didn’t ask for that, thank you very much.
It doesn’t matter. You can’t resign from white privilege. It is in the very warp and woof of the fabric of American society, and has been for centuries. Dr. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Colby College, once gave a lecture to a class we team-taught at Chicago Theological Seminary. She drew a line on the board. “That,” she said, “is the European-African axis.” Then she put European above the line, and African below it. Cheryl documented over and over through examples from law, custom, religion, economics, and politics that the European-African axis is the basic structure of American society.
Now, as people of other races and cultures immigrate to the U.S., they are often shocked to find they are assigned a place above or below that line. In fact, a Muslim philosopher friend of mine pointed out to me that after 9/11, many Muslim professionals were shocked to find out they weren’t white. As skilled professionals who had immigrated to the United States in a very different climate, they had mostly not experienced the kind of wholesale prejudice against Muslims that began immediately after 9/11 and is still going on today.
These and other issues of how #WhitePrivilege works in and through American society are included in a CTS discussion guide. In this guide, we can see how #WhitePrivilege separates and arranges us all in a hierarchy that is systematically hidden from whites and all too visible to African Americans who suffer from it every day.
See racism. Confront racism. Eliminate racism.
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