On being white

I  know that I will never be on the receiving end of blatant discrimination, at least not due to my skin color. It simply won’t happen. There is no way that the stars of my birth circumstance will align in such a way that would allow me to suffer regular discrimination. The contours of privilege from what I know and enjoy as a white person mean that I never need fear being pulled over in my car or paying hundreds of dollars in questionable fines simply because of the color of my skin.

It hurts to write this truth, yet putting it on the table is critical. Those of us with white skin tend to take our whiteness off the table in discussions of race. We don’t see our whiteness as a race; it’s just “normal humanity”—the template from which other people are judged to be different or abnormal. Those with different skin color have race; we whites don’t. Ever notice how schools celebrate Black History month? The other months are just plain history. We know black poets, preachers, and mayors. Nobody has ever referred to me as a white preacher or a white columnist.

As for white privilege, I like to think of it less as a charge of racism and more as a descriptor of the way things are for us who receive daily societal power and benefit simply by virtue of our skin color. Such an understanding of white privilege was made clear to the teenagers in my congregation during a recent work trip in Appalachia. “We knew we were in for an experience when we started seeing Confederate flags popping up in Kentucky,” recounted one of the trip leaders. “The black kids in my van immediately tensed up. They started to speak of being scared.”