I know I promised a week of Thanksgiving, and I’ll resume my posts on thankfulness tomorrow. But tonight I want to write about something more important.
My American readers are probably aware that last night, the Grand Jury in Ferguson, Missouri chose not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown.
I’m going to quote Betsy’s blog post, “How Far Have We Come?”
No matter how you feel about the violence and looting in and around Ferguson, about the right of the police to take any action they feel necessary to protect themselves, or even about reparations or affirmative action, I think we can all agree that this country hasn’t come nearly far enough in the last fifty years and the only way to change that is for us all to get involved.
I think I made my feelings of sadness and disappointment fairly clear on Twitter last night. I thought this tweet was particularly poignant.
"White privilege is me being outraged and angered by the #FergusonDecision rather than utterly terrified."
— Cass Luhowskyj (@cassluhow) November 25, 2014
Last week I wrote an introduction to privilege. The last two days, I’ve written about being thankful to God and giving thanks for my loved ones. As you can see from the screenshot of my editorial calendar below, my tentative plan for Friday’s post was to write about how thankful I am to live in America, land of the free.
But living in America as a white person is very different than living here as a POC, particularly as a black person.
White people love to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We’ve somehow re-imagined him as this “warm and cuddly” civil rights leader. When we quote him, we quote him selectively. Consider what he said below in one of his last speeches before his assassination. I recommend you read the entire speech.
And so I want to use as a title for my lecture tonight, “The Other America.” And I use this title because there are literally two Americas. Every city in our country has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia, split at so many parts, and so every city ends up being two cities rather than one. There are two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. In this America, millions of people have the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality flowing before them. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America children grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.
But there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this other America, thousands and thousands of people, men in particular walk the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. In this other America, millions of people are forced to live in vermin-filled, distressing housing conditions where they do not have the privilege of having wall-to-wall carpeting, but all too often, they end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. Almost forty percent of the Negro families of America live in sub-standard housing conditions.
In this other America, thousands of young people are deprived of an opportunity to get an adequate education. Every year thousands finish high school reading at a seventh, eighth and sometimes ninth grade level. Not because they’re dumb, not because they don’t have the native intelligence, but because the schools are so inadequate, so over-crowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out.
Things have gotten better, but systematic racism is still a major problem in America. Income inequality is still a major problem, and it often falls along racial lines.
When I count my blessings, do I thank God, or do I thank my white and class privilege?
Like I said in my post last week, I don’t feel guilty for my privilege, but that doesn’t absolve me of the responsibility to work towards a more just and equitable society.
This week, as we celebrate Thanksgiving with our friends and family, say an extra prayer for Michael Brown’s friends and family. Say an extra prayer that America can overcome our problems with racism. Remember that black lives matter.
And if you want to take a few extra steps, check out my suggestions at the end of my introduction to privilege.
