Sermon     “Dismantling Our Privilege” The Rev. Rali M. Weaver

First Church and Parish in Dedham

March 21, 2010

I feel certain that as both of our readings this morning suggest the first and only place to start to dismantle our privilege would be to begin by examining how our own way of being might contribute to issues of wealth and poverty within our class structure.

Just returning on Thursday from a short visit to Florida I can start by recognizes my own privilege to escape the horribly rainy weather and spend a week in the sun. I am also privileged to have friends who will both feed me and house me so that I have the resources to take such a trip.

When we arrived in Florida I found out that my friend’s parents live within a gated community. If you aren’t already familiar with it a “Gated Community” is basically a form of residential housing that has a strictly controlled entrance and generally a closed perimeter of walls keeping some people in and some people out. We have them here in Massachusetts and they come in a wide variety of forms from retirement housing to housing for the elite. Whatever their intended purpose Gated communities usually consist of residential streets and include some form of shared amenities from playgrounds to swimming pools to everything you might need to get by on a day to day basis. Gated communities exist in nearly every country in the world to protect the rich and keep out the poor.

I should note that my friend’s parents are retired schoolteachers from the north and live in a far from elite gated community of modular homes. The amenities they share are a swimming pool and shuffleboard and tennis courts and a clubhouse with pool and poker tables. Because the amenities in their community were modest my friend’s parents would need to leave their chosen compound regularly to grocery shop or go to the post office or to see the ocean.

While I found the accommodations quite comfortable it was impossible (from my outsider’s point of view) not to notice how the gates worked to keep people out in order to give those on the inside the feeling of security.

Clearly some of the insecurity that comes from leaving the gated community is real. One of the natural advantages of gated housing developments is that it gives the police an excuse to reduce patrols because of the already high security within the residential areas. Unlike their safe home community once a resident leaves the fences and gates behind, they are sometimes entering a no-mans-land where there is no regular security detail.

One evening my friend and I wanted to go to leave the compound walls to go to the grocery store to get some things for breakfast and dinner for the following day and her parents insisted on taking us because they felt the potential crime at the Wal-Mart was too much of a “security risk”.

As I see it there are two problems with this scenario. One is that at 7pm on a Friday evening every person in the world should feel safe enough to go to a local store and get groceries. I know that many people in the world live in similar unsafe conditions but to be in the United States and to have to remain at home at 7 pm or be required to have an escort to go out to the grocery store seemed absurd to my outsider sensibilities.

The problem with the theory that keeping track of outsiders reduces crime is that statistically gated communities have no less crime than non-gated communities and a very small percentage of overall crimes are actually committed by strangers and visitors inside or outside secured facilities.

This inherent need for security creates boundaries and tensions between people that are difficult to cross.

When you decide it is unsafe to go out at night, you see everyone as a threat. And even when you are safe you walk with a feeling of insecurity. When we begin to analyze our privilege in this light we begin to recognize how our fear builds up walls where community could have been built.

In her article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” Peggy McIntosh offers the suggestion that the first step in Unpacking our Invisible Knapsack of Privilege is to recognize what is in it. In her article she identifies many rarely examined White Privileges that are therefore invisible to our eyes.

Just a few of the list of White Privileges included are:

I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection

I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing a person of my race.

I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.

I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.

When we open our eyes we can clearly and simply see how imbalanced our privilege is. In a similar way to the Gated communities’ walls of insecurity and of privilege have been drawn since the beginning of time to hold some people in and some people out. If we do not begin to wake up to the class systems that are at play even in the formation of our global economy we may miss the opportunity to throw a monkey wrench in the capitalistic drive to keep us all separate.

I don’t think there is a better example to me of how Capitalism divides working class citizens than the evolution of Major League Baseball.

In 1999 I had an opportunity to go see Tiger Stadium in Detroit at the start of the last season the Tigers ever played in that park. In interviewing workers and patrons of that park as well as people passing by on the street I quickly understood that they were moving the park because they no longer felt that “The Corner” on Michigan Avenue was a safe place to do business. From talking to some real old timers it seemed that ever since the tigers had won the World Series (in 1984) ticket prices had skyrocketed and the working class people of Detroit could no longer afford to go to the game.

From my vantage point this is a great departure from what Detroit Tiger Baseball had been about, Baseball was considered America’s pastime because it was a place where the common man and rich man alike could enjoy the afternoon. Since its inception in 1896 Tiger Stadium had been used to help to entertain the masses, and give them something to do to keep them off the streets. According to one old timer the Tigers would regularly play back-to-back double headers to keep crime down. One day, to reduce the riots in Detroit, the Mayor supposedly asked the team to play a triple-header to stop a riot. In those days tickets were less than a nickel a seat for the good seats. Times of course have changed dramatically and the common man can’t usually buy a seat. And baseball is no longer considered an activity for every man.

I bring this up because when we think of the price of going to the movies or to a play or to a baseball game or even to the gym we know these lines are not invisible between the have and have not’s but they are drawn with money. To have a fully rounded education in our culture we need experiences. To gain experiences we need time and energy and money. Those things are privileges in an economy where people are working three and four jobs to stay afloat.

In our own town since they have built Legacy Place I have seen groups of workers get off the bus on Route 1a and cross Route One to get to work several times a day. When will we demand that there be a safe crossing on the highway or a bus stop at the mall itself? Will it take someone getting hit by a car? And what about the workers who are employed at Foxhill how far must they walk on busy streets and in the snow to get from bus lines to work. How will our silence and refusal to use what political capitol we have limit their security within our society?

For several centuries (on and off) church has been an institution that is intended in its nature to balance the state and help to distribute capitol more fairly. And by capitol I don’t mean just money. I mean our resources our political capitol our time and creative energy. We do this already in some ways with the food pantry. How else might we do this more effectively? How might we use what we already have to bridge some of the class gaps that are created by fear and greed?

Two weeks from today we will have an Easter egg hunt after church. If you haven’t seen it yet it is quite an amazing event. The children run willy-nilly about the meeting house and unchecked a few would end up with many eggs and many would end up with a few eggs.

To begin our event we start with a few rules. Configuring how children are looking and how many eggs there are I tell them how many they can find before they have to help someone else to look. And once everyone has the requisite number they can all look for what is left.

For this to work all of the children must start out at the same time. If a child comes late they aren’t configured into the count of eggs and the whole plan goes awry.

I am telling you this because I think this is a perfect metaphor for two things we might consider as we proceed to start to dismantle some of our privilege. Finding ways to help everyone get what they need should be the first order of business. And second we must recognize and prepare for the fact that we aren’t all working form the same starting point and in fact our Society wouldn’t function if we did. We need people working the counters at Legacy Place if we want to shop there. We need people to pick up our garbage and to help us with a wide variety of things; in acknowledging this we must offer our capitol to make things livable for all.

This year I have learned my lesson. I am going to hold a few eggs out maybe a dozen or so and that way if any children come late to the hunt, I can slyly lay out as many as we need for them to participate fully.

If no one comes late, and everybody gets their requisite number of eggs, well --more eggs for me to disperse as I please. Dismantling our privilege is more about inviting everyone in, and making room for them and evening the playing field than it is about giving it all away so there is nothing left for us.

Dismantling our privilege is an opportunity to let go of our fear and our greed and live in a generous place of community that will free not just a small select group of us but all of us.