Day 10: On Privilege

The experiences that started and ended my day were somewhat disparate.

This morning, I had to go into work (school) for a few hours. The school is reviewing new student applications for fall admission and there are two Saturdays in February when applicants come to the school for observation and testing. Lead teachers facilitate these observation days. I was paired with a first grade teacher and we were charged with seven first graders for the morning. This was, perhaps needless to say, my first time doing anything of this sort. Young children applying to school is a totally foreign concept to me, at least in my own upbringing and in that of most people I know. But I was quite impressed with these kids and their ability to play and test-take so naturally in this odd situation in which they are taken away from their parents for a couple hours, sent off with a group of strangers (children and adults) and made to write their alphabet and cut and paste pictures in sequence. All for a spot in a private school classroom. I can't help but wonder about the conversations parents must have with their children before a morning like this one. How do you prep a child for that? Do you prep them for that? I am not sorry to admit that this kind of thing wasn't my experience--I'm thankful that it was not. All the same, I wish only the best for these children and look forward to perhaps teaching some of them next year.

So, that's experience 1. Experience 2 was a documentary screening at Eastside called Traces of the Trade. It is the story of one woman and a group of her relatives who explored their family's involvement in the slave trade by traveling from Bristol, RI, to Ghana to Havana and back again.. The historical discoveries they make and they experiences they relive lead to, of course, the question of, "so what do we do now?" The film moved toward issues of racial reconciliation in the United States today and how we might grapple with our past in order to heal our present and shape our future. While this documentary presented an overwhelming array of topics worthy of discussion, many of us present at the screening were affected by the question of privilege. There was a scene at the end of the film when the family members had gathered together for conversation after their journey. Out of about 10 people seated at the dinner table, only one had not attended an Ivy League school. One of the men who, like his father, was a Harvard grad, repeatedly claimed that his admission to Harvard was not based on family or privilege but on work ethic. In our discussion after the film, the group almost unanimously saw this as one example of the blindness many people have to their own (white) privilege. There was so much more than hard work that affected this man's college trajectory--social location, family resources, quality of primary/secondary schools attended, etc. What about those who do not have these privileges? Are they truly given equal access to a school like Harvard? To any college  or university?

Of course, as this morning's experience shows all too well, I am in the business of nurturing and grooming the children of white privilege. And despite the change of perspective I've taken on my job recently (as described in my post a couple days ago), I cannot ignore the fact that I teach in a school that serves a very particular demographic and focuses primarily on making itself and only itself better. That is a culture in which I don't think I can healthily dwell for a long time. My career, my life's work, will be elsewhere, I feel sure of it. It seems, though, that I have decided to ignore the tension and dwell there for a time. I am left questioning, yet again, whether that is okay--whether it is okay to spend a season immersed in white privilege when there is so much more in the world to work for than a self-perpetuating system. What am I perpetuating by staying put?

Of course, films like this one raise many questions that quickly become overwhelming and have the capacity to render us incapable of any action because there seems to be simply too much injustice and too much work to be done. Our conversation shifted into the industries of modern slavery, and it is chilling and somewhat numbing to consider how almost everything we use/wear/eat/buy has some association with production involving unfair wages and/or slavery. Yet inaction cannot an option. The challenge, I believe, is in determining the small steps one can take towards justice--as one friend described tonight, it is important to decide each day to take one small action of change, to do one thing that will shift the tide of justice in the world. Asking oneself each morning, what is it I can do today to live more justly? To walk more humbly?