privilege – Central Methodist Mission

June, 07 2020 Alan Storey: Making Disciples in a Violent World.
[Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20]

Reclaim the City takes over the Rondebosch Golf Course to protest against the City’s failure to redistribute public land for the development of affordable housing.
Picture: Tracey Adams / African News Agency (ANA)

Friends,

Today I want to talk about golf. Well actually golf courses. More specifically, golf courses that are proximate to the city. This may seem strange or insensitive to you considering what is going on in the world at the moment: Covid-19. Unemployment and growing hunger. Gender based violence. Military and Police killings. Murderous racism. Climate devastation. Beijing stomping all over Hong Kong. USA fracturing under fascism.

However, I assure you that focusing our eyes down a few fairways and landing our thoughts on a couple of greens has everything to do with what is going on in the world today. Let me explain.

You may remember that late last year, to draw attention to the stubborn reluctance of the city to reverse the persistent Apartheid legacy of spacial planning, we raised a yellow banner on the steeple of CMM with the words: “Golf courses or social housing? What would Jesus want?” (Luke 9:58 has the answer). We were collaborating with civil society organisations Reclaim The City, who occupied the Rondebosch Golf Course on Human Rights Day last year, and Ndifuna Ukwazi. Ndifuna Ukwazi released a report entitled “City Leases” showing that the lack of change is not for a lack of available land but rather that there is no political will to allocate public land for public good. Please read our press statement here.

One would think that when faced with the choice of preserving a recreation facility for the few or providing social housing for the many, especially in a country with a pandemic of overcrowded informal settlements, that it would be a no-brainer on every ethical scale of common decency and common sense to choose social housing. Yet the mowed fairways and manicured greens remain as do the under-serviced and overcrowded informal settlements. This is nothing short of murderous. But no murder docket is opened and you will not find a single article anywhere that describes this choice of recreation over social housing as an act of violence.

Most people do not see this as a violent and deadly decision. So we need to translate the decision to bring it home for us to see and feel. In fact, let us take this decision into our own households. This is very appropriate because the original meaning of the word ‘economy’ means: management of the household.

Imagine a parent favouring one child’s recreational desires over the basic needs of their other children. Surely this parent’s potentially life threatening behaviour would be called out as abusive in the very least? And rightly so. And how easy this is to see. Yet when it comes to seeing this on a larger societal scale many of us remain blind.

The overwhelming majority of parents would never do this because they know how unjust and inhumane it is. They know the emotional trauma and physical damage it will do to their ignored children. They know the suffering and heartache that will manifest forever in the future. They know that violence will one day erupt within their household when their ignored children refuse to be ignored any longer and when their ignored children demand that their lives matter. They know their parental authority will mean little at that moment of rage and revolt. Perhaps police will need to be called to the home to stop the violence or even open a murder docket. A picture may be taken and the heading ‘violent criminal on the run’ typed in bold. Simply put, the parents know that without fairness in their home there will be no peace.

The parents also know how their spoiled child will carry an ingrained sense of entitlement and superiority that will resist equality in relationships going forward because “when you accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”.

Above all else the parents know that their household is more peaceful, healthy and fruitful when each child receives the optimal level of care and respectful appreciation for their being.

When this public policy is brought into our own homes we can easily discern how violent it is. We can easily understand the violence of revolt. We can also clearly see who the victims are and who the perpetrators and beneficiaries are.

Can you now see how the decision to favour the recreation of a few, literally robs thousands and thousands of people of a more peaceful, healthy and fruitful life? It is a violence that seeds more violence. Violence must be pulled out at its root. Therefore, until systemic violence is seen as clearly as the violence in our streets is seen, there will be no end to violence. The one legitimises the other. Can you see how when similar decisions are made in just about every sector of society over years and years that we end up with the world we are living in today? If we cannot see this, then we have work to do. Let us have a conversation.

[See Abahlali baseMjondolo’s press statement this past week for further insight into the struggles of the landless.

For our CMM Chat at 11h11 on Sunday the context of systemic violence will form the canvas for our conversation. Please email welcome@cmm.org.za for the zoom link.

Grace,
Alan

The Trinity of Water — Food — Energy is vital for our living.

Of the three, water is the most important because without it we would not have food or energy. Therefore our primary private and policy concern should be to preserve water.

Oh and Remember: We cannot grow water.

LENTEN PRAYER OF PREPARATION
Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something more than interesting or entertaining or thoughtful. Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something awesome, something real. Speak to my condition, Lord and change me somewhere inside where it matters, a change that will burn and tremble and heal and explode me into tears or laughter or love that throbs or screams or keeps a terrible, cleansing silence and dares the dangerous deeds. Let something happen which is my real self, Oh God. Amen. [Ted Loder]

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I don’t know about you but not a day goes by where I do not encounter some issue connected to the colour of my or someone else’s skin. It could be overhearing a conversation about “What if Oscar was black and he accidently fired a gun in a public restaurant?” Or it could be me walking through a “Musicians only” access point at the Jazz concert on Wednesday evening without so much as being questioned while others were stopped and sent round. Or when there is fighting outside my flat at night I know within myself that I feel far more entitled and confident to intervene when it is two black people fighting than when it is two white people fighting (in fact then I may decide to simply mind my own business). Sometimes it is simply a conversation I have with myself in my head.

This past week I was asked to participate in some research about white privilege. In doing so I was reminded of the great paper written by Peggy McIntosh in 1989 called, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack. Here is a brief extract:

“Through the work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s.

Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended. Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected.

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege.

I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of colour that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.

My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as a morally neutral, normative, and average, also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’.”

Where else is more suited than the Church to have conversations about these matters? Look out for the next Anti-Bias workshop.

Grace, Alan

Tag: privilege

Denials and Taboos

The Trinity of Water — Food — Energy is vital for our living.

Of the three, water is the most important because without it we would not have food or energy. Therefore our primary private and policy concern should be to preserve water.

Oh and Remember: We cannot grow water.