Hunger Rumblings
ELCA World Hunger staff and associates write about root causes of hunger, current events, and anything else they find pertinent.
Privilege
Privilege
This last weekend I was at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting. This is my one professional meeting that I am sure to attend each year because it provides an excellent opportunity to explore new ways to conceive of and articulate a Christian response to hunger and poverty. This year was no exception and as a result I am consolidating some new thoughts on 1) the role of the Bible in moral deliberation and 2) the apocalyptic imagination as a tool for resisting systems and structures that keep people impoverished. These will likely keep me occupied for the next year (or more!) and they will undoubtedly inform my seminary course at Trinity in Ohio this January.
Today’s post, however, will not explore such heady (and pedantic?) topics (I understand if you just breathed a sigh of relief!). I want to reflect on a dinner conversation I shared with old friends from seminary. Over the meal I suggested that in spite of its claims about liberating ideas and free thinking, the academy is an incredibly hierarchical institution. Your academic pedigree–where you studied and where you teach (God forbid you do not work in an academic institution!) determines your credibility. Both of my friends vigorously denied than any such criteria existed. One received his PhD from an Ivy League school and now teaches at a large and well respected seminary, the other from one of the best schools in the south and now teaches at a strong research institution. They denied my experience and assured me I was wrong… as the one who graduated from a good (but not great) university and now works in the church.
The awkward moment (and it was awkward!) revealed to me in a new way the power of privilege. My friends (who are intelligent and generally committed to social justice) are blind to the hegemonic forces of the academy because they are beneficiaries of the system. And they worked hard to maintain the system, insisting that my impressions were surely misguided. As a white, well-educated male who is financially secure and holds a position of (minor) authority in a national church office, it is not often that my experience is denied so flatly. I did not like it.
Here is the scary question, though. How often do I (who am generally intelligent and firmly committed to social justice) do exactly the same thing? Whose experiences have I unwittingly trampled simply because I am unaware of dynamics of privilege in a given situation? Race, gender, class, and age (to name a few–humans are exceedingly skilled at coming up with arbitrary ways to keep people disenfranchised) are all used to create and maintain (often unspoken) power differentials. In the case of my dinner it was an awkward moment. In more critical situations it can be the difference between being fed or going hungry, having access to medical care or suffering from preventable and treatable diseases.
I am not sure about the take aways from this experience just yet. Here are few initial thoughts: 1) Privilege does exist and too often we operate in it unconsciously. 2) The first step to addressing privilege has to be critical self reflection and repentance. 3) The system will work hard to maintain itself and those with privilege must actively work against it (through awareness and education, among other things). 4) If those who are privileged are unaware of the dynamic they need to be reminded. 5) If they are aware but unwilling to address the problem, perhaps they should be resisted.
David Creech
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on November 26th, 2011 at 11:35 am
I was surprised that your post, while taking two paragraphs to set a context for your observation, never connected the dots between lack of privilege, hunger and justice. People with privilege— which is a much larger group than the 1% of the Occupy Movement— actively resist not only the loss of their privilege but even the identification of their privilege as such.
There are many voices in the current strident partisanship in America who decry the sense of “entitlement” in programs for people at the bottom of society, and from that argument they are trying to unweave our badly-frayed safety net for the poor/elderly/hungry/vulnerable. Ironically, the most strident voices are themselves coming from the most privileged in our society.
Privilege has balkanized our society. It is the “elephant in the room” of political discourse on many hotly-debated matters including bail-out programs, immigration, health care, education, jobs, and criminal justice.
Unfortunately, a sense of privilege has long since permeated the mainline church, especially in those denominations and congregations that cater to suburban upper/middle class (and mostly white) people. The sense of privilege is a cancer which continues to attack the very heart of the Gospel of Jesus. Need we look any further than the Beatitudes, the Parable of the Judgment (Mt. 25:31-46) or the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19–31) to see where privilege or lack of privilege is found in Christ’s teachings?
But privileged Christians can begin the “critical self-reflection and repentance” to which you refer, and hopefully resist the corrosive power of privilege by seeing what we have not as privilege but as gift. Before God, none of us has, or deserves, privileges. But that truth should not be easily “spiritualized” as a matter of forgiveness or justification. All that we are, and have, and hope to do with our lives, are gifts of God. That we can rise each day, and use our health and wealth productively is a gift.
We have all heard the lame jokes about a family sitting down to a table of leftovers where someone who thinks it is unnecessary to give thanks says “This food was already blessed once before!” But when we give thanks at each meal, it is not the food which is blessed. We are blessed that we are able, once again, to eat. Recognizing that our whole lives are gifts may help us to begin to see those all around us for whom food, health, shelter, safety, dignity and justice are all still deeply felt hungers. – Pastor Dan Hooper, Hollywood Lutheran Church
on November 26th, 2011 at 6:50 pm
[...] Privilege [...]
on November 28th, 2011 at 1:33 am
David, another thought to your closing list is concerning those who are not privileged yet want to be. How do people (or, more specifically, Christians) who fall into your #2 and #3 thoughts then respond to those who are non-priveleged yet seek to be? It’s hypocritical to say, “Trust me, you don’t want what I have.” Or is it? Regardless of our verbal response, how do we respond in action? I have no answers, I’m just continuing the thought process. Thanks for posting.
on December 1st, 2011 at 11:11 am
Hi Dan,
Thank you for your comments pushing the post a bit further. I was intending the post to be suggestive rather than directive. I am glad you made these important connections and shared them.
on December 1st, 2011 at 11:20 am
Hi Kris,
.
This is a very dicey question, indeed! I have two thoughts and I wonder what you think. The first is that in the biblical story, very often it is not a leveling of the playing field but an overturn. Since it is Advent, I will mention the Magnificat, where those who are hungry are filled and those who are filled leave empty; those in power are toppled and those who are marginalized are lifted up. This is a scary idea for someone like me who has a lot of power. The second thought relates to how current discussions about climate change are being handled (on my mind while world leaders meet in Durban, South Africa for yet another discussion). In the Global North, we are telling everyone to be careful about their strategies for development while we continue pumping out more and more gases. Our line seems to be, you don’t want what we have because it will stress the environment too greatly… Maybe we should be cutting back our emissions a tad more aggressively instead
on December 3rd, 2011 at 12:48 am
David, once when I heard a sermon on the Magnificat, the pastor mentioned the concept of overturning found in the song. I was puzzled because he spent all his time talking about this, which was great, but then he finished by saying he and others listening aren’t the rich or the poor, so we’ll likely stay exactly where we are. Talk about dulling the gospel…
Regarding the global warming discussion, it reminds me of something someone once said; “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”