I got my second pfizer shot early in June, and felt privileged because, well, that's what it is!  Our Alberta government had said every adult should be able to get at least the first shot by July 1.  We have populations hesitant about taking the vaccine but we're close enough to the targets that the Calgary Stampede, a 10-day rodeo and midway carnaval has come back to life.  Last Saturday, Olivia and I went for part of the morning and while attendance was clearly lower, there were a lot of people. It's almost disorienting now, to be so almost in the clear?  But to add perspective, Kenya, a Commonwealth country, a month ago had a 'comprehensive vaccine plan by which 30% of the population will be vaccinated by June, 2023.' (African Population and Research Center, Mar 3/21.) In Canada we're at 79% (of those eligible) with a single dose and 49% double dosed. We have supply access to vaccinate everyone 3 times over by end of September. Vaccines these days are wildly controversial, but the covid vaccine, like other basic necessities including food and water, has also become about privilege. 

After an earlier post I suggested that for lent next year, maybe we who are of the privileged or, to use Orlando's adjective, the dominant, usually white class around the world should consider a privilege fast.  Then someone asked what that would look like.  And I really don't know. Don't take the vaccine until people in Kenya and Bolivia also have it? It's one thing to collect a list of privileges … but it's another to abstain. Because from what, exactly? If you're white, the police in the USA are less likely to pull you over and if they do, they're more likely to let you off with a warning? You're probably a desirable neighbor. You don't have to do your job twice as well to gain the trust of the company. You're not followed discretely down the aisles of the grocery store. You won't have people chasing you in public parks and walkways with racial slurs and, increasingly it seems, physical violence. You won't wonder why you didn't get the promotion because … it's more likely you did, and also, the other guests at the hotel will not assume you are one of the cleaning staff … . Is it possible to divest oneself of any of that privilege, even for 40 days?  

I asked a few people about their experience with privilege. They quickly listed examples where they or their relatives had experienced racism, discrimination, marginalization, or just not being noticed.  A friend said her brother,  a young latino adult, is often racially profiled.  A truck was stolen in the neighborhood and who did the police come after? She said this is a repeated experience for him even though he has a job, lives like his neighbors, but happens to be darker. It's obvious that this happens to him and to many others because they are not white, but when we ask how a white person can abstain or remove ourselves from the privilege of never being profiled and harassed by the police it becomes a harder question. Would admitting that privilege is a thing be a start?  

A mixed-race couple said that divesting yourself of privilege is not really possible because we live in a system in which accepted ways of thought and behaviour are, well … accepted.  The problem is systemic and self-perpetuating:  'no matter your level of awareness, you still benefit from being white' and are part of the culture to which the rest of the world has deferred for centuries; your (woke) awareness of this 'does not keep you from being chosen for a job interview', nor how others treat you on the sidewalk, on the construction site, in the office, the grocery store. We are born into privilege.  So they suggested that rather than somehow divesting ourselves of our privilege, it must itself be used to dismantle the culture of oppression that keeps things as they are. To tell people of color that racism is their problem to solve by … working harder, being more like us, speaking without an accent, being patient, trusting us because we really are well intentioned …  etc, etc … is to abdicate our role in restructuring our world of privilege. 

Cultures, institutions and systems become self-preserving.  Unless we really do think and talk about it, we'll keep feeding our privilege, and we'll do it to the point that when we feel it threatened, we'll turn it into a battle for rights and entitlements. Witness church leaders taking governments and health regions to court because their freedom to meet during covid was taken away for a while and because they were supposed to wear masks. None of this was remotely close to persecution but we are so entitled by our privilege that when we become inconvenienced (that's all it is) we will litigate to keep it all. 

Don't turn off the other's light so that ours can shine.

We also self-preserve in ways that can't be captured on iphone cameras. In the 6th season of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, the 2nd and 3rd podcasts are called Lord of the Rankings (2) and Project Dillard (3).   How it's decided which Universities in the USA are 'the best'. Gladwell discovered that it's all pretty subjective. US News surveys the presidents and ranks them by how they rank each other. Terribly subjective but these are smart people with many degrees. They must be objective. Right?  Gladwell discovered that the ranking often has to do with how big their endowments are, and whether or not they're expensive to attend. Seemingly, it's about 'status'.  If they're not expensive schools, it means students with less money will be attending which also means there will be higher drop-out rates for all kinds of reasons.  No one drops out of expensive, prestigious schools; they make sure.  Dillard University is ranked near the bottom, and, to sum it up, it's because, as Gladwell says in (3), 'they attract the wrong kind of student'. Students 'of color'. Which then means those students are disadvantaged while they're in school and after. They graduated, not from Yale or Harvard but … from Dillard. Gladwell also talks about how Universities raise money. They sell bonds. A bond attracts value by how its buyers think of it. Meaning, an investor will buy what he or she thinks has solid value. Gladwell then asked about universities in Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia. Universities with larger numbers of black students.  And, surprize!! … bonds from those universities were valued much lower than those offered by a 'normal' mostly white, richer kids school. Do investors care about race?  Maybe not, but we can tell a lot by the people they invest in. It all perpetuates itself but it's not always on camera.

So maybe fasting or abstaining from privilege isn't the right question? Is it at least one of them? At the very least, we could resist the temptation to turn privilege into rights. And we could recognize it for what it becomes … a civilization that's comfortable looking away while denying equal access to decent wages, security, health care, clean water, housing, jobs, education … and the safety of sidewalk space to indigenous, refugees, newcomers and people of color alike, because, well … it's really on them? Jesus, Gandhi, King, Mother Theresa, Mandela, Romero, Bonhoeffer, Jody Wilson-Raybould and many others … refused to participate in the privilege that separates us from each other.  It's why Mandela spent 27 years in prison and, excepting Mother Theresa and JWR, they kept getting killed. All of them would say it begins with ourselves. And if those of us who profess to know Jesus could actually, for 40 days, follow his example by not turning away … we might be on to something?    

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