Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
When I was a grad student at Vanderbilt, I took a field placement one semester in a mental health center in Bowling Green, KY to get some supervised experience in counseling. A young psychologist on the staff there had a bumper sticker on his car that said, "Happiness is an inside job." I spent weeks seeing that sticker every day and trying to figure out what it meant, assuming that it had some obscure psychological, tongue-in-cheek message that I should be able to figure out. I finally gave up and just asked the psychologist.
"There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."
― Elizabeth Warren
The actual meaning was not at all obscure. In fact it was so basic that it should have been obvious. He said, "After one year of working for a construction company through the bitter cold of winter and the heat of summer, I was inspired to go back college and earn the degrees that would get me a job in an office building."
It was probably a meaningless exchange for him but it was, for me, almost like a brief encounter with a Zen master.
I grew up in rural Kentucky surrounded by the tenet farmers and the crushing poverty of the majority of those who were trying to scratch a living out of the poor agricultural land around us. When I hauled hay and housed tobacco, however, it was for extra spending money. When I milked a cow by hand, it was for entertainment, for the novelty of it.
Though my parents could not afford to send me to college, the fact, the cultural assumption, that I was going to college was reinforced in my life from my earliest memories. I have done hard manual labor, helping to build houses in the thin air of the Andes in Ecuador, and in the heat of Managua, Nicaragua.
After a day of carrying concrete block and mixing mortar on the ground with a shovel and a pale in Nicaragua, I asked my friend, Bill Ringo, as we stumbled back to our hotel, "Bill, are you doing OK?" And he replied, "If I hurt just a little bit more I would sit down right here and start crying like a baby."
But, for us, it was five days of labor in what Bill fondly called, "Gandhi Camp" and we were jetting our way back to the USA, making plans for our next scuba vacation. My life is not charmed. I have had some real tough blows to endure and have had to put in a lot of long hours and do some pretty demanding work. But, with rare exception, I work indoors. I get to take a lunch break. I always have access to both healthcare and a safe place to sleep, running water and flushing toilets.
More than that, I was born into the dominant race, of the dominant gender, in the dominant nation of the world. There is no predictor of success in life greater than being born white, male, heterosexual, and protestant in North America.
It is fair for everyone to have the same finish line in a race if they all have the same starting line but white men in this country get a solid head start before women and minorities ever get into the race. White privilege is not just a real thing, it is almost an undefeatable thing even while it defies detection and definition.
For those of you who, like me, watched both of the Republican debates on TV, the mere fact that white, male, millionaires could look into a camera and say with a straight face that salaries in the USA are too high and that rather than raise the minimum wage, that wages in America are already too high and have to be lowered in order to be competitive on the world market.... If you have ever doubted white privilege, watch that clip again.
They can pay lip service to the fact that wage disparity is destroying our economy and that it is the number one challenge facing the future of America and yet, when asked point blank, if they would favor a raise in the minimum wage, every one of them was against it. If I may mix my literary genres and images a bit, they all sounded like odd combinations of Voldemort and Ebenezer Scrooge.
I don't want for Ben Carson to become a running theme in my preaching, but when he said that the United States went from its birth to being the dominant economic force in the world because of its positive business environment. I don't feel like I should have to be the one to point out to Ben Carson that what he is calling a positive business environment is what historians call the institution of slavery.
But folks, as we are nearing our Thanksgiving observance, I would like to add one more thing to our awareness of white privilege in America. As morally bankrupt as the treatment of European settlers of their African slaves was, and as horrible as the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans was, the historical aspect that is typically really undersold is the fact that the takeover of North America from the tens of millions of Native Americans who were living here when we arrived was largely due to the diseases we brought with us.
So unprepared to face the illnesses that most Europeans had evolved to survive were the native tribes that entire villages simply collapsed under the weight of the casualty count. There were villages where people died in such numbers that they couldn't even bury their dead, they simply abandoned their entire village of houses and agricultural fields.
The reason why there are so many cities in America with "field" as a part of their name, there are more than 40 Springfields in America and a lot of Mansfield, Fairfield, Greenfield, and so on because white settlers found cleared and established agricultural fields that had been prepared and used by our Indian predecessors that had been abandoned after the epidemics of measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough), tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chickenpox and sexually transmitted diseases that Europeans brought across the Atlantic on their little wooden ships.
The arrival of large numbers of Europeans spelled near extinction for the American Indians but it presented those settlers with vast resources of cleared farmland and a leg up ahead of the rest of the world that was braced for an industrial revolution.
So, no, no one in modern America can claim to be a self-made person without acknowledging the inheritance of a continent from Native Americans, and an infrastructure due in large part to the uncompensated labor of African slaves and barely compensated labor of Chinese railroad workers.
And for all of the talk about building a wall between us and Mexico, the same people screaming for a wall now will be wanting to tear it down when they find the cost of their fruits and vegetables going up by three digit inflation year after year. No one who owns a farm, a hotel, or a restaurant really wants to try to endure the spike in labor prices that would result from a real ban on immigration, not to mention a mass deportation of the undocumented.
If wealth were predicated on hard work and frugality alone, the richest people in the world would be the women of sub-Saharan Africa where they carry water on their heads and fire wood on their backs, day after day.
Nobody here ever killed an Indian or owned a slave. Everyone here has, however, dramatically benefited from the theft of land from the Indians and the labor of African slaves. We are all connected. No one is an island and no one can take credit for their successes as a stand-alone event.
Therefore, we have a very basic, moral, logical, just obligation to pay it forward to the next generation, to the next person, who is trying to make it. Many of us here did not come from wealthy families who sent us to college. I not only worked my way through school but I even had to help my parents out financially through much of my grad school experience.... But you know what, I lived in a time when that was possible. That time no longer exists.
