Getting Past Our Black And White Thinking

Thankfully, God made us all "people of color".

Question: How many Americans are white, and how many are black? Answer: None. Zero. Unless artificially painted for some clown or minstrel act, no human being can be described as either “white” or “black”. Rather, each of us represents one of an infinite number of shades in God’s vast palette of skin colors. In other words, we are all “people of color,” neither ghostly white nor bituminous black, but some shade of pink, brown, peach, tan, coffee or dark olive.

So why think in terms of color-based categories at all?

I’m not suggesting we become color blind, but rather color-honoring, appreciating and celebrating the variety of shapes, sizes, hues and other unique features represented in the human family.

Having said that, we’re faced with an urgent need to address long-standing, racially-based inequities and injustices in our country. These have been with us ever since the original “white supremacists,” our European ancestors, claimed the right to arbitrarily occupy North American land and to conquer and destroy any who dared resist them. Both their beliefs in the “Right of Discovery” and the principle of “Manifest Destiny” represented a racial bias that remains all too common today, consciously or unconsciously held by members of a dominant culture that takes certain advantages and privileges for granted.

In the United States, race still stands out as a major factor associated with people having greater or lesser power, status and influence — power defined here as what helps people achieve their goals. Wealth plays a large role as well, along with other factors like ethnicity, education, national origin, and religious affiliation. Each of these can affect the chances of people getting a desired job, living in the neighborhood of their choice, being admitted to a quality school or receiving a just outcome in court.

Of course, enjoying the typical advantages associated with being part of the dominant culture, like growing up in a well-to-do family rather than a poor one, having access to a good education rather than an inferior one, being part of a mainline Christian denomination, rather than being a Muslim or a Hindu, or being of Western European ancestry rather than of Asian or African descent, do not guarantee anyone’s success. Nor does not enjoying any or many of these advantages doom one to failure. But these factors do tend to create strong headwinds or tailwinds that greatly affect the likelihood of success.

So those of us who are members of a social class formerly known as WASPs (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) must acknowledge that we remain “western European people of privilege” who tend to have a head start in the race for success. If we deny that, we should ask whether we would be willing to trade places with those among us who are of non-European descent.

So let’s work at righting past wrongs and creating a truly level playing field for people of all shades of color and all kinds of ethnicities.