Chances are, you are reading this and do not live in Ferguson or the greater St. Louis area.
If so, the death of Mike Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson probably has not directly affected you.
Protests have not led to canceled classes for your children. Marches have not disrupted your commute home.
You have not been hit with tear gas. Your favorite store has not been looted by people from outside the community seeking to cause chaos while others peacefully protest.
Because these things are not happening to you, you may believe the death of an 18-year-old, due to what I see as an unjust abuse of power, is tragic but has no effect on you.
But it does, and you should care.
Ferguson Is Not the Only Example
Whether you believe Wilson acted within his legal rights or not, we can no longer dismiss the reality that the system often views and treats people of color differently, especially Black and Latino people.
Let us pretend the events in Ferguson, Missouri, never happened.
Or at least pretend you did not hear about them on Twitter and the president of the United States never discussed them during a news conference.
The fact that it took the president speaking publicly for a city under conditions resembling martial law to become a major news story is beyond me, but I digress.
Instead, consider other events happening around the country.
Look at the cases involving Barneys New York and Macy’s, which were settled in August 2014 over discriminatory treatment of minority shoppers.
When your minority friends say store employees treat them like thieves, they are not simply making it up.
Macy’s revised its rules for dealing with customers and suspected theft as a result of the case.
That is what systemic means.
It does not necessarily mean every person working at Macy’s or Barneys is racist. It means a system can produce racially biased outcomes.
What Systemic Bias Looks Like at Home
Although I am a Detroit native, I recently moved to Silicon Valley. We enrolled our daughter in kindergarten at a public school.
For context, San Jose, where we live, is the 10th-largest city in the United States. Its population exceeds 1 million.
The city is largely white, Hispanic and Asian, while only 2.8% of its residents are Black.
Before we registered our daughter, several of our white friends gave us direct advice.
They told us to stay active at the school, communicate regularly with her teachers and fight to ensure she received a fair education.
“She is a minority, and she will be labeled,” they told us. “She will initially be placed in lower class groupings simply because she’s a minority and they assume she’s behind.”
Yes, that advice came from my white friends.
It did not come from my conspiracy-minded Black friends or my fellow socially burdened Latino friends.
These were white friends who recognized the system for what it was: broken and racially biased.
I could continue with stories of personal injustice.
I could discuss how Black and Latino defendants often receive longer sentences than white defendants convicted of similar crimes.
I could also address systems that perpetuate problems in predominantly Black and Latino communities while producing different results elsewhere.
A member of my church recently looked me in the face and described the greatest challenge he experiences as an Asian American.
People expect him to assimilate into the majority culture and whitewash his own.
But, he added, he will never fully understand what I experience because, in his words, “Asians are treated just about the same as whites.”
“The system’s broken, schools closed, the prisons opened.” — Kanye West
Distance Does Not Remove Responsibility
No matter where you live, whether Ferguson, Missouri; Fremont, California; or Fairfield, Connecticut, systemic racial bias exists.
There is a penalty for being brown in America.
There is even a common phrase describing why a minority driver may be stopped without breaking a law: DWB, or “driving while Black” or “driving while brown.”
These systems exist today, even when they remain hidden from people who belong to the majority culture.
That should not make you feel guilty for being white.
It should not make you ashamed of belonging to a cultural majority you did not choose at birth.
It should, however, make you angry.
It should bother you that someone may treat your friend unfairly because he or she has more melanin.
It should infuriate you.
And you can do something about it.
You may not live in Ferguson, but systemic racism is alive in your city.
You do not have to follow John Mayer’s advice and “wait for the world to change.”
Waiting has allowed broken systems to cause more harm. Waiting has produced more problems, not solutions.
Using Privilege to Serve Others
We can lead change.
You can lead change.
When people within the majority culture speak against systems that perpetuate racial bias, the world can slowly begin to change, piece by piece.
Matt Chandler and others have spoken openly about white privilege in America.
As a believer in Christ, there is something you can do with that privilege: You can use it to serve others.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).
In humility, Christ possessed the ultimate privilege and used it to serve others.
I pray that you will go and do likewise in Ferguson, Fargo or wherever you are from.
You may be far from Ferguson, but injustice exists closer to home.
To borrow a line from St. Louis hip-hop artist Thi’sl: “Then go do something ’bout it!”
About the contributor: Steve Patton is a pastor, writer and speaker who serves as pastor of preaching and discipleship at Reunion Seattle, a church he helped launch in 2017. A Detroit native, he writes and teaches about discipleship, race, culture and building healthy, multicultural churches. He also serves as a leader with the Regeneration Project and lives in the Seattle area with his wife, Nichole, and their two daughters.