Chances are, you’re reading this and you don’t live in Ferguson or the greater St. Louis area. So chances are the death of Mike Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson hasn’t directly impacted you. Protests haven’t led to canceled classes for your children. Marches haven’t impacted traffic on your commute home. You haven’t been shot with tear gas and your favorite store hasn’t been looted by people from outside of your community seeking to cause anarchy while people are peacefully protesting. Since these things aren’t happening to you, you believe that while the death of an 18 year old (due to an unjust abuse of power from my vantage point) may be tragic, you think this has no impact on you. But it does… and you should care.
Whether you think Officer Wilson acted within his legal rights or not, the fact that people of color—especially Blacks and Latinos—are viewed and treated differently on a systemic level is a fact we can no longer do away with. Let’s pretend the events in Ferguson, MO never happened. Or at least let’s pretend you didn’t hear about the story on Twitter or the President of the United States never talked about it in a press conference (the fact that it took a LITERAL act of the POTUS to make a city being put in a near state of Marshall Law become a news story is beyond me… but I digress).
Let’s look at other things happening around our country. Let’s examine things like the Barney’s and Macy’s lawsuits that were settled just last month in August 2014 due to both stores’ discriminatory practices towards minorities. When your minority friends tell stories of feeling like they are being treated like they are thieves when they walk around the store they aren’t just making this stuff up! Macy’s now has rewritten the rules on how they deal with customers and begin to deal with theft differently on a systemic level due to this lawsuit. Systemic. It’s not that the people of Macy’s and Barney’s are racist, it’s the system that is racially biased.
Though I am a native of Detroit, I recently moved to Silicon Valley, where we enrolled our daughter into kindergarten in a public school. To give you a bit of context, San Jose (where we live) is the 10th largest city in America with a population of over 1 million people. The city is largely White, Hispanic and Asian but only 2.8% are African American. Before we registered for school, many of our White friends told us very plainly to make sure we’re active in the school, talk to the teachers ALL of the time and really fight to make sure that our daughter is getting a fair shake in our education because, and I quote, “she is a minority and she WILL be labeled. She will get initially put in lower class groupings simply because she’s a minority and they assume she’s behind.” And yes, this was advice from my White friends. Not my conspiracy theorist Black friends or even my fellow social suffering Latino friends. These were my White friends who saw the issues for what they really were—systemically broken and biased based on race.
I could go on and on with stories of personal injustices I’ve endured or how on a national level Blacks and Latinos serve more time for committing the same crimes as Whites. I could go on to discuss the systems in place that perpetuate the problems that exist in predominantly Black and Latino areas that largely don’t exist in primarily White or Asian cultures. I recently had a member of my church look me straight in the face and tell me that the biggest problem he faces as an Asian-American is that he is expected to assimilate into majority culture and whitewash his own culture BUT he’ll never know the things I face because largely, and I quote, “Asians are treated just about the same as Whites.”
The system’s broken schools closed the prisons opened… – Kanye West
No matter where you live – Ferguson, MO, Freemont, CA or Fairfield, CT, systemic racial bias exists. Systemically there is a penalty you pay for being brown in America. In fact, there is a phrase commonly used to describe why a minority gets pulled over when no law was broken to get them pulled over. We say it was a DWB (Driving While Black/Brown). Those same systems, though possibly shielded from your view because you are part of the majority culture, exist today.
That shouldn’t make you feel guilty for being White. That shouldn’t make you feel ashamed of being part of a cultural minority you didn’t ask to be born into. However, it should anger you. That should bother you. It should infuriate you that your friend, simply because he or she has a higher amount of melanin in their body, will be subjected to unfair treatment. It should tick you off.
And you can do something about it!
You may not live in Ferguson, but systemic racism is alive and well in your city. You don’t have to be like what John Mayer said when we sang from the comfort of his privilege of race and wealth and “wait for the world to change.” Waiting for the world to change has led to greater abuse in the broken systems. Waiting has led to more problems not solutions. We can lead the change. You can lead change. When majority culture begins to speak out against the broken systems that harbor such racial bias the world will slowly, piece by piece begin to change.
Matt Chandler and many 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 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 took the ULTIMATE privilege and used it to serve others. I pray that you would go and do likewise in Ferguson, Fargo or wherever it is you’re from. You may be far from Ferguson, but injustice exists closer to home. To quote a line from Hip-Hop artist and St. Louis native Thi’sl, “then go do something ‘bout it!