Continuing from my previous blog, I would say that white privilege in America feels like latent conflict to me. At least among most white people, it is. In our mostly segregated neighborhoods, many of us can ignore racial disparity. Or we have the feeling that we care about problems in society, but from a distance, as if we were floating in our safe existence above the problems of immigrant detention and violent policing, cushioned by a vast inner tube of complacency, ready to swoop down with a good deed at any moment, afterwards to return to our kitchens for a delightful cup of tea, perhaps a yoga class in the evening.
We don’t realize it for a long time, but the positionality of white privilege entails pain, just as being oppressed is painful, though oppression is far more painful, as evidenced by the worse health outcomes faced by communities of color. Privilege is the flip side of oppression. I think feeling this pain – if we can get to that point – is the doorway to understanding what it means to be white in America. The complacency that is made possible by a privileged position, the numbness… I will explore this more later.
Father Cedric Prakash, a Jesuit priest from India (currently based in Beirut) and an activist for peace, visited us on Thursday. The point that he made that I appreciated the most was to describe how the US military-industrial complex helped create the refugee crisis we are currently seeing out of the Middle East. It’s not that the US caused the war in Syria, but that if we were to be, say, feeling concerned about refugees entering the US, we would do well to look a little deeper and ask ourselves how we could treat a refugee as having anything other than an inalienable right to enter our country when our country is supplying so many arms to the Middle East, that find their way to ISIS fighters, when so many Americans and people of other nationalities make their living off this arms trade. If we blame refugees for being refugees, we are missing the point. Money makes the world go ‘round, and money loves war. War makes a lot of money (for some).
The last piece I need to touch on from last week is our class on dialogue with Dr. Mara Schoeny. Dialogue doesn’t belong everywhere; it is not a solution to everything. But a model of dialogue she described showed how it could be used to allow a group of people to “suspend” a concept together, in order to observe it from all sides without feeling pressure to take sides or make a decision, and how this is different from discussion. Discussion often involves hashing out positions or known viewpoints; suspension of a concept gives the opportunity for completely new positions to emerge, for new understandings to form. This could be very powerful with the right group.
Dr. Schoeny also said that a useful contribution of academia to the peacebuilding field is that it encourages us to take a step back and survey all the possible tools we have for dealing with conflict and to examine which tools work best when, and how. It’s not bad to become an excellent practitioner at one modality, like dialogue or streetwork, but that one method will not always be effective. With study we learn to step back, take a second look, and choose our tool appropriately.
