Let me tell you a story.
In 1980 I was part of a religious group called The Way International. It was a Christian group that was far enough outside the mainstream that it often got labelled as a cult. The Way has a program called Word Over the World Ambassadors, kind of a missionary program, where volunteers were assigned to a year of proselytizing, usually in an area far from home. I signed up for this program and in August of 1980 left my home in Queens, NY to attend a week-long gathering of Way folks in New Knoxville Ohio, Way headquarters. There I received my assignment to serve as a Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador in Sidney Nebraska, population 5000.
It was in Sidney where I experienced bigotry first hand.
Not that I had never seen bigotry practiced by, and inflicted on, others. When I was in my teens, homeowners in my Queens neighborhood of Rosedale organized to keep blacks from buying homes in the neighborhood. At the time, Rosedale was almost 100% white, predominantly Irish, Italian and Jewish. The homeowners formed an organization called R.O.A.R. - which either stood for Rights Of All Rosedale or Restore Our American Rights (I think it changed from one to another). http://billmoyers.com/content/rosedale-way/ - it was never proved if R.O.A.R. members did it, but homes of black residents of Rosedale were firebombed and vandalized. Watch the linked video. It was pretty disgusting. I was appalled at the hatred, but honestly, and to my shame, I didn't speak up or otherwise do anything about it.
But back to 1980. When I arrived in Sidney, along with three other people around the same age (I was 22 at the time) I was a little culture shocked. After all, I had come from one of the largest cities in the country and here I was in an insular rural community. But otherwise it seemed like a decent enough place. Little did I know that the community was fortified against us. Steve, the appointed leader of our group, had made a scouting trip to Sidney a month or so earlier. He secured a job for himself and looked into housing options, so the people of Sidney were well aware that a "cult" would be in their town.
It didn't take long for the people of Sidney to begin to express their displeasure at "the other" in the their midst.
I was fired from my job as an apprentice glass cutter because my employer's church objected to him hiring a "cult member". We were evicted from our duplex on New Year's Eve for the same reason and had difficulty finding another place to live due to discrimination by landlords. We were verbally assaulted in the streets and in stores, people attempted to run us down with their cars and staged a protest outside our house. We were refused service in several local restaurants; local churches organized meetings to protest our presence; a weekly radio program by a Sidney minister regularly railed against us. I was physically assaulted in a men's room at a bar one night. All because of our religious beliefs.
Before the thought "Oh that's nothing" forms in the minds of those who have experienced much worse, I thought the same thing myself. None of us were killed, our house wasn't burned down, the police weren't pulling me over and shooting us while our hands were up. And most importantly, I could have walked away from The Way and been accepted by those yahoos as soon as I joined an "acceptable" church. When I moved to another town I passed as just another white mainstream Christian and the discrimination just magically melted away. The color of my skin, my facial features or my accent didn't continue to identify me as "other". My whiteness enabled me to walk away from the bigotry of the ignorant, a privilege that many others do not have.
So yeah, I benefit from what some call white privilege, and I haven't experienced the systemic racism, bigotry and discrimination that so many others do every day, but in part due to my limited experience with bigotry, discrimination in any form disgusts me, and I have no patience with it.
Including at the highest levels.
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