Background:
I don’t talk about
it much, but for a brief period during high school, I called myself “Born
Again.” One of the benefits was that it
was a safe space where I felt like I belonged.
And with that, one summer Sunday evening, the memories of being molested
by a man who worked for my father some six years before came back. Overwhelming me, I cried and tried to explain
what had happened to my youth group leader.
The sudden on-rush of shame and confusion was really overwhelming, and I
struggled to understand it. In my
memory, I felt I’d done something wrong.
I
hadn’t. I’d been tricked, coerced into
letting this man do things that no one, up to that time, had done. I was only twelve and a late bloomer, but
somehow the fact that it happened was my fault (or so I thought). And in youth group, the memory of it, the
shame of it came rushing back.
After
telling my parents and listening to their sincere apology for putting me in
that position (I’d spent the summer at a hot springs resort with my father and
had very little parental supervision for most of it), I begin to kind of piece
it together. This was the ‘70s, which
was still a relatively innocent time, so it didn’t seem strange to my father
that a grown man would show some sort of passing interest in me. And it wasn’t my fault.
But
it was also in this Youth Group that I begin to understand the rhetorical trap
that Christianity uses to keep its followers in check. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he
states, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of
these is love.” (13:13). On its face, there is nothing inherently problematic
with that verse, but situating faith as one of the core tenets creates a bit of
problem, a rhetorical trap.
As a young man
questioning my faith, the reason I begin to doubt its truthfulness could be
simply explained away with the “I just don’t have enough faith” trap. Even
though I was having a hard time with my own dogma around Christianity, that
doubt was evidence of my lack of faith.
I was in a no-win situation.
And
I lost. By the middle of my junior year, I was no longer attending youth
group. I was hanging out with friends
from work and no longer claimed being a Christian. If I didn’t have enough faith, I wasn’t going
to accept any of it or use the label. It
was a bit dogmatic, I admit, but I still don’t think you can just selectively
believe and borrow doctrines from a religion that has such a well-established
pedigree. Sure, some things can be
emphasized of de-emphasized over time and leave a sort of modern or post-modern
spin, but the core tenets: belief in the
divinity of Jesus, belief in the imperfection of humanity (sin), and belief in
Jesus being the only one who can account/redeem that imperfection, seems rather
fixed. And ultimately, because I didn’t
have enough faith, I didn’t belong. The
rhetorical trap pushed me out of the religion to such a degree that now I have
a hard time seeing any value in religion.
Situation:
A
few months ago my wife begin an unstructured, fairly intensive deep dive into
how her Jewishness fit into the narrative around privilege. In many contexts, especially in a geographic
location where all fair skinned people are seen as white, she benefits from
white privilege. Much like I do. The idea that we occupy a position and look
at the world through that strikes me as rather uncontroversial.
Instead,
what I want to look at is in what way has the narrative around white privilege
used the same rhetorical trap that I saw Christianity use?
Yesterday,
we were walking to a show and I was talking about some of my more nuanced views
of White Privilege; she stopped me.
“I
just have a question. Are the people you
are reading white men?”
“Yes,
mostly.”
The
implication was a familiar one.
Critiques of White (and male) Privilege from white males may not be as
salient as other critiques because white males can’t escape their white
privilege, and they also have the most to lose.
Yet I see that as
a version of the rhetorical trap. I,
ultimately, can’t help but look at the world from the standpoint as a white
male thus my critiques of the way we talk about white privilege are suspect if
not downright invalid.
I
assured her that I was being diligent in my adopting these critiques and making
sure I was not just being resistant because I didn’t want to change, wanted to
hold on to my privilege. I get that; I
really do.
Unlike
when I was younger, I want to be able to understand and use the framework of
white privilege as a way of seeing and understanding some of the problems but
not have to accept that I can’t be critical of it because of my white
privilege.
In other words, there
has to be a way controlling for my standpoint.
There has to be a way that people outside of our standing can
understand, empathize with our experience without having to live our experience,
or to borrow from feminist theory: Standpoint
Epistemology.
Loosely, in
Standpoint Epistemology, people who are situated within a category have claim
to a certain privilege or authority within that category. Thus, because a person is a woman, an
African-American, or a Trans-person, etc. it means they have a privileged
authority on issues of being a woman, an African-American, or a
Trans-person. And while I agree with
that in principle, it doesn’t mean that someone who doesn’t occupy that
standpoint can’t also be an authority.
For example, there are many doctors who are of the opposite sex to their
patients, yet we wouldn’t argue that all females should have only female doctors? That is not to say that we shouldn’t
encourage more diversity in medicine because we should. But we aren’t going to stop treating illness
and injury because we don’t have that diversity yet?
Taken to an
extreme if we use standpoint as the most important qualifier, and the person
who has it being the best authority then how are we going to live in
community. Logically it leads to
situation where no agreement can be reached because every conflict can be
boiled down to springing from differing standpoints. If you only understood my standpoint you’d
know why I did such and such and thus there’d be no right or wrong only
standpoints. For example, (to use an
extreme example) if you only knew what
it was like to be an alcoholic you wouldn’t punish me for drinking to excess or
driving drunk. If we aren’t able to take
another person’s standpoint, then how can we possibly ever live in community? My
living in community with a person of another viewpoint is dependent upon my
ability to believe they can understand my position, perhaps even empathize with
my position so that we can make decisions that mutually benefit us both?
Which brings us
back to my wife’s question and why I’m still troubled by it several days
later. While I agree that I need to look
at my standpoint when viewing issues around white privilege, I don’t think
because I have a lot of white privilege (and I do) it means that my critique
isn’t valid. It does mean that I need to
be very careful that my standpoint doesn’t shape or distort my critique. And my critique is that if we fall into the rhetorical
trap of saying, for example, “Your white privilege means you can’t critique the
concept of white privilege” then we are no better than the Christians who say,
“You just need to have faith” and then follow whatever impossible facts or
dictums their religion demands.
August
22, 2019
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