"Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain
embedded in the very fabric of the culture.” Tim Wise
One of the aspects I most love about working with cityWILD is the opportunity to work with young people and their families for multiple years. Imagine the kind of transformation that can occur between the ages of 11 and 18. This month I celebrate 7 years of working with cityWILD and during this time I have been given the gift of supporting some of the most extraordinary young people as they defeat odds to rise above obstacles most people in my life can’t imagine. I have been working in the field of social work for more than 20 years. The barriers that go hand in hand with poverty are painfully familiar to me, but not because I know anything about what it feels like to walk barefoot on the hot coals. Rather, because I have witnessed the impacts of poverty, oppression, and racism over and over again. Yet, even after 20 years I am still learning how much I don’t know.
Not long ago I stopped into a bookstore, the kind with coffee and couches that invite people to linger while browsing the aisles and flipping through magazines. These kind of bookstores are one of the places where I feel most at peace. On this occasion, I had an 17 year old student with me and unbeknownst to me, this was the first time this student had ever been inside of a bookstore. As we walked through, it became apparent the student didn’t know such a place existed. As we talked, the student had no idea people could take books off the shelves and sit down to read or that it would be fine to hang out for the afternoon and study without buying anything. As much as I think about inequity, it had never occurred to me that someone could grow up 2 miles from where I was living and not know what a book store is. If I could overlook this, I wonder how many other privileges I don’t see each and every day.
The truth is, regardless of how many students with whom I work get straight A’s, take AP classes, go on Outward Bound courses, learn to be rafting guides, complete service learning projects, travel out of the country, and go to college, they will still struggle for justice in a world stacked against them.
I volunteer for an organization that partners with privates schools with tuition costing as much as $20,000 per year. This is not college tuition, this is tuition for kindergarten through 12th grade. $20,000 is more than most of the families in the neighborhood where I work make. When people are raising families on less than $20,000 per year, (often much less,) there is a lot more than bookstores to which their children aren't exposed. The advantages of privilege are so multi-layered sometimes it feels nearly impossible to quantify.
Since that day at the bookstore, I find myself reflecting on the rituals of my day and wondering how many of them are rooted in privilege I have yet to recognize. It’s a heavy burden to realize I have so many unearned advantages that I can’t identify them all. Yet, this burden seems weightless compared to the weight of the struggle people without these advantages carry each day of their lives.
"In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth." Peggy McIntosh
