On Privilege and Forgiveness

I went to sleep early again on election night. Frazzled by the math and the frenetic analysis of “the map,” the still-raw emotions of four years ago started to chill my heart all over again. I had told myself all day I wasn’t going to do that again, I wasn’t going to those places. I had read scripture. I had prayed fervently. I had taken part in online vigils. I am a Christian, and I told myself I could not and would fear.

If I’m being honest, though, what I really did was lean into my privilege. I told myself that I, that we, my family, were going to be ok no matter the outcome. The truth is, that was and is the case. I am a white, cisgender, heterosexual, upper middle class male. I have a great job. I live in a really nice neighborhood. My kids go to private school. I am about as close to the top of the socioeconomic food chain as one can get. Sure, there would be challenges and threats to our wellbeing if the election went the other way. Our health care is the most striking example of that. In reality, though, if it really came down to it we could (can) move to Canada, because I am a professional and I already know I qualify for Express Entry. That wouldn’t solve everything, but it sure could and would be different for us than for so many.

I have children and a wife whose skin tone is the same as mine. While my daughters’ gender brings certain risks to them that a son’s wouldn’t, I don’t have to have “the talk” with them like my cousins or friends or classmates who have Black sons do. I don’t have to teach them how to deal with the police. I don’t have to warn them about not stopping in certain towns or what to do when being followed or pulled over. I don’t have to tell them that their lives matter, because society just says they do.

I don’t have to worry about someone from the government snatching my kids from my arms. I don’t have to cross a river after fleeing my village in the middle of the night because the cartels have taken over. I don’t have to leave my family behind and do backbreaking work for low wages while hiding in the shadows. I don’t have to worry about my parents being deported. I don’t fear being sent back to a country I don’t know and having to speak a language I never learned.

I don’t have to worry about losing my job because I fell in love with my wife 15 years ago and somebody objects to my “lifestyle” or believes I have some hidden “agenda.” I don’t have to worry about my kids being kicked out of their school or being taken away from me because of who I love and how I was born. I don’t have to fear being beaten when my wife and I walk down the street simply because we are holding hands or I steal a kiss on her cheek.

I get paid a fair wage for my work and my experience, and I don’t look at my female colleagues and wonder how much less I make than them. I don’t face catcalls. No one is going to grab my private parts. I don’t have to put my keys in my hand as a weapon when I walk into a dark parking garage. I don’t carry a purse, and if I did there wouldn’t be mace in it.

As I wrote above, I am a Christian. My faith has grown stronger in recent years, particularly as our family has faced the diagnosis of our daughter with type 1 diabetes and my wife with cancer. God has been my rock, and my relationship with Jesus has enriched my life and given me strength in my darkest hours. At the heart of my faith is the knowledge of the audacious love and impossible grace I receive, unearned and most certainly undeserved. My obligations as a Christian include extending that love and that grace to all I meet, particularly to those I may be tempted to deem unworthy. Because I am unworthy of the grace I’ve received, who am I to deny it to others?

That’s my struggle today. How do I reach down and extend that grace, particularly to those who have spent the past four years engaging in or excusing hurtful and hateful behavior that has inflicted such pain on my country? How do I reconcile the fact that friends and neighbors who I really do love and who I really do believe are good deep down have and continue to support a regime unparalleled in its destruction in my lifetime? How do I accept the fact that so many around me voted for policies that would directly harm my family and do unspeakable damage to people I love?

As I listened to Natalie Maines and The Chicks sing “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice” this morning, I realized I don’t have to. Not right now. There will be time to examine my own struggle with this and figure out how to handle it. There will be time for me to privately wrestle with these issues and try and sort them out in my own way.

I’ve been reading and listening to the voices of those who’ve been so wounded by these past four years today, and I’ve been trying to be quiet and acknowledge the very real terror they felt at the possibility that we were going to continue on that trajectory and things would get even worse. I cannot grasp that level of panic, even if I tried. My privilege shields me from ever having to.

And that’s at the very heart of this notion of reconciliation. As much as I support President-Elect Biden, and as grateful and hopeful I was to hear his important words about unity and ending our divisions, much of the optimism and idealism of my youth has been chipped away. I will never get over the fact that seeing and hearing those babies in those cages wasn’t the end of the line, not to mention the never-ending litany of abhorrent, racist, misogynistic behavior and even more destructive governance. If we are ever really going to reconcile, that reconciliation must start with the truth.

The truth is, none of that was ok. None of that was rational or justifiable. No amount of judges or tax cuts or deregulation or any of the excuses are enough to justify the hurt and the pain that administration caused and would have loved to continue causing. What too many people have had to endure is tantamount to abuse, psychological and physical, and we do not get to insist that victims forgive their abusers. That is not our place.

So where does that leave us, and more importantly, where do we go from here? Right now, today, I realize I must start listening more. As much as I like to consider myself tolerant or “woke” or any of those descriptions people like me use to make ourselves feel better, none of that changes the fact that we still benefit from a system designed and maintained to protect us, and nothing absolves us of those decisions even if we oppose them. Try as we may, we can never, ever understand the lived experience of those who are dealing with the betrayal of 70 million of their fellow Americans voting to continue hurting them. Acknowledging it is the first, and probably easiest, step.

Then the real work begins. Then the discipline required to keep quiet and truly listen must be found. Then the effort to put our own selfish interests and perspectives aside must take priority and we must focus on pursuing the very real and tangible policy decisions that will continue the long, slow, difficult process of progress.

One of the phrases that hit me hardest these past four years is that when somebody tells you that they’ve been hurt, you don’t get to tell them that they haven’t. Reading my social media feeds yesterday and today made me realize that, though I thought I did, I truly had no idea the level of hurt and fear felt by so many people who don’t look or love like me. As much as I have to say and as many feelings I would like to share, it became so apparent that people don’t really need to hear any more from people like me right now. Instead, it is my duty and my obligation to stop, listen to, and elevate the feelings and concerns of others. This is all made more dramatically so when we accept the reality that it wasn’t people like me who made this victory possible. It was the people hurt the most, those who had the most to lose. So let’s listen to them. Let’s lift them up. In that listening, maybe, just maybe, we can all begin to heal, and maybe, just maybe, we can recognize that until others are given space and support to start that healing first, none of us can ever be truly free, and none of us can ever heal ourselves. And while we are listening, let’s work to implement the change so desperately needed to move beyond just words, and let our actions speak the change that history requires of us.