I want to thank Tom for this vulnerable and courageously honest sharing and responding to my invitation for people to get real and share. I truly mean it… please follow in his footsteps and dare to look at yourself and your life through the lens of privilege and oppression and share, as Tom has here. We can learn so much from one another. My eyes tear as I read his sharing….
Essay on Privilege and Oppression in my Life
I was born in the southern part of the United States. North Carolina to be exact. As Pat Conroy so well expressed “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call”.
I entered the world in a racist environment – though, I and, no one there would know or believe that. My world was white. My world was religious – specifically evangelical Christian. We were middle class. My Mom was a nurse and my dad a milkman. I have two siblings 10 and 11 years older than I. We are not close.
I did not experience a lot of oppression directly. I did witness people oppressed due to race, being different, or rebels.
Other people were ‘oppressed’ in my world. The only people of color around me were servers, the ‘help’ and grocery store workers. All of the white people were automatically ‘good’ folks. I was taught that Jesus loved the little children – red, yellow, black, or white”. Though we did not know any of those people.
Since my Mom worked full time – we had ‘help’. Her name was Flossie. I now know she was very influential to me. I think she ‘vaccinated’ me from the full-blown racism around me. I remember her being poor. We would sometimes drop her off at her house, which was a shack. I don’t believe that she had any healthcare.
White privilege was and is a fact.
If I was ‘oppressed’ at all, this is not the right word for it. My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. She treated me like she had a form of Munchhausen syndrome. I did not know I was being abused. This has been a disability.
I have always felt like an alien in the world around me. I just wasn’t ‘right’. I didn’t do well in school. I was severely introverted and I was alone a good bit of time. They now call that a ‘latch key’ kid. Sexuality and gender codes were a mystery to me. I was a sweet kid with the last name of Query – born in the 50’s. I learned tools to be engaged with those around me.
I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. Just on the other side of the ‘civil right’s’ cultural explosion. Charlotte schools were integrated while I was in middle school. That meant that people of color were ‘bussed’ in. “From the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, Charlotte was the most desegregated major school system in the country”*. It happened for us at the same time as Boston. Every spring racial ‘riots’ sprung up at my school.
There were African-Americans in my elementary school – a very few. One student – I think his name was Charles Sadler, and everyone called him Charlie Brown. I invited him to my 3d grade birthday party. My parents did not know he was black. My Father made him leave and was angry at me for inviting a N*. He called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - “Martin Luther Coon”. I’m sorry for even writing that. But that is what I grew up with.
The riots during my High School years were violent and bloody. My high school was half black and half white. Almost exactly. It was the white students that rioted – tearing up the buildings, ripping wooden steps off the trailers, throwing bricks through windows. I was standing beside a ceiling high window, having been physically jerked in there by the Spanish teacher, while the fighting was going on. A student beside me was hit by a brick and glass and we were told he lost an eye. We had police with riot gear stationed on all the hallways. We were on the CBS national evening news for a week.
I never got it. I now know it was systemic racism.
I was elected the senior class president. The close runner up was a black woman named Cynthia Washington. I remember refusing to take the position unless we could be co-presidents. I did not remember this until she wrote me on Facebook in 2010:
“Reaching out to say hello. Do you recall our campaign for class president and you won? Then you graciously appointed me as your Co-President! I think of that experience as one of my life's most memorable acts of kindness. I'm not surprised that you are a minister and psychotherapist. I'm sure you're still creating memorable experiences for those under your care. Peace & Blessings Cynthia McMurray”.
I do not say this to pat myself on the back. I did not protest enough. I was not anti-racist. I was quiet too many times. I was too scared to be counter-cultural. I did not integrate. I am not proud of the kind of white person I was. I am trying to learn to be a better one now in my 60’s.
I was involved in a racial protest in Cumming, Georgia in 1987, not a year after my daughter was born. I was on staff at a Presbyterian Church in Sautee/Nacoochee Georgia. My counseling mentor and a good friend that helped me get a job in Georgia tried to have a Brotherhood March on the weekend before MLK day January 17, 1987. They were stopped by the Klan. A few days later, there was another try and the sheriff and handful of peaceful protesters were pelted with bricks and stones and had to be rescued. The next weekend 15,000+ people descended on this tiny town that had a sign on the city’s edge warning blacks to not be there after sundown. People from everywhere.
I arranged for a bus to take church folks ‘down’ to the march. I had to hire a black owned bus company from Atlanta because no white company would help us. There were 17,000 armed national guard troops lining the march route. A little boy, perched on his father’s shoulders had a sign pinned to his hat saying “I hate N*’s”. Among those marching were: Coretta Scott King, Hosea Williams, former Senator Gary Hart, Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Representative John Lewis, the comedian Dick Gregory and Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP.
I became a reluctant minister, a psychotherapist and I worked as much as I could for people with disabilities. I worked for LGBTQ+ folks – particularly gender. I was involved with Habitat for Humanity and got to meet Millard Fuller and Jimmy Carter.
I tried to raise my daughter without the overt systems of race and religion. We lived in what she would later call Whiteyville. The environment was what I called the Golden Ghetto. In the 90’s - white privilege in my area was off the chain. Newt Gingrich was our representative and our cultural decline into polarization began.
I tried to ‘expose’ my daughter to the varieties of human existence. We went down to Auburn Avenue and walked. We saw the birthplace of MLK when she had a book report on him in the third grade. I brought people with mental illness and developmental disabilities into our world. I told her she needed to take off two years and get out of where we lived, preferably out of the country before or after college. I told her this was not the real world. Nor were the values around us to be admired.
She ended up going into the Peace Corps and serving in Peru after college. Later she married a man who happens to be African-American and adopted a child. She is a school counselor in Florida.
So, those are my thoughts on oppression and privilege during my life. I had privilege and many around me were oppressed. I did not do enough to combat the evils of culture.
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