CLGS

• CEO reviews two equally qualified candidates and hires the man, not the woman.
• A local church committee turns down a possible new pastor who seemed a good match for the congregation, but is blind.
• Judicatory delegates promise their votes to a gay candidate, but the numbers never add up.
• A plumber directs his comments to a 50-year old housemate rather than to the 70-year old owner of the house who had called him.
• A middle-class women's support group says, "Well, we tried, but Doris just doesn't fit in."
• A lesbian coming out group shuts out Paula, a transexual lesbian who used to be Paul.
• A white congregation says "We're open, but the African-Americans in town just won't come to our church."

The Double Taproot

"Why do people discriminate against other people?" That is a major question
asked of program staff as they travel across the country doing welcoming and reconciling ministry work. Why do people discriminate? What are the roots of people's oppressive behavior? As I probed the answers, I began to doodle. Roots are underground, unseen for the most part, tangled, tenacious. Roots grow in a soil of certain characteristics. Roots emerge into specific kinds of plants. Root systems have taproots and subroots.

The root system of oppression has two taproots. The first taproot—prejudice—is fed by a whole subroot system of feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and actions (illustration 1). These subroots include fear and mistrust of those different from us and the blaming of them for things that really are part of us. Digging deeper down the taproot of prejudice, we find that fear, mistrust, and blaming are fed by ignorance of who the "other" really is and is not. Digging even deeper, we uncover subroots of hatred all tangled up with subroots of violent actions. Finally, we come to a root of anger. These are subroots of prejudice familiar to most of us working in the welcoming church movement.

When I tried to determine what feeds the anger, I discovered a second taproot—privilege—which is connected to prejudice (illustration 2). The anger feeding prejudice also feeds privilege. What feeds the anger of prejudice is fear of loss (or perceived loss) of control of one's life, a fear that comes from the system of privilege.

One of the primary subroots that feeds privilege is power over others. A "power-over" position of dominance is conferred on us (by society or its institutions such as the church) due to some advantage we have from our gender, orientation, race, age, ability, or class. Power-over is an unearned advantage. Having such unearned power, we are fed by fear; we might lose our power. We are also suspicious of others' motives and abilities to wrest power from us.

Other subroots of privilege include unearned advantages, feelings of superiority, and actions which maintain that superior status. Although by our actions we may appear to feel superior, underneath we may fear the loss of power and benefits that go with it. Because of these fears, we exercise our privilege by excluding others or somehow denying them equal privilege and benefits. We demonstrate our power by patronizing some, dehumanizing others, controlling still others. We shore up our power by controlling decisions and decision-making processes and by controlling money, real estate, and goods. All of these behaviors are designed—consciously or unconsciously—to help us maintain our own privileged status, whatever that happens to be.

Connecting the Roots

Now I rapidly began to connect the
two taproot systems (illustration 3). For example, the ignorance of prejudice is fed by a dehumanization subroot of privilege. The mistrust of prejudice is fed by the suspicion fostered by privilege. The patronizing attitude of someone who is privileged is fed by fear of loss of control and in turn feeds the dehumanizing process which feeds ignorance and mistrust and fear. Tangles and more tangles, which erupt in different forms of oppression—"weeds" of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, classism.

While we may see the common root system of these products of oppression, it is more likely that we are caught up in the struggle to dismantle one specific form of oppression—the one closest to our own experience. We sometimes try to prioritize forms of oppression in an effort to get others to join our cause: racism is the basic oppression; no, sexism is basic; no, heterosexism is basic; no, classism is basic.

Yet some of us cannot separate the effects of the root system of oppression. A poor, Native American gay man who is hearing impaired simultaneously experiences the effects of prejudice and privilege in the form of classism, racism, heterosexism, and ableism. An old, black, blind, poor, lesbian woman potentially experiences six different kinds of oppression in our society because of who she is: ageism, racism, ableism, classism, heterosexism, and sexism. Their experiences cannot be separated out and prioritized since they are the experiences of whole persons. These persons will refuse (rightly) all demands to separate out any aspect of their oppression from their whole selves.

Because of who they are, we do not have the luxury of working only on "our oppression." If we are working for the full liberation of all people, we will want to make the connections and to stand in solidarity with all people, working actively and simultaneously against all forms of oppression. For, ultimately, every form of oppression comes from the same two taproots: prejudice and privilege.

Our focus in this issue of Open Hands is on understanding privilege, the taproot much less known and acknowledged.

Who Are the Privileged?

Our social system confers privilege
on some of us by freeing or exempting us from something. As a white person, I am freed from having to learn in detail the customs, values, and realities of other races of people in order to survive among them. As a lesbian, however, I am not exempted from the need to understand the heterosexual world in order to survive within it. If I do not conform, I reap a host of penalties, from loss of career to threats against my person. As a person without physical disabilities, I am freed or exempted from having to plan ahead to be sure I will be able to get into a building or have access to bathrooms, pay phones, drinking fountains, or usable work or leisure equipment. As a woman, however, I am not exempted from the need to understand our male-dominated society. If I do not learn to operate within, and remain generally subservient to, male ways of naming and male styles of leadership, I will be penalized.

Who are the privileged ones? In the United States, as Audre Lorde has said, it is the "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure" person who is most privileged. Each of us is gifted with privilege—or threatened with vulnerability to human rights violations—according to how closely we fit this norm.1 (See "What is Your Risk Factor?", p. 7.)

Rights vs. Privileges

Not all privilege is harmful. Some
privileges are really basic rights which need to be seen as "unearned entitlements" available to all.2 These include such rights as health, well-being, a decent education, safe neighborhoods, clean water, breathable air, enough food to eat, shelter, a livable wage, the pursuit of happiness, loving relationships, and being treated decently by others. Be clear: these are basic rights, not "special rights." Those of us who enjoy these rights as privileges and deny them to others find ourselves in the group called oppressor.

Acknowledging Ourselves as Oppressors

Are you saying, "Now, wait just a
minute! I'm not an oppressor. Those people in the illustrations at the beginning of the article are not oppressors. Oppressors are people like Hitler, dictators in Central America, Soviet communists taking over a country, or the Klan."

If this is your response, you are not alone. Most of us recoil from naming ourselves "oppressor." Oppressors are usually defined as those who keep others down by severe force. It is this image of oppression that leads us to think of Hitler or the Klan. However, oppressors are also those who unjustly use their privilege or authority to deny equal access or benefits to others. These people may act with intention, motivated by ignorance, religious belief, or fear and anger. Or they may act without intention and without thought. An oppressor is both Hitler and the CEO who chooses the male candidates over equally qualified female candidates. An oppressor is both the Klan and the lesbian coming out group who excludes a transexual lesbian.

Given this definition of oppression, chances are we all are oppressors of somebody. The biases with which we were raised, the beliefs we were taught, and the privileges we enjoy because of who we are (and the power that comes with those privileges) almost guarantee that somewhere, sometime—maybe often—we will use authority unjustly. No matter who we are. Having advantages, and the unearned authority that comes with them, puts us in the potential pool of oppressors of other people who have fewer advantages and less power.

We may also be among the oppressed because society denies us basic rights and discredits our earned authority based on some aspect of who we are. And we may be part of the solution because we are actively working against prejudice and oppression. However, if we glide over the fact that we are oppressors because of privilege conferred on us, we are in danger of missing part of the "big picture." We stay mired in romantic (liberal and conservative) notions of diversity that conveniently give us permission to retain our own privilege and to hoard our power. For example, we will be in danger of supporting equal access to jobs only as long as it does not affect our own status or job security. We will refuse to see that if jobs are to be equally accessible and if unemployment is to be spread equally across race and gender, then fewer white men will hold top level jobs, fewer white women will hold middle management jobs, and more white people will become unemployed. Once we see how we participate in economic oppression—and if we decide to do something about it—we will make ourselves vulnerable in the job market, competing equally for jobs. We will risk losing out to a woman or someone of another race without calling it "reverse discrimination."

Likewise, if we skip over understanding ourselves as oppressors in the church, we are in danger of missing the whole point of ministry: being in ministry with those whom we may have oppressed. Once we see the unjust use of authority in ministry—which is fed by privilege and power and erupts in oppression of others—we no longer only minister to others whom we feel are less than we; we become willing to be ministered to by those who have been marginalized by our unearned privilege.

If we are to value human differences, untangling the form our own privilege takes is where we will need to start—no matter what our race, gender, age, orientation, class, ability, or religious beliefs. In the rest of this issue of Open Hands, writers explore specific forms of privilege as a beginning step toward untangling roots of oppression and moving toward valuing human differences.

Notes

1. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: Crossing Press), p. 116.

2. Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" Peace and Freedom (July/August 1989), p. 11.

About the author

Mary Jo Osterman, Ph.D., is editor of Open Hands and a freelance writer.