Last week I participated, along with 40 other North Park students, on a trip of racial reconciliation known to the North Park community as Sankofa.  Sankofa has taken on many identities over its 13 year existence, with discussion topics ranging from “angry Black people” to “White guilt.” However, I will not fixate on either, and will, instead, speak on the topic of my trials and tribulations in regards to racial reconciliation.

I will be honest with you, I have felt the burden of responsibility in my stomach ever since I got off the bus.  I am burdened because I (as well as all Whites) must claim that we have knowingly benefited from a White privilege that began back when America was being founded.  Everything that America has laid claim to was either stolen from its native people, or forcefully produced by a large slave population. Though this may seem shocking to some, for every Black person that has been oppressed by racist America, this fact has been as much a part of them as is the hair on their heads.

Though I have no control over others, I still bear the markings of the system that continually oppresses minority groups in America.  Make no mistake, I am and never will feel “guilty” for being born White.  It is my Christian duty, however, to repair the damages that have occurred because of this system that I regularly benefit from.

Some of you may be asking, “to what system does Andrew refer to, and how can I really be benefiting from it?”  I must answer by stating that the system, which was made by a White often “Christian” majority, has imposed on society the view that African slaves (now African-Americans) were and continue to be inferior in every measurable way to Whites. It began with scientists, politicians, and ministers who used their discipline to exact dominance over the “impure,” and “savage” African slaves.

Though White ownership of African slaves is long over, the system of dominance continued through the historical Jim Crow era of America, and it still continues today. Some members of the trip were “shocked” to hear that atrocities continue daily for minorities within the United States, and it took watching several documentaries to reveal this truth.  Personally, those documentaries (When the Levies Broke and Tulia Texas) stirred within me the responsibility to claim my privilege even more.

Is it that difficult to see the disparities between Blacks and Whites in education, affordable health care, unemployment, and the prison system? No, truthfully it is not.  It is however, easily ignored by those who choose not to see it, or willfully disregard it as “not their problem.”  I know that I, for one, am guilty of this.

It is far too easy to be cliché in this North Parkian climate of “social justice meets Jesus freaks,” yet it is my responsibility to take ownership of what I have said, and hold those accountable who I know are ignorant of the privilege they benefit from every day.  I leave it at this, I am as prone to err as anyone else, yet with the knowledge that I now have it would be a slap in my Black friends’ faces if I choose to remain a “White moderate.”

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