Imagine you walked up on a group of children playing kickball. After watching the game for a bit you notice that the rules don’t seem to make any sense. For instance, one child scores and their team doesn’t get a point, while the other team gets two points when they touch home plate. It looks like stealing a base is illegal for this team, encouraged for the other. You can’t make heads or tails of it and would ignore it as silliness if not for the fact that all the rules seem to favor one team over the other, and the children on the losing team are truly hurt by the results.
If you had a say in how that game was constructed, I bet you would work your hardest to create fairness. Rules would have to be changed, the scorekeeping would need some supervision, etc. The entire game as the children had been playing it would be reformed in favor of a better, fairer playing field.
Christian, I’d like to ask you to help me rewrite some rules.
I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that our nation’s history is filled with regular and systematic unfairness. Might cause more trouble if I say that this oppression has been built into the institutions, laws, policies, etc. of today. The length and depth of our country’s barriers to certain people is beyond the scope of this blog. To sharpen the focus a bit: when I write about oppression in public schooling it’s usually through the lens of race and class.
You are a stakeholder in a game that punishes and rewards people for things outside of their control. Why, then, do I regularly find that my crowd (white, evangelical Christians)—even when made aware of the injustices—is hesitant to ask for rule changes?
Neutrality is not peace
“Why is this guy spending this education/religion blog talking about systemic racism” you might be asking yourself. My ultimate goal for this writing is to spur you to some kind of action, and you’re more likely to act if you think something’s wrong. Only the sick need a physician, after all.
Political action sits in a weird space in the evangelical mind. I saw an interaction on Twitter (X?) where a conservative believer bemoaned Minnesota lawmakers passing a law to provide free school meals to all children, and people asked him what Jesus would do. His response? Something to the effect of: “He wouldn’t petition the Roman government to increase taxation.” He has a point: Jesus calls His followers to a Heavenly kingdom and has much less to say about civic advocacy. But consider that this same commentator is also a stringent opponent to abortion—in practice a huge expansion of “Rome’s” authority. He is not the only Christian who is selective in their support for government intervention—I’m willing to believe this is the median belief of white evangelicals.
So maybe my church isn’t fully opposed to the idea of the government as a tool for justice. Now I’m asking that we look at other areas as well.
I said earlier that I can’t use this blog to fully explain systemic racism but what if we just took a quick peek? How about the fact that on average Black families have 1/8th the wealth of white families in this country. My grandfather built generational wealth by becoming a printing company president and then starting his own business. He did this in Jim Crow Georgia, while similarly-talented Black men were kept from the same resources that eventually secured me in the place I am today. There are Black people smarter and harder-working than me with a literal fraction of my wealth for no reason other than I was born white. This is not a stretch, how else can you explain such a huge discrepancy in Black and white wealth?
Poverty and race are tightly connected in this country, and poverty is a millstone around the necks of Americans. People with masters degrees born into families in the bottom 10 percent of income are more likely to be unemployed than high school dropouts who have parents in the top 10 percent. Poverty is a curse that stresses you out, attracts predators and literally kills. We have become far too comfortable with poverty being the mark of people of color, and then doing nothing to either remove the Scarlet Letter for everyone or even just decouple income and race.
But it’s just so complex!
Some folks will hear my spiel on housing policy, environmentalism or early childhood education and just throw up their hands with a full-body, “I dunno!” It can all seem too much to process. Without complete understanding, it’s easier to fall back onto what you know. But what do you actually “know?” Before the fall of Roe v. Wade, Christians willingly argued that the status quo was violence. Abortion is complex and personal and anyone who thinks it can be “solved” by making it illegal is selling you something. To wit: Jerry Falwell pushed abortion as a way to get Christians to become a voting bloc when racial segregation became an unwinnable issue.
I’m not here to argue that racial and economic equality is easy, but rather that it is necessary. For too long we have allowed one political party to use abortion as a complete stand-in for “support for the vulnerable.” If you’re thinking here, “oh no, Stephen’s trying to get me to vote Democrat” ok you got me. KIDDING! I can expand in later posts, but suffice it to say that there’s lots of wiggle room within parties to support new initiatives if the political will exists. I’m much less attached to party than policy. Whoever you vote for should push policies that reduce human suffering for all. What if a strong welfare state, criminal justice reforms and, yes, public education are issues that could help change some rules to balance the playing field?