I’ve been thinking about my privilege.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been thinking about the privileges I have as a straight, white, affluent, Protestant, male.
I recently saw a tee shirt, those blunt billboards of our culture’s convictions, that said across the front: Make a Friend Who Doesn’t Look Like You... You Might Change the World. I nodded with a self-satisfaction built on decades of making friends across racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, economic and religious boundaries.
Good job, Rick, in living out this tee shirt’s admonition.
Ah, but self-congratulation quickly fades. In the weeks that I’ve been pondering this quote, its message flipped around on me. I now believe that the main reason to spend time with Friends who don’t look like me is not to understand them but so that I might better know and understand myself. What if I can only see myself clearly when I stop staring at my face in a mirror and instead look to those who do not look like me, to help me understand the privileges I have as a straight, white, affluent, Protestant, male?
I was never cast out of my family because I’m straight; I don’t know a straight person who was. I’ve never had to fear my colleagues, my social peers, or the police because of my sexual orientation. My earliest gay friends, whom I fell in love with in the 1970s, were mostly closeted; they lived in fear of the police raiding their bars or parties, of homophobes beating them, of being outed at work, of being ostracized from their families or social circles.
After these terrible eighteen months we’ve spent with the Covid virus, I’m reminded of the last plague I lived through, in the 1980s. Once the media discovered what they labelled This gay cancer, it took four years – let me write that again, FOUR YEARS – for our president to speak the word AIDS in public. Dozens of my gay friends were among the over 700,000 Americans who have died of AIDS; many in the Evangelical community – I’m remembering you, Jerry Falwell – called this plague God’s Vengeance on these men for the sin of being gay.
I was married (to a woman) in 1963, and I didn't officiate at my first gay marriage until 2008, in a narrow California window before the Supreme Court opened the national door in 2015. Again, it took this experience of their struggle for marriage equality to help me realize what a gift it was that I could assume my right to marry as a given.
I’ve never been arrested because I am white. None of my ancestors were hanged or shot because they were white. I’ve never endured racist slurs, been rejected for a job, been refused membership in an organization, or had someone walk across the street to avoid me because I’m white. Though I have immigrant ancestors, none of them arrived chained in the hull of a slave ship.
I grew up in a blatantly racist family in a blatantly racist culture, so I have tens of thousands of memory-brain-cells awash in racist assumptions. On those occasions when these jump into consciousness, I’m stunned and ashamed. Long ago, I convinced myself that intimate friendships and copious reading and a deep desire to cleanse myself of these impulses would, in time, nullify them. Well, not yet. So I’ll keep at this redemptive process, looking to that moment when these ancient memories don’t rise up in me.
I've never worried about my children's or grandchildren’s access to excellent health care. When one of our own kids was sick, we knew the emergency-room doctor from church, the pediatrician was a family friend, and the longest we ever waited to see a doctor was about fifteen minutes. We lived in safe suburban neighborhoods with good public schools and even better - and more expensive - private ones. We spent summers on Balboa Island in Newport Bay, or took our children to Paris to watch the French Open. That's privilege. It doesn't mean all of life is easy for us, or that we haven't worked hard to create this life. It does mean that we're able to use our affluence to solve or avoid problems that the great majority of people cannot buy their way out of.
I’ve never been rejected from any organization because I’m a Protestant. Jews are still restricted not only from clubs and organizations but from social circles many of their neighbors keep exclusive. Muslims are routinely suspected as terrorists, their attire mocked, and their children threatened. My wife, who is a lawyer, represented three Sikh children whose father was murdered after 9/11 because a white man mistook him, in his Sikh turban, for a Muslim. In the America where I grew up, and still today, Protestant Christianity is thought of as the norm while other options are somehow not just differences, but deviations or abnormalities.
In 1960, one of the critiques of John Kennedy's bid for the presidency was that he might be more loyal to the Pope than to the Constitution. We hear these same ideas today about the loyalty of Jewish Americans to Israel, or Muslim Americans’ loyalty to Sharia law, as if not being a Protestant opens your loyalty to America to suspicion. This conflation of American-ness with a specific religious identity speaks to how deeply ingrained this prejudice is.
I’ve never been sexually harassed in public or private, and I’ve never been afraid to park in certain areas, run for exercise through certain neighborhoods, or go to certain shops, theaters or restaurants on my own.
A few years ago I saw a television news report in which a young woman walked in the afternoon through a major city’s downtown streets. She wore a black tee shirt, black jeans, black shoes, and her only accessories were two black microphones which she carried discretely, one in each hand. Several yards in front of her on the crowded sidewalks was an unnoticeable film crew video-taping her walk.
Over the course of an afternoon, dozens of men whistled, shouted cat calls and made crude sexual gestures toward her. She never looked toward them nor spoke a word. On two occasions, young men walked close beside her for several minutes, offering her their phone number, commenting on her looks, and as their frustration at her silence grew, making derogatory comments. She never responded in any way to either of them.
Later that evening I told my wife and our daughter about this video, and the next day I talked about it with four women colleagues from my therapy practice. Every one of them confirmed that what I described was not only something they knew about but something they had experienced. Among them, these six women had been followed and threatened while running (one of them rang a stranger’s doorbell and asked them to call the police), shoved into a doorway on a city block and groped, had a man approach from behind on a crowded sidewalk and reach up and grab her crotch, been mugged on a dark street in a college town. They know where not to park, which streets are not safe to walk, day or night, and to go only in pairs or groups into certain stores, restaurants or theaters. My male privilege is not just the absence of such harassment, but the fact that I had never been aware enough of this central experience of the women in my life to even have a conversation about it.
Make a friend who doesn't look like you...You might change the world.
This is wise counsel, and I want to continue to seek out such people, to understand them better, and to relish the changes such inclusive relationships can ignite. But then there is this new and difficult task: to see myself in the context of my privilege as a straight, white, affluent, Protestant, male; to appreciate the vast divides that separate my life from the majority of other people; to educate myself and engage in the hard conversations that I've avoided until now.
The point of this search is not to lead me to some dramatic display of public guilt or shame, but to take the kinds of public and personal actions that acknowledge that the world we inhabit is unfair because we have made it so, and leaves to those of us who have been born to privilege the obligation of making it more just.