Reel Urban News Special Report
By: Josphe Evans, Ph.D.
I will not tell you what I was wearing –at least not exactly. It was clothing with social indicators but subtle and not intentional – at least not consciously. I was finishing an early morning exercise routine. Afterward, I walked into a coffee shop and immediately stood in line near two people talking about their common experiences.
The man who was thin bodily, and his hair was gray and thinning, but his thinning hair was far less than my own. He was sharing with a younger woman (but not that young) about his daughter who had graduated from NYU’s (New York University) law school. He claimed his daughter was a third-generation graduate from the premier institution. White privilege was on display always and everywhere and everywhere, always at the same time. This recent lived experience was a constant reminder of the income and wealth gap in this country.
It takes income and wealth to attend that kind of law school for three consecutive generations. Three generations also points toward social location and advantages and in this instance an unashamed arrogance. The man with the thin body, blew his own horn. He ignorantly boasted. With his hot wind, he filled a braggadocio hot air balloon!
Jesse Holland has informed the chattering classes that black folks know about white supremacy’s unfair advantages. Its exists and continuous in morphed forms of oppression (i.e., slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, lynchings, riots), not to mention the current metamorphous – Project 2025. Holland writes in the Nation (2016): If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years. Absent significant policy interventions, or a seismic change in the American economy, people of color will never close the gap.
I had read Holland’s article several times, I have used it in my own written work, I have taught from it to seminary classes and church groups. I know Holland’s article influenced my responses to this particular conversation among the chattering class. Still for a moment, I permitted their “privilege of ignorance” to roil in me toward disdain. While thinking about it, another woman took notice of my cap with a baseball team’s logo (my social indicator). She was friendly. Formerly, she lived just outside Washington, DC (on the Maryland side). She relocated to Berkeley to teach at the University of California of Berkeley. I did not share my reasons for being there. She did not ask. Later that morning, I entered a local grocery store. With me, I had a bag. I had bought something earlier and I was still walking toward the end on foot. I had nowhere to place the bag. I had to take it inside the store with me.
Why did I even think of that? Double consciousness I suppose. I have witnessed whites eating grapes while waiting to pay for their grapes and other groceries. I had done nothing of the sort. I paid. I paid and began to leave when the young black security guard who wanted to look into my bags. The reason given was I had a bag that was not in the grocery store’s inventory. People use those kinds of bags to steal groceries she explained. My social indicators did not register – they did not matter in her social location – what mattered? My hat did not matter.
Joseph Evans is the J. Alfred Smith Sr. Professor of Theology in the Public Square
And the Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing and Restorative Justice, Berkeley School of Theology, Dr. Evans is an Editor-at-Large for ReelUrbanNews.com.
