I benefited from white privilege. When my mother and I moved to Pittsburgh....(I was 13)....God provided a very modest apartment in a duplex on a street with middle income houses. The new friends that I would grow through my teens with went on to become PHDs and other professional occupations. I tagged along to a Catholic high school that to this day is considered elite. I took a bus to our graduation ceremony....there was no family present....and when it was my turn to walk up and get my diploma....there was no diploma. It was held back because tuition was not paid....(I paid that tuition about fifteen years later when I found out about all of this.) When I returned from the army....all of my neighbor friends were graduating from college....so I went to Pitt on the GI Bill. (Is that socialism?) There were no drugs in the neighborhood that I grew up in....no arrests....and no shootings. The mayor lived across the street....my friend's father was the chief of police. If there was any of the....lower class....on the street that I lived....it was me.
There is not one scintilla of difference in human beings....in their skin color or ethnicity....as to intelligence or love or potential. We....the white population....built this city....this city on a hill....so to speak. The urban centers are of our making....as we may have worked or occasionally went for entertainment....to as the Petula Clark song so frolickingly invoked....Downtown.The average middle income house....as the decades passed....grew bigger and more beautiful. We all have fancy cars today. We all go on vacation or vacations....but the city remains the city. We love the black athlete that stars on our college or pro football teams....we just would rather that blacks do not live too close....or not too many of them anyway. Do you object to what I just said? You must not remember how Trump campaigned hard....particularly in Florida....telling mothers....very forcefully.....that they should vote for him....because he will keep low income housing away from their neighborhoods. That is racism folks....and we evangelicals struck out on that one!
Let me ask you....for God's Word asks this question....what do you have that God did not give you? At that elite high school that I went to....we had to read the 1961 classic....Black Like Me....where a white man had his skin color temporarily darkened....and then just went out into southern society. I haven't forgotten the message and ugly truth from that book....but we in evangelicalism today forgot where we came from....spiritually....we lost our first love....and we went hard after the way of Balaam....for profit.
