“The problem with the world is that we draw our family circle too small.” – Mother Teresa
On many nights, my almost 6-year-old daughter comes in the middle of the night to climb in bed with me. I have a big bed so it doesn’t bother me. From what I can tell she isn’t scared or having trouble sleeping, she’s just woken up and decided that it would be easier or more fun to go back to sleep in my bed. Then we came back from a vacation where we’d shared a bed she wanted to spend that first night home starting out in my bed. One night stretched to three nights and then it happened – the night where she didn’t even ask before she assumed she could start in my bed.
In less than a week a privilege became a right, or at least an assumption. I think about this as I grapple to identify my white privilege. It’s something I’ve had for my whole life so naming what is so endemic to my experience is difficult. Until I start listening to experiences of black people and realize that the access, the safety and the assumption of equity I have had are privilege. I’ve heard from other white people that they have worked so hard for what they have and don’t doubt that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t privileged. I’m starting to see that it’s so many things in the day-to-day experience that I don’t have to worry about so that I can just focus on education and work that is privilege to name just one. I don’t imagine that my ponderings are changing the world or that I’m even getting it right. But it seems like I have no hope of being a part of changing this unfairness or the dialogue unless and until I see the system. The way I figure it’s like in relationships, good happens when we are willing to look at what isn’t working and start to say “this has to change” and the more people, the better it goes.
I asked my daughter what her brother who sleeps in a crib thinks about her getting to sleep in my bed. She said that he probably doesn’t care. I told her it’s not fair for her to start in my bed if he doesn’t too. Today I can, at the very least, start the conversation for this next generation to understand that unless everyone gets it, it is not something we can assume, it’s a privilege and we have to figure out how to share it.