We Can't See It Because It Isn't Us

My grandma passed away recently.  As I was making the 1200 mile drive to her house, I had a mix of emotions.  I knew that Grandma was ready to go and while I was happy that Grandma was no longer suffering, I was dreading the task ahead of me.  I knew that I was about to walk into the middle of some high drama.  To say that my mom and her brother have never gotten along would be an understatement.

You see, there's always been this thing in our family between the boys and the girls.  My grandma clearly thought that boys were superior to girls.  It was very obvious to me as a child and it became more obvious to me the older I became.  My grandma treated my uncle like he had hung the moon. She treated my Mom like she had the plague.  My uncle's son was treated better than my Mom's sons...just because he was the male child of the male child.  Now...my uncle and my cousin will swear to you that they were never treated any differently.

As I was travelling across the miles, I kept wondering how my uncle and cousin could be so blind to what was happening.  I was wondering how they could go through life and pretend like the female members of the family weren't treated like "less than" for our entire lives.  Did my cousin not see the times that he got to go out in my grandpa's fishing boat all alone while I was up in the house being taught how to "walk like a girl"?  Did they not see that the girls were always told to clean the house and do the dishes while the boys were outside playing with their "toys"?  Did they not understand that when my grandpa died, they got trucks, tractors, tools, and guns and my mom got her dad's driver's license?  I was pondering all of those things when it finally occurred to me why they didn't understand.  They could never see it,  because it wasn't happening to them.  The girls were the ones feeling the pain.  The girls were the ones feeling slighted.  The girls were the ones who felt like things were unfair.  The girls were the ones who had to stop talking when the boys walked into the room with something to say.

When I finally got to my grandma's house, I tried to have a discussion with my cousin to help him see that maybe his perspective on things was a little off.  That maybe my mom wasn't being greedy...she was just demanding for things to be fair.  Try as I might, I couldn't convince him....and I realized that I never would.  The injustice wasn't happening to him.

I remember standing on the front porch of the house that my grandpa built, thinking about this new realization.  I thought growing up that the boys were just jerks, but I realized that they had simply lived life through a different filter.  Let me be clear, I think my uncle is just a jerk but I think my cousin just never understood the favor that he was receiving.

So anyway, I was standing there thinking about the boys seeing life through their filter and as clear as day, God showed me that this is also what is happening with white privilege in our country.  We see people who don't share our skin color shouting from the rooftops that they want to be treated fairly but try as they might, they can't convince us...because the type of injustice that they are suffering isn't happening to us.

Since then, I've had the same realization about all of the injustice that is happening in the world. When we see injustice, we need to stop wearing our privileged filter and start seeing things as they truly are for the people who are suffering the injustice.  How would I feel if I got pulled over simply because I had blue eyes?  How would I feel if I didn't have clean drinking water simply because of the country I was born in?  How would I feel if I knew a cop was more likely to pull the trigger because I had blonde hair?

Just because a particular injustice isn't happening to you, doesn't mean it isn't happening.