Privilege

Jesus spoke a lot about privilege. His greatest sermon started off with the line, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and then follows a list of blessings on those who reside on the margins of society. He often talked about those who are first in the world - and those who are left behind. For example:

People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God.  Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last (Luke 13:29-30).

One way to think about race in America is to think about it as a system of privilege, created by people to get more power and wealth.

In brief, biologically, human beings are not different from each other; culturally, there are plenty of differences. The Bible uses the praise ‘image of God’ to describe our similarities and the word ethos to depict the differences in culture and ethnicity. But when it comes to race, well that’s a different thing. As capitalism rose in influence during the enlightenment, race as an idea was created to justify using some human beings for economic gain. It was claimed that white human beings were superior to others, and this was based on appearance (not ethnicity or the ‘image of God’) and for the purpose of economic and political gain (think slave labor, voting rights, land ownership, etc. - see the reading below on the use of the U.S. census, for example).

Because race is inherently about privilege, when Jesus speaks about ‘the first and the last’ (and all those other aspects of privilege he addresses regularly), it’s very biblical to apply these teachings to race as well.

How have you experienced privilege and/or the lack of privilege in terms of the color of your skin? Ask Jesus to help you think about his teaching that the first will be last and the last first along the lines of race. What does that mean to you? How

A Short History of the U.S. Census and Race as Privilege

We see our nation’s struggle to define race in the changing categories used when a national census is conducted. In the first US census in 1790, racial categories included free white, free other, and slave. 

Thirty years later, racial categories were expanded to include free colored and foreigners (not naturalized). Every ten years following 1830, our country has struggled to adjust its racial categories to match the growing complexity of our people groups. By 2010, the census revealed the absurdity of the fundamental category of race. In that census, race, ethnicity, and nationality were combined into a single category of race.7 The 1850 census took place at the height of the American slave trade and in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, which called slave masters to free their slaves. The census that year sought to capture the realities of an increasingly complex human landscape. 

According to a report on Census.gov, the 1850 Free Inhabitants schedule listed races as white, black, or mulatto (mixed). The schedule had a separate question regarding place of origin, and there was a completely separate schedule for slaves. The slave schedule delineated race using two categories, black or mulatto. Chinese men from Canton Province began arriving in the United States to work for the Central Pacific Railroad in 1850. By 1868, twelve thousand Chinese men worked for the company. The 1870 census responded by adding Chinese to the list of races. The category incorporated all people of Eastern descent. In this year, the census incorporated the category Indian for Native American but only counted assimilated peoples living in or near white communities. In 1890, eight years after the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the census delineated between Chinese and Japanese. It also attempted to capture the complexity of mixed-race heritage by adding quadroon and octoroon to the list

A review of the 2010 census shows the categories Hispanic, Latino, and Spanish ethnic origin, with an option to write in one’s nation of origin. The census lists “racial” categories, and respondents choose one or more categories, which were white, “black, African am., or Negro,” “American Indian or Alaska Native—Print name of enrolled or principal tribe,” Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, “Other Asian—Print race, for example Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on,” Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, “Other Pacific Islander—Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on,” “Some other race—Print race.” Why does the federal government ask for the nations of origin for Asian and Latino people, tribal affiliation for American Indian people, and include “African American” (a specific ethnic group within the racial category “black”) but does not ask “white” people to identify their ethnicity or nation?

It's because of power. The only racial category on the national census that did not change from 1790 to 2020 was “white.” In the United States, whiteness is the centerpiece around which all else revolves. That was an is intentional. 

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin argued to the British ministry that due to the shrinking percentage of white people on earth, America should be kept an exclusively Anglo-Saxon colony to protect the race. In the years following the establishment of our nation, the founders followed Franklin’s lead and white became the identity of power.

The core lie of Western civilization is that God reserved the power of dominion for some, not all. Since the Enlightenment era, that lie has been racialized. With the founding of our nation, racialized dominion was made law with one resounding message: God reserved the right of dominion for white people and no one else

-        Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel