Dear friends, I struggle with gratitude. Not the part about seeing how my life is overflowing with love and beauty and abundance, though. Hopefully, if you know me at all, you know that I know these things, deep in my heart.
I struggle because gratitude is an insufficient response to a world that is unjust in my favor. “Wow, life is unfair! That’s so fortunate… FOR ME.” Nope, not how I wanna be.
Bear with me for a sec; I promise this is not belated humblebragging. In 1988, our little local newspaper chose me as Outstanding Female Student of the Year. Senior class photos of me and the Outstanding Male on page one, interviews with us and our teachers, the whole Hometown Proud deal.
But what made it extra hideously embarrassing was the pull quote they used, from the part where I was talking about planning a career in some sort of public service. In big boldface type there in the paper: “I have an appreciation for what I have and others don’t.”
Every day for the rest of the year, the group of boys who always sat at the table by the entrance to the high school cafeteria would sing-song that quote at me as I walked in for lunch. I cringed and tried to look like I didn’t hear them.
Guess what, I’m 50 years old and still cringing. But for very different reasons now.
I was 16 then, so I should probably go easy on myself, but I really wish I’d wondered sooner: Wait. Why is that, anyway?
Why is it that I have so much? Why is it that “others” don’t?
I have always worked hard, definitely. But I won’t say I worked hard for everything I’ve got, because it just ain’t true. From my first breath, I started off in a situation and identity that is advantaged in our society. Every single day, I continue to benefit from those advantages accruing over time.
For the Me of the four-plus decades during which I simply took the world at face value — my world that I experienced as a privileged educated middle-class abled straight cis white woman — there was an obvious solution. I would Help People! Yay!
And helping people felt great. It WAS great! I did a lot of good. Really, I did.
But I didn’t do as much good as I could have, because I didn’t truly see what I was trying to fix. #Spoileralert, it wasn’t the people my nonprofits worked with who needed fixing. It was the larger unjust systems that we, as white-led organizations, failed to even perceive around us.
There is a meaningful difference in the strategies you’d choose for “people from this community need help getting jobs” versus “employers discriminate against people from this community.” Both can be true at the same time, of course, and both are worth addressing, but only one of those truths points in the direction of an actual solution.
As a result, we — including me — weren’t able to really aim our efforts in the most effective directions. And we — including me — did some harm along the way.
Okay. When you know better, do better. Right?
But for the Me of today, that raises the stakes on the question of what is better ENOUGH.
If I’m operating in an ethical framework of “yay, I can use my good fortune to help people,” that’s easier to limit. When I start seeing “uh oh, it’s not good fortune, it is UNJUST,” that’s more of a problem.
It’s not merely that I have things and others don’t. It’s that people such as me — including me — have things that were stolen from others. We have these things BECAUSE they were stolen.
And yet. You don’t see me giving away all my worldly possessions to good causes, do you?
I hope you’re not reading in the expectation that I’ll tie up this ethical quandary with a satisfyingly tidy answer. If it exists, I don’t know it, so I sure hope you’ll put it in the comments if you’ve found it.
Here’s what gives me some comfort, though.
- I used to think that the way the world works for me was just the way the world works. Now I know: it doesn’t, AND I want it to. I believe that my version of the world ought to be available to everyone.
- So the corollary to #1 is, I belong as part of “everyone.” My refusal to take rest or to feel joy or to provide for my own future wouldn’t make things better. It might look like a form of equality in the literal sense, but it wouldn’t be equitable or just. It’s not fundamentally helpful to enforce an edict of “nobody gets nice things unless everybody gets nice things.”
To some extent, I recognize that that‘s sophistry. I could give far more than I do — certainly financially — and I would still be richer, safer, and more secure than the vast majority of humans who have ever trodden this earth.
But this Thanksgiving day, it’s the best I’ve got to work with so far. A way to keep learning, keep trying, keep working. Keep moving onwards. ❤️
Note: Written on the lands of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, Pennacook, and Agawam people. 🙏