In Response to the Last Post

So on my last post (that I post on 4 different sites....you gotta reach your audiences!) I talked a little about some frustrations with some of the issues discussed in BUILD and I got responses on a variety of sides.

Since I got such response I want to expand on it further. I didn't notice it at first, but I definitely came to the BUILD class with my own set of prejudices, as everyone has them. I still don't want to share my personal story in BUILD cause I think the class is past that point and it's not needed, but I want to explain some things here.

Marcie and Val made some interesting points on one end of the spectrum and I really had to think about things. I think my post mainly fell into the realm of middle-class and poverty, and I didn't really mean it to relate to racial tension. That being said, racial tension was the reason why I was frustrated with BUILD. I kind of had to see some things that were a sort of cycle.

I was very excited about BUILD at first and then I think I gained a chip on my shoulder because it reminded me a lot of things I heard growing up. I went to school in a county where I was definitely a minority (PG county connects to Southeast DC). There was such a race factor and from many white viewpoints it felt like the "race card" got played a lot. It was almost like if you looked at someone the wrong way race was a factor-on both sides.

One time in my job I got in a spat with these people who came through my drive thru (how absurd does that sound??) because I was way more stubborn than I ever should have been and neither party was patient with the other. Nothing we said had anything to do with race, but they alluded to my manager that I was racist, which he dismissed because I worked for him and he's African American. When I heard that I was accused of being racist because of what happened I was dumbfounded. I really don't think race even entered my mind. But what happened was it caused me to continue in my thinking that there were so many people in the world ready to accuse one another of racism.

I guess in BUILD my defenses went up as soon as I got an inkling that someone was trying to blame me for social injustice. Where I thought the class would mainly deal with social classes, it dealt with race too and I guess I thought that would be easier to separate. Maybe I am more at fault than I'd like to think. But as everyone brings a personal story to BUILD, I did too. I can't blame everything on my environment, so I know I have a lot of learning and growing to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I want to learn and grow and I'm in that process.

I guess one thing that made me cynical is that talking about race relations isn't something new to me. In middle school we were already talking about it in class because it was such a big part of the environment. So I guess in BUILD I wanted to see social justice as a poor/rich issue and not necessarily as a racial one. I wanted to explore economic factors and not simply race factors. But maybe you can't separate those.

I don't think I even knew I still had those feelings from the past until the BUILD class because in past urban ministry experience I've had, economic status was emphasized and not race. I wanted to think that social justice could be dealt with without race, but I'm now seeing that maybe it can't. If that instance at work seemed to cement some things in my mind and that was just one instance, how many instances have other people had to cement things in their minds? Of course my perspective was shaped by many years of observing race relations and not just that instance at work.

So now I see that one can't really be entirely objective in the class. I thought I could and I can't. Just as I grew up with a certain perspective of race relations that had time to take root in my mind, so did everyone else in the class.

So we all have our own stories. I thought other people were the defensive ones, but it seems that I am even more. Feel free to comment cause I want to learn.