We Don't All Live In The Same America

What we need to know if we are going to understand the culture war.

This week I am offering a series of posts hoping to guide us to a place where men (especially us straight White guys) can learn some valuable lessons from women and other historically marginalized communities.

In my previous post, I offered an analogy of the overall experience. It might be worth reading that post first, even if this one can stand on its own.

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Welcome to East St. Louis

As a college freshman, I had to read a book on educational inequities in America. It was a strange book to read at my deeply conservative Lutheran liberal arts school and, as far as I know, it was the only time this adjunct professor was invited on campus.

While I don’t remember much from the book, I still vividly recall reading the chapter on East St. Louis. I remember reading about children being taught in schools that were falling apart around them, where the heat didn’t work in the winter and AC failed to temper hot and humid midwestern summers. And that was before we got to the quality of teachers the inner city draws, the instability of families, and so many other factors that would work to keep kids trapped in poverty.

Ultimately, I found the descriptions within it so sensationalized that I wrote them off. I couldn’t believe that there was anywhere in America where a child was expected to learn in those kinds of conditions.

Inequality And Me

But something was going on under the surface. I grew up a staunch believer that we live in a meritocracy and that outcomes are entirely about individual responsibility. I thought we all had an equal opportunity for self-determination. In the end, if the book were true, I could no longer believe that.

To probe even deeper, if we didn’t operate on a level playing field and things like where and how you grow up have a significant outcome on who you become, then it could challenge my own performance-based identity.

Was I a 13-year-old Eagle Scout because I was just more driven and devoted than all my peers, or maybe it had something to do with how engaged my parents were in Scouting? Then again, it might be an outcome of my performance-driven mindset that left me perpetually desperate to prove I was good enough.

Were my grades and academic performance a consequence of hard work at my end, or did growing up knowing I’d have a roof over my head, food on the table, and a mom at home give me a significant leg up, not just on the kids in the inner city, but the kid at the desk next to me. Or maybe God just blessed me with a double dose of brains.

In the end, anything that potentially undermined the idea that it was entirely because of my hard work and performance was dangerous because that was the basis of my identity and self-understanding. And if I didn’t have that, who would I be? What would make me significant?

So in my desperate attempt to matter, I created the categories of hard workers and the lazy,¹ then rejected a book I read that brought the category of lazy into question.

Unraveling My World

Eight years passed before I enrolled at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis to begin my training as a pastor. As part of our program, each student was assigned a fieldwork church that we would attend on Sundays, teach Bible studies, and preach our first sermons. As fate would have it, I was assigned to Unity Lutheran in East St. Louis.

That first Sunday morning driving to the church broke my heart. I passed one of those dilapidated school buildings I read about eight years earlier. I began to wonder if that book I’d read understated reality because the truth was so unbelievably abhorrent.

That morning, I met several neighborhood children who would come to church on Sunday mornings because adults there would pay attention to them. A few of them had parents who were strung out, but most were single moms working two and three jobs just trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. In either case, they were functionally absent parents and these kids suffered both academically and even more so emotionally.

Over the next three years, I spent hours every week in inner city St. Louis and East St. Louis, hearing the stories of the people who lived there. We worked side-by-side on neighborhood projects and wept together at funerals. We worshipped together and broke the same loaves of bread. In the process, I got a small taste of what it was like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. It changed the way I see the world, and yes, it unraveled my own.

Looking Back

Ultimately, this whole experience served as a blaring horn letting me know that I had a huge blindspot regarding the American experience.

And it’s not like I was some “bad person” before. I didn’t disparage the homeless or those on the margins, I’d done plenty of donating, food distribution, and service projects focused on helping the less fortunate, but I always kept the “us and them” dynamic that was blind to the fullness of their experience.

They were the poor people who needed my help and it made me feel good to help them, but at best, I saw them as those who needed my protection and provision. In other words, I treated them like children when, in fact, they are people systemically denied the same opportunities I’ve experienced.

This doesn’t negate the need for personal responsibility, it simply puts it in context. What would they have done given the opportunity? We will never know.

Those years in East St. Louis heightened my awareness around other possible stories of systemic oppression. It forced me to realize that just as I had no idea what it was like to be poor, I also didn’t know what it was like to be Black in America, or Latino, or a women, or gay, or a combination of the above.

It also compelled me to start trying to learn more and unpack the history that brought us to where we are today.

But rather than engage with this kind of honest assessment of the world, our society pushes us into a culture war with all kinds of identity and status-washing designed to make both sides believe they are correct and that the other side is wrong.

Unironically, the people who do the identity-washing are also the ones doing the status-washing. Who are they? The straight, White, elite men … although the word that matters most is elite.

I’ll unpack that in the next post.

1. Politicians have done the same with makers and takers, although in our current cultural context, I’m pretty sure the makers are the workers and the takers are capital … but that’s a post for overcoming societal obstacles.