Otherness
Every now and then in life you meet someone you just know is going somewhere. Someone who is smart and talented and has the ability to talk with anyone. Someone, who with all those gifts, doesn’t have an ego that gets in the way.
I had lunch with a person like that last week. I’ve known him for nigh on to a decade now. He was in his late twenties when I first met him, a few years out of undergraduate school and in his first job as a junior staffer to a powerful congressman.
His boss sent him out from Washington DC to help me in my first Congressional campaign. The young man happens to be a talented vocalist, among his many other gifts. He sang in the black churches of East St. Louis, Illinois, where he met with black clergy to encourage them to support me.
His talent and hard work had a great deal to do with my election to Congress in 2012. Upon my election I asked him to become the Legislative Director in my Washington DC office. A more prestigious title, but for a far less powerful, newly elected congressman, than his current boss. With the concurrence of his boss, he came to work for me.
In the two years, I served in Congress, I found his advice on legislation invaluable. When I wanted to know if a speech rang true, I read it to him. When I lost my temper over some idiotic congressional powerplay, the staff sent in Willie to calm me down. His quiet, calm, rational demeanor never failed to bring me back to center.
When Willie came to tell me he wanted to go to law school and would be leaving my office, I asked him to consider going to my alma mater, Southern Illinois University. Although accepted to Howard University School of Law, probably the most prestigious historically black law school in the nation, as well as his home state law school, the University of South Carolina, after meeting the Dean and touring SIU, he elected to attend law school in rural southern Illinois.
After working a few years here in the St. Louis area, he’s now back in DC. Back with the third most powerful Democratic Congressman’s staff. Back as senior advisor and legal counsel. He’s clearly a young man on his way up in the world.
As we sat at the sidewalk café table in the summer sunshine of St. Louis’ old town Soulard district, Willie reminisced about his days at Southern Illinois University School of Law. He told me one of the reasons he went there was the study abroad program the school offered. A program he hadn’t been able to take advantage of as an undergraduate. “I loved studying abroad in Botswana and South Africa,” he said.
“It was the first time in my life, that I didn’t feel I was “other”.”
His calm, clear statement has bothered me ever since. Here is an American for generations, middle-class, professional, educated, successful, telling me that because of the color of his skin he felt like an outsider until he left his country.
That my friends is what white privilege is all about. I grew up working class. I grew up moving from town to town as my dad sought employment. I worked as a janitor and a dishwasher and a weld grinder while working my way through college and law school with the help of the GI Bill.
I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished but I don’t suffer the illusion that I did it on my own. Even as the new kid in town, I never felt that I was “other”. My whiteness blended right in. I didn’t have to go to another continent to feel that I fit in. I could change the clothes that were too worn and the work boots that were out of place, but I didn’t have to change the color of my skin. If the muffler on my old car was too loud, I only had to worry about a ticket, not a trip to jail or worse. That my friends is what white privilege is all about.
It hurts me that Willie said that. Sometimes truth hurts. It hurts me as an American, as a veteran, as a person of faith, that a good and kind and wise beyond his years, young man would have to say that. He is not “other”. He is one of us. My wife and I love him as we love our other two sons. There is no “other”. We are all children of God.
(C) William L. Enyart
Reflections from the River
www.billenyart.com
E-mail: bill@billenyart.com
