What the Beloved Community is

It is a concept embraced by, but not created by, Dr ML King, Jr, an idea that in the radical community of people inspired by God (and for King, the words of Jesus), there is no hate, no poverty, no separation between what we can be and what we are. In this wild inclusivity, a person doesn't just look out for himself but for everyone, knowing that all people are also him.

Here are some examples. In this first one, from 2017, it's the efforts, first of the two men who lift up a woman who is nearly on her face in the final yards of a half-marathon in Philadelphia (!). They each take an arm, effectively ending the times most marathoners care about and need to keep up if they want to submit for longer marathons, and walk her together toward the finish. I think it's clear that for her, it isn't the time that's important, it's the completion that's important. But finally her legs are just too weak and buckle and it's at this point another man, yards ahead, stops, turns around, and scoops her up to carry her there.

In the second, from earlier this year, a teen waitress is rewarded for helping a customer eat his breakfast. It isn't the proclamation by the town's mayor of "Evoni 'Nini' Williams Day" or the gratefully accepted money to help her with tuition that's an example from the Beloved Community because there wouldn't be a reason there for those things. It's in the simple, unselfconscious act of Evoni Williams, at the customer's request, of reaching across the counter and cutting his meat for him, the way billions of fathers and mothers have done for their children. It isn't an infantilizing gesture and Williams doesn't seem embarrassed by the request. Presumably, in her mind and in Adrien Charpentier's mind, it is what people ask for and do in the Beloved Community.

Real-life Where's Waldo

This is an excellent video and explanation for both defining white privilege and explaining ways to use it. If Brittany Packnett is emotional, remember it's her life she's talking about.

It shouldn't be so hard, in 2018, to explain what this privilege is, but it shouldn't be so hard to see how poorly Donald Trump is administering the country, and that's something at least the same number of people refuse to understand. Too many whites focus on the word "privilege," thinking of themselves or their friends, and in their arguments focus on what they can't do. But it's not about what white people can or can't do, it's how they're seen by people with authority.

For better and worse, I often think of this in terms of what I have gotten away with in the past. My years of shoplifting and taking drugs and being drunk in public, and how I was aware I was likely not to be seen as someone who was doing those things. Most black or Hispanic men of the same age could not do so since their simply being there puts the shop owner or cop on a higher alert. It can be a function of just being aware there's a person whose color doesn't blend in with the shades surrounding him. As Packnett puts it, White privilege isn't a blame or an excuse but "a lens to understand how race works in this country, where white people are the default and everyone else has to adjust." It's a condition of the privilege of being seen as just like everyone else, rather than being seen as an anomaly. The same is true of people in wheelchairs or blind people: they stand out by virtue of the majority around them being "normal." For many in authority, it's a real-life game of Where's Waldo. The game is made more serious for both authority and the person singled out because at times both person's livelihood or life is at stake.

But that same normality means it can be valuable to use in bringing attention to how people who aren't white, or aren't capable of blending into the background, face issues the majority are unaware exist. I think here of my old teaching practice of blindfolding students and leading them around by a rope to make them aware how they default to the use of their eyes and not their other senses. In doing so, their writing could be opened to allow in a newer, richer way of describing the world around them. Similarly, being aware how someone benefits from the way he sees the people surrounding him can open him to a newer, richer way of interacting with them.