Almost a year and a half ago, I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and a minor in Creative Writing. It took me eight and a half years, and it was sometimes hard to find the motivation to finish. My job at the time only required an Associates or equivalent number of college hours. I had learned everything I needed to learn. There wasn’t any reason to finish other than to get the credentials.

I knew I wanted to take a year off before deciding what to do next, and at the time I didn’t see any good argument for getting a Master’s degree. As far as a career goes, there’s no job I want that requires that credential. I like what I’m doing right now, and while I may want to teach someday, that sounds like a good thing to pursue a few decades from now.

But over the last few months, I’ve been evaluating what exactly it is I like about my job. Which parts are my favourite, and which do I dislike? In reflection and talking with a few people, I think the parts I like best are those that involve project management. I like identifying a need, and coming up with a solution for that need, and piloting the idea, and putting together a system, and taking something from beginning to end.

I feel like I manage our small projects pretty well for the Open-Access Labs, but when friends have asked me for project management advice, I’m at a loss. I don’t know how to come into the middle of someone else’s project, I don’t know the right questions to ask, and I don’t know how to really help someone. In talking with other project managers, though, I’m fascinated by the stuff they do.

No spoilers here, but today I remembered a scene from the first episode of season three of Game of Thrones. Jon Snow is asked what he wants to be, and he says, “Free.” The person asking him tells him he’s lying and says that what he really wants is to be a hero. And I think I’m the same: I want to be a hero. I want to help people who need help. I want to help non-profits get from point A to C, or help churches achieve their goals. Over the last few years that I’ve been helping Vineyard with some stuff I’ve seen that one of the major hindrances is just having someone who can handle the organization and administration and management. It might only be 20-40 hours of work to make something happen, but a church may not have anyone with those administrative skills.

And I don’t have all the skills I need to do that. If I’m really going to help people the way I want, I need to learn more. So, a few weeks ago, I met with the head of a master’s program at Missouri State University, and then I applied, and then was accepted, and last night I registered for classes. This fall, I’ll start a Masters of Science in Project Management.

At the same time, I’m going to get a graduate certificate, the Educational Technology Specialist Certificate. I’ve checked with all the departments involved, and the Graduate College, and my plans are solid. I want to help with non-profits, but I’m also excited with how this will help me manage better at work. We’re going to need more and more project management in the coming years, and that’s stuff I love. I think some graduate-level courses in educational technology will really help me with working in higher education.

I ordered my books today for the fall, saving about $140 compared to our local bookstores. It’s funny how you can save money if you have money… when I was starting my undergrad, I had to buy from the university bookstore because I needed to defer the cost. Now, I can pay for them from the checking account, but save a bunch of money in the process.

There are some other exciting things going on at work, but I really just wanted to announce that I’m going back to school. It’s flabbergasts me that a Master’s degree, which I view as so much more valuable than a Bachelor’s, will take me a quarter of the time I spent to get my BA. Two years? That’s nothing compared to what I’ve done in the last ten.

More on the work stuff in a week or two, maybe, once we get into the summer. I’ve been swamped right now and having trouble to find time to talk with people, let alone blog, but hopefully I can share more of that in the coming weeks. I’ve also had some conclusions and changes with my pen pal project and PAX and some other stuff. More when I’ve got time, hopefully not long from now.

As a motivator and a happy tradition, I’ve decided to start going to Gailey’s Breakfast Cafe the morning after doing server updates. On Saturday, I finally went to bed around 5 a.m., then woke up around 8:30 a.m. for my breakfast pilgrimage.

While I wasn’t sure I recognized her at first, it turned out I was eating at the bar next to a girl I knew in high school. Talking with her was like the blessing I experienced last summer when I ran into a different old friend at a house party. She just seemed happier, and healthier, and wonderful, and I love seeing that in people.

Last night was our 10 year high school reunion, and I had kind of expected it to be like breakfast at Gailey’s, or the house party last summer, and I did experience a bit of that. There were a couple of people who seem to be doing well, and I was glad to see them and catch up. But last night also brought back some unpleasant memories and emotions.

There was a video on loop showing us in junior high and high school, and seeing us in the atrium on the film reminded me of my times there. The video was of people drinking hot chocolate, or at a blood drive, or being excited and dancing around. All I could remember was mourning our classmates who died over the years, or walking through a crowd that at turns either ignored me or shoved and tripped and mocked me. I remember those blue benches, and crying with Matt and Christina, and standing huddled with people, none of us making eye contact after the latest tragedy.

The class of 2003 from Hillcrest went through some rough stuff. We didn’t talk about that last night, though.

I was also surprised by the level of animosity I still have towards some of the people from back then. There were people there who made me feel terrible. They wounded me deeply, over and over, and over the course of years.

A week or two ago, I was thinking about another guy from high school who probably had a lot in common with me. I kind of hated him back then because, while he was also an outcast nerd like me, he sold out and got “in” with the jocks while I stayed on the abused fringes. He spent the last couple of years of high school with the popular kids, and that just got under my skin. But when I thought about him recently, I was able to extend some grace to him. He was doing what he needed to do to survive. In a way, we all were.

That experience, of thinking about him and being able to forgive, made me assume that I’d feel the same about everyone else last night. A lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges since elementary, and junior high, and high school. Because this wasn’t just a high school reunion–there are some of these people who I’ve known a long time.

I was wrong. I guess when you get hurt that badly by someone, for that long, it doesn’t just go away. I was glad to see a few people and hear that they’re doing well, but I was more glad to leave that place.

When I graduated in 2003, I went to the all-night graduation party (I can’t recall the name of it now) with many of my classmates, and we road a school bus back to the school in the morning. I looked around the bus as we pulled up to Hillcrest and thought, “I’ll likely never see most of these people again, and I’m alright with that.”

Last night, I realized that I’m really happy with how my life is now. April and I have a great group of friends, I have a great job, and I like the people I work with and the things we’re doing. I have April. I have a home. We have money and food and a sense of security and belonging and love.

I’m glad I can be one of those people who are healthier and happier. I’ve only realized recently, in the last couple of years or so, how incredibly angry I was as a kid. I remember hurting back then… I mean, between the classmates who died by drug overdose, or auto accident, or suicide; and my niece dying; and 9/11; and the woman I loved committing suicide; and the other woman I loved cheating on me and breaking my heart; and a third woman I loved leaving me and callously ending our friendship; and dealing with being mocked and ridiculed and excluded on a daily basis… I knew I hurt. But I wasn’t able to recognize the anger until recently. And I’m healing from that. I’m way, way better now.

But there’s still some of it I’m carrying around. I kind of think I always will.

I look forward to trying to make it better for our kids, once we have some. I think I can make it better for them. I want them to live better than I did.

And I want to remember the goodness of back then too. My classmates were so happy in that video… there was no mourning, only excitement to be alive. And as I am fond of saying, “I have loved and been loved by more women than any man has the right to be.” There was heartbreak, but there was great joy as well. I found a family in the speech team. I learned a lot, and between computers and communications, the lessons in high school helped set me up for my current career. I became Christian.

I hope I can get some of those old pictures and videos. I don’t want to forget the bad stuff that happened… I want to honour the memories of those who died, and to remember the pain that we can inflict on one another far too easily. We have to learn from those experiences so we don’t repeat those mistakes. But I don’t want the bad to overshadow the good. I didn’t see much good at the time, but maybe I can find some rose-tinted comfort in the memories recorded by other people.

And Lord knows, we’re making new memories now that will outshine anything that came before.

This is a fascinating article that I recommend if you’re involved in any way with higher education, STEM, or immigration discussions. In short, we’ve been told for years that there is more demand for good STEM graduates than the United States can meet, and that our students are, on average, poor when compared with other countries. This report from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that:

1. There are more than enough highly qualified domestic STEM graduates, but
2. For whatever reason, they cannot find jobs in IT or STEM, potentially because
   1. Wages aren’t high enough and they can find a better paying job outside of STEM, or
   2. They simply weren’t hired, and meanwhile
3. The number of guestwork visas to import STEM workers from other countries continues to increase, despite #1

Within IT, what it really comes down to is that while we have plenty of people who can do the work in the USA, we don’t have people who are willing to work for the same amount of money that these jobs paid in 1990, and a lot of the jobs have dropped back to 1990-level wages… while the price of goods and services has increased (due to inflation).

I love seeing actual research and evidence on these sorts of topics. For me personally, I’ve felt that the reason companies have had trouble getting the staff they want/need is because they’ve been clamoring for STEM graduates, but then the STEM graduates apply for jobs and their communication skills are lacking…. That what the CEOs and the companies actually want are people with a strong liberal arts background who can handle the STEM work. If you look at the education of a lot of CEOs, it’s actually in the liberal arts, and so they find the STEM graduates inadequate because those graduates aren’t similar enough to themselves (the CEOs and managers).

My off-the-cuff hypothesis is undermined by this report, though, which indicates that the problem isn’t that companies aren’t hiring domestic IT graduates due to their poor communication skills, but rather that most IT graduates discover they can make more money outside of their anticipated field. (The article states that about ~50% of IT graduates choose a job outside their anticipated field while ~33% couldn’t find a job within IT at all.)

I’ve been a lot less active online for the last couple of years, and in December 2011 I deleted my Facebook account. I had grown sick of the privacy problems, and Facebook changing their policies and how the application worked without notice or documentation, and I strongly had this perception that they were selling people’s data to third parties.

Unfortunately, Facebook accounts are pretty much required for some things… for instance, we have a Facebook page for our church, and one for work too, and you need an account to manage those pages. So I created a new account, but I was determined not to “friend” people with it, and I also relegated it to a web browser I never use so Facebook couldn’t track my web browsing.

And now my 10 year high school reunion is coming up, which is all organized through a Facebook group. It has me seriously reconsidering my involvement with the social network. Their business practices haven’t changed, and everyone I know continues to hate Facebook while also continuing to use it. But I want to reconnect with some people, and the last year and a half has shown me that it likely won’t happen any other way.

So I’ve been doing a lot of research about Facebook. I’ve read about controversies and court cases, I’ve gone through their Terms of Use and some of the stuff they write about themselves, and I even searched this blog to see what I had written about Facebook in the past.

One post in particular jumped out at me. Just earlier this year, I wrote about making and maintaining friendships, and I read again about Courtney messaging people on Facebook to let them know she’s thinking about them. She lets them know she cares about them and that she’s available to talk.

I’ve been conflicted for days about this. It probably seems dumb to you, but I took an ideological stance against Facebook and how they do business, and none of that has changed. So in a sense, it seems wrong and a little hypocritical to rebuild my network there. At the same time, I’m thinking a lot about friendships and relationships and communication…

And I wonder if the end doesn’t justify the means. Maybe Facebook sucks, but isn’t connecting with people more important? It is for April, and as she and I have discussed this, that’s what she comes back to: what’s important to her is being available. She wants it to be easy for people to reach her.

I do too, and I’ve comforted myself by saying that I am easy to find online. Just do a Google search of my name… even if you misspell it, you can probably find me. But I’m beginning to think that is disingenuous. There’s a difference between being easy to track down and being available. And the latter is something that I have to communicate to people. I can’t be passively available. Instead, I need to be reaching out to them and letting them know I’m thinking about them, I care about them, and I’m interested in how they are doing.

If they live on Facebook and I have no other means of reaching them, then maybe that’s where I need to be.

I’m currently at the Springfield airport, two and a half hours before my flight leaves for Boston by way of Chicago. While I’m at PAX, I won’t be on IRC or instant messenger as much, and chances are I won’t be blogging because Internet signals that aren’t inundated are hard to come by once tens of thousands of PAXers descend on Beantown.

But I will be posting on Twitter and Google+, so if you want to keep up with me, be sure to follow me on one or both of those services. I’m going to try and take more pictures this year, since I took absolutely zero pictures last year after my failed attempt at video blogging (due partly to being unable to upload anything because, as I wrote, the Internet connections can’t handle us).

Of particular note is that I am an Exhibitor’s Assistant (XA) this year. All Enforcers have to submit an application to get in the first time, but there’s an additional app to become an XA and I’m super-excited to have been selected. I’ll be working with a few indie gaming companies to help make PAX as good as it can be for them.

The exhibitors I’m working with are:

• Outlier Games
• IndieGameStand
• Asinine Games, Inc.
• Mugen Studios
• Dinosaur Games
• Boston Indie Showcase

I’m spending my morning here at SGF researching each company to find out what they make and learn a bit about them. I’m most excited about the Boston Indie Showcase, which has a number of developers who won space at PAX because they’re just that awesome.

If I were really cool, I’d write a blog post about each company and schedule it for the future, but I think I’m just going to read about them, then try to play some SWTOR with no mouse and this MacBook on my lap. Turns out, there aren’t a lot of tables available here.

Hit me up on Twitter or G+ if you need anything. And for those of you coming to PAX, be sure to visit the Indie Showcase area and say hello!

I’m reading a book right now that talks about The Politics of Jesus, and right now I’m reading about jubilee, or the period forgiveness of debt in ancient Israel.

I know there are some fellows who are doing this on a massive scale through the Rolling Jubilee, but as I was walking across campus just now, I began to think about it on a more local level.

What if churches began practicing an annual jubilee by raising money and then paying off the debt of a member?

Come talk about it on Google+

With yesterday’s startling news that Google Reader is shutting down (startling to me, anyways, if not to others), I’ve been casting around for a new RSS reader that I can use on both my desktop and my phone. One of the services that has been highly recommended is Netvibes, and while I’m not confident I’ll be using it long-term, I did discover that it’s super easy to get your feeds from Google Reader over to Netvibes.

Step the First: Export your feeds from Google Reader

Google has a tool called Google Takeout that lets you export your data from them, but when I used this, I found that it didn’t preserve any of my organization. Because RSS doesn’t actually support things like tagging and file structures, all of my groups in Google Reader were unrepresented in the Takeout export.

This means that you don’t want to use the generally recommended method of Google Takeout, and instead you want to create what Google Reader calls “Bundles.” This is really easy–just open the menu of each group you have using the down-arrow to the right of the name and select Create a Bundle.

You have the option of naming the Bundle, which is pretty irrelevant for our purposes, so you can leave that as its default. Hit Save.

Once your Bundle is saved, you can download the OPML file created by Google. Just right click on it and Save As. Put this on your Desktop, in your Downloads folder, or someplace else that you can find it easily, because we’re going to upload it to Netvibes in the next step.

Step the Second: Create a Netvibes account

Sign up for a Netvibes account. It didn’t occur to me to document this and take screenshots until I had already almost finished the process, so I’ll rely on Netvibes themselves to provide you guidance on how to create an account

Step the Third: Add Feed to Netvibes

I liked my organization in Google Reader, so I wanted to recreate that in Netvibes as much as possible. To that end, I created a tab for each folder/group/bundle that I had on Google Reader.

Use the Plus on the far right side of your screen in Netvibes to create a new tab.

Once your tab is created, you are asked to “Enter the topic you want to track.” If you do this, your new tab will be filled with content selected by Netvibes. Instead, click “Or leave the tab empty.”

This done, you can name your tab in the Tab Options on the left. This will pop up automatically, but if you don’t see it, you can get to it by clicking the down arrow to the right of the tab name, much like we did on Google Reader. Once you have it named, you can click that same down arrow to hide the Tab Options.

We’re now ready to add content to the tab. Click on the Add Content button at the top left of Netvibes to drop down the options.

Using the Add a feed option, we’ll be given the opportunity to upload the OPML file we created earlier.

Select Import and find the OPML XML file you saved earlier. Once you have it selected, you’ll click the Import button to the right of the file name.

And we’re done! To make it feel a little bit more like home, you can switch it from the Widgets view to the Reader view up top, but the choice is yours.

I hope this helps those of you switching from Google Reader to Netvibes in the coming months. As for me, I’m testing Netvibes, Feedly, Fever, and probably a couple other RSS readers before I’ll settle down on one for good.

Let me know if you have any questions, and good luck!

Do you use a made up name for your online presence, or do you use your real name? When I got started on the Internet, back in 1997 or so, no one used their real names. Unable to think of a good handle, I was dubbed “SpiritGod21″ by a friend, based on an inside joke, and began my foray into telnet and talkers. That became my identity for a while–my email address, handle, and eventually a Geocities page all used the same name. But what worked for me in junior high didn’t work as well in college, and I began casting around for a nickname that fit my changed personality better.

This was still before Facebook, or even Gmail, and most people still used nicknames of some sort. Even our university email addresses were a semi-random string of numbers and letters at the time. So when I decided to let SpiritGod21 go, I took on a nickname also inspired by an inside joke: dmmagic.

And now it is around 8 years later. I’m still fond of dmmagic as a handle and I use it on games whenever appropriate, but Google+ and Facebook both prefer we use our real names. I now use my real name for my website, and I’m beginning to feel some internal pressure to use it for Twitter as well. Does “dmmagic” really identify me as well as “MStublefield?” I don’t think it does.

Any expectation of privacy on the ‘Net was gone a long time ago, in my opinion, and I’ve certainly got enough stuff on this site and related to all my handles that it would be quite simple for someone to tie all my accounts together through some Google searching. Using a screen name was never intended as a way to hide. Rather, it was a unique way to identify myself, and I’m not sure how well dmmagic does that anymore.

That said, I am loathe to let it go. If I change my Twitter handle, which is really easy to do and you still retain all your followers and connections, someone else might take the old one. Just like I was known by SpiritGod21 for a long time, I don’t want to lose the identity that I associate with dmmagic. I think it represents for me my childhood, while MStublefield is an adult’s screen name. MStublefield is professional and responsible, while dmmagic is fun and carefree.

My Twitter is used more for business than personal use now, though. I still Tweet stuff I find interesting, but a lot of the content is related to my job or is to connect with people in IT. For that context, MStublefield makes more sense than dmmagic.

I’ll remain undecided for at least a few more months, and probably another year or so, but I have a strong feeling that the era of dmmagic is coming to an end.

I’m loving this album.

I have Exhibitor Assistant training for PAX in less than 20 minutes. I’m super excited to be an XA this year and help make PAX better and better.

I have an awesome friend whose team won an Oscar this this year. I have another friend whose blog really inspires me academically and has been mentioned randomly in various places by various people, which indicates she’s doing great stuff. It’s neat.

I’m learning bass and stuff is going good at church. Also, I preached again recently.

I have discovered that Kamora tastes a lot like Kahlua, and it’s great mixed with a little peppermint Coffee-Mate creamer.

I have a good job and great staff and we’re doing good things.

I have a blog I can post on if I want.

I keep thinking about maybe getting a master’s and pursuing becoming a teacher, but then I work too many hours in a day and decide, you know, going home is nice.

I have a five year old puppy. She is made of unconditional love.

I have a wife that loves me and is smart and beautiful and fun.

I’m taking a trip with her to the UK and Ireland this summer.

I am fulfilled; happy; content; satisfied.

Training is starting, so I’m going to go do that now. But I felt like recording this general sense of contentment.

Within religious studies, gender studies, and probably history and political science (and others I can’t think of), the word “privilege” has come to mean “a group of people is accorded special status due to their appearance or caste.” In my culture, it generally translates to WASPs, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and in particular, WASP men. Especially WASP men who own land and have decent jobs. And what privilege gets you is a long list of benefits, such as being able to assume you are generally right, and that you’ll have food and a home, and that you can get a job, and that police won’t harass you, and that your opinion won’t be dismissed due to your gender, race, or religious beliefs.

The concept isn’t one I encountered until college, and even then it wasn’t until around my senior year. To put that into perspective, my senior year was around my seventh or eighth year of college, so we’re talking around the age of 25. April was pursuing a master’s in counseling, which features a number of classes about diversity and privilege and taking those subjects into account so you can treat people well and help them treat others (and themselves) well, and I took a class named “Women in Religious Traditions.”

I can boil that class down really quickly to: “Women throughout history have been under-reported and under-represented, not because they did not practice religion, but because their writings were destroyed, their stories hidden, and their experiences deemed unimportant.” It was a sobering lesson because, for me, it was simply something I had never thought about. Why aren’t any of the books of the Bible attributed to female authors? Why wasn’t ancient Buddhist poetry written by women published and circulated? Despite having a panoply of female deities, we don’t hear much about female followers. The class was fantastic and helped me apply the public affairs mission at Missouri State University more than any other class I took during my undergraduate career, and I came to understand what “privilege” really meant.

But when we start talking about privilege beyond the historical and the academic, and we start using it in arguments about statutory rights, access to traditions, or societal need for change, I think we diverge from the path we ought to be taking. I think this for two reasons. First, I think that when we appeal to an argument against privilege we undervalue both the “unprivileged” and the “privileged” alike. Second, I think that appealing to an argument against privilege is little more than an attempt to wield fear against an enemy.

Undervaluing ourselves and others

I recognize that I am naïve in this, but I think it important that all people are evaluated on their personal merits. I don’t want women in the workplace treated differently from men–we all have a job to do, and that’s all that matters. Our work ethic, intelligence, and creativity are not due to our gender.

When privilege is used as an argument for why someone who is consider “unprivileged” should be elevated, it borders on ignoring that person’s merits. This is one of the main arguments against affirmative action, and drives at the need to take race and gender out of the equation. It is certainly possible to use the argument that, due to a lack of privilege, a well-qualified individual is being passed over or ignored–their opinions are discarded, their writings go unread, etc.–and if such a thing happens, it is terrible. But I think we need to instead focus on the quality of those writings and opinions rather than focusing on the question of privilege.

Even as I write it, I recognize that this is naïvely ludicrous. I know. You don’t need to tell me. There are still a lot of people out there who think women are biologically inferior, or that blacks are, or that the Irish are. You cannot appeal to reason in those cases. If they will not be reasonable about merit, though, they’re certainly not going to be reasonable about gender or race. It would probably be more productive to find more reasonable people either entirely elsewhere or who are superiors to the unreasonable so that the unreasonable can be dealt with.

To put it bluntly, I think that we should listen to what everyone has to say, regardless of race or gender. We should not, however, take the next step and conclude that what a person says is worthwhile just because he or she comes from a traditionally unprivileged or under-privileged group.

In addition, by appealing to an argument centered on privilege alone, we can generalize against those who are privileged and assume very nasty things about them. We can undervalue their reasonableness, their compassion, and their open-mindedness when we paint everything as black and white, us vs. them, one group or caste against another. Appealing to privilege as an argument just muddies the water. It confuses us about why something is or is not worthwhile, and it confuses us about who is or is not worthwhile.

Wielding fear like a hammer

Several years ago, I had a night class about Martin Luther King Jr. I don’t recall the full title, but ostensibly we were to be studying his life and the lessons he taught as well as their affects on our society. What I got instead, during the first 4-6 weeks of the class, was our professor’s ranting and ramblings about how the white man is keeping people down. Our professor was a black male, and the class roster was made up of me and one other white man, and about twenty women. The lectures often left me uncomfortable because they featured stories of the professor being oppressed by white men, and I didn’t always feel they were fair. He used those incidences to generalize and state that this was a societal issue. Obviously, racism and oppression are society-wide things, but in his specific stories, I could see the possibility that maybe his negative experiences were due to people reacting to him personally rather than it being a race issue. But I’m fine being challenged, and I recognize challenge as an opportunity to grow, (plus I needed the credit hours) so I went with it.

Eventually, though, there was a story that was presented in such a biased fashion that I had to beg the question. Is it possible that maybe he wasn’t given this job because it was in a field completely outside his education and experience? It was obvious from the story that this was the case, even with his reporting, but he was set on it being a racial issue. I didn’t attack, but I just asked if maybe that was possible in this instance.

In reply, I was pointed at, yelled at, and told that I was personally responsible for the oppression of all blacks and women. Because of my white privilege, I couldn’t see it, but it was my fault, personally, that these things happened. I was personally perpetuating it and oppressing him and all the ladies in this classroom.

The other male student wilted at this. I was shocked and hurt. The next day, I dropped out of college and didn’t return for 9 months.

This is the road we walk down when we start to use the concept of privilege in an argument. I think it is deceptively easy to begin overgeneralizing when we talk about privilege because there’s a lot we can’t see when we look at someone’s gender or race. I was talking with a fellow about this one day regarding a diversity seminar and he stated that the entire experience made him feel like he was being pointed at for oppressing blacks because he was white and male, but what was ignored was that he was essentially a first generation immigrant who had been homeless and had seen his share of oppression. I have spoken with a doctor who is white, male, and wealthy, but felt oppressed because we live in a very Christian and conservative part of the country and he is an atheist who is afraid to voice his beliefs. I grew up non-Christian, and I was beat, threatened, and shunned throughout elementary, junior high, and most of high school. But you don’t see those things when you look at me. You can’t tell.

When we say that a person’s statements are less relevant because they are “privileged,” we discount the experiences they have had that make them unique. We can’t know who is and is not privileged. When we say that a person’s statements are more relevant because they come from an unprivileged or underprivileged group, we are telling them that the main reason they matter is because of their race and gender, and we tell others that the main reason we should listen to them is for the same reason.

What’s more, we make people afraid. A lot of people these days are afraid to say something that might possibly be construed by anyone as being racist, or sexist, or anti-something. I know a lot of “privileged” people who work very hard to try and keep their place in society from influencing them a great deal. One of the things about privilege is that it is part of the air we breathe–it’s hard to notice and impossible to keep its influence from us 100%. But by just looking at someone, we can’t know where they are on that path of self-discovery and learning, and we can’t know how much they are working to treat others well and actively striving to take everyone equally and as they are.

By appealing to privilege, we appeal to fear. We use it to keep certain people quiet, and no culture, society, or fellowship can truly move forward with that as a foundation. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, he didn’t say that black people need to take power and white people need to lose power. He said he wanted equality.

Privilege is, by its very nature, not equal. There are privileged groups and unprivileged. It is defined by way of comparison. When our arguments rest on privileged vs. unprivileged, we are building them on the wrong desire. We should be seeking more equality, not a swapping of power levels. And we cannot achieve that by pointing fingers, shouting down, and causing fear.

Instead of appealing to privilege

I try to live according to the teachings of St. Paul and Jesus Christ on these things. I’m not great at it, but I think there are two relevant lessons here. First, that we should strive to make every word edifying to others. Second, if someone will not listen to us, due to racism, sexism, or a perception of privilege that they feel elevates them such that they can ignore others, we should shake the dust from our feet and leave them. I’m not advocating ignoring them–we should speak out about oppression and oppressors–but we need to speak to the reasonable and rational, and perhaps to society as a whole. We must confront evil, but we mustn’t stoop to its level by using the same weapons with which it acquits itself. It is important to extend grace and attempt to help others learn and grow, but if their hearts are hard and they absolutely refuse to listen, that is their choice. It is the choice that God gives us all.

We should all strive to listen to people because they are fellow human beings and their experiences and words may have relevance and import. We should then gauge their words based on the situation, our knowledge, and our best ability to decide whether it is relevant and worthy. Each individual is just that, a unique individual, and we have to take them as they come. We cannot generalize a race or a sex or a gender, and we should neither elevate nor discount based on those criteria.

If we can do these things, and more of us do them in greater and greater numbers, then we will find that we need not discuss privilege except in a historical context. As we educate people, invest in them, and show them they are worthy as an individual, society as a whole will improve. Not overnight, certainly, nor in a generation. But perhaps in three, or five, or ten more generations. I can see improvement in our society generationally, and I am hopeful that the trend will continue. I believe that we can become better.

To continue the conversation, comment below, and you should also check out Krista Dalton’s post, White Male Privilege: Why I’m Scared of the Witch Hunt, which inspired this blog post.