Relinquishing Privilege ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 5, 2023
I wasn’t sure that Darren Walker still had a job. After I finished reading his opinion piece in the New York Times, portions of which Pat just read, I looked him up on line to see if he was still the president of the Ford Foundation. After all, he had just published such a provocative piece about the role of philanthropy, and the income inequality experienced today in the United States. I could easily have imagined him being called into the board room the morning after the Times piece dropped, and told that it was time for him to go home and spend more time with his family.
But rest assured, Darren Walker is still president of the Ford Foundation, and I find that hugely reassuring. He has gone on to write a book that continues to examine the rise of income inequality and what can be done about it. And what seems clear is that traditional philanthropy, or charitable giving, is simply not adequate to counter the structural divide that continues to grow between the wealthy and the poor.
We see this in the concentration of wealth among fewer and fewer people in the United States. And we also see it around the world as more and more people find that the climate crisis impacts their daily lives.
The first question before us, then, is this: have we reached the limit – the effectiveness – of traditional generosity? If the answer is ‘yes’ – and it appears to be – then the country and the world are being called on for a systemic response to income inequality, and to the climate crisis. Charitable grants, given piecemeal, are never going to repair a system in crisis.
And then the next question we need to consider is this: what are those of us with ample resources willing to give up?
“You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?…
And what is fear of need but need itself?”
Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable? (Khalil Gibran, “On Giving,” in The Prophet.)
Guarding our resources for fear we may need them tomorrow.
Ultimately, what we see when we look closely is that much of human behavior comes down to a choice between a worldview of abundance and one of scarcity. In fact, managing scarcity, studying scarcity, is cited as one of the purposes of economics. (https://www.aeaweb.org/resources/students/what-is-economics)
Those of us raised in Western cultures don’t really question this orientation; this emphasis on managing scarce resources. Like racial and economic privilege, it’s just part of the air we breathe, part of the water we swim in. We ask ourselves frequently if we have enough. Enough money, enough food, enough housing. Too often, we are unsure of what enough looks like, or that we have enough. It’s an uncomfortable question.
And so, to avoid trying to look at ourselves too closely, we ask ourselves if others who have less are deserving before we offer any charity, any generosity. Often, we decide that they are not worthy.
I remember when I really grasped that narrative. In the course of relief trips to the Gulf Coast, I discovered that in Louisiana, land was disappearing at a rapid rate, being submerged under the Gulf of Mexico. Since the 1930’s Louisiana has lost nearly 2000 square miles of land. This is largely due to decisions of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and their system of levees, and due to pumping by oil companies that causes the land to sink, a phenomenon known as subsidence. And yet, in conversations about how to preserve the homelands of the local populations, especially local indigenous people, such concerns were often dismissed almost with a wave of the hand – a response along the lines of “Well, they shouldn’t be living there anyway.” As though they weren’t there first. But that narrative, that somehow these people had made a mistake and landed in the wrong spot, gave people with power permission to ignore what was happening.
And I learned that giving of myself, far outside of my comfort zone, would not make a difference. Charity would never repair this.
Of course, behind efforts to ignore injustice there is always an economic calculus, based, again, on scarcity. What would it cost the taxpayers to correct the levee system along the Mississippi River? What would it cost the oil companies, and their shareholders, to pay damages to people whose land is sinking underneath them?
Too much, we think. Too much. And the folks affected can just move to the nearest city, and find jobs, can’t they? Because of the way our economy works, based on commodities and competition and scarcity, we don’t consider the intangible losses: of a way of life, of ancestral land, of language and folkways. Those intangibles don’t get factored into the bottom line.
Darren Walker wrote, “I do see progress. I see business leaders … acknowledge that we conduct our daily work in a system built on unfair incentives. This system puts the interests of capital over labor, while it compounds privilege at the expense of opportunity.”
He went on, “The boardroom elite are beginning to recognize that these unfairly structured incentives have grossly distorted our economy. I see an evolving understanding that our twisted economy is an existential threat that has pushed our republic to a breaking point.” (New York Times, “Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege?”, June 25, 2020.)
Mr. Walker’s words: ‘privilege over opportunity’ really opened up my thinking, and gave me context for what is taking place in our economy and in our national government. What we are seeing today, as the country seems to be splitting in two, is an ever more frantic attempt to preserve privilege.
When you look at American society today through the lens of scarcity vs. abundance, you can see it everywhere. We see it in the refusal to teach the truth about the history of Black and indigenous people in this country. We see it in gerrymandering Congressional districts and restrictions on voting: the continual effort to interfere with voting rights. We see it in the academic world, with gigantic donations to colleges and universities to ensure admission for some prospective students. We see it in taxation privileges. We see it in the refusal to stop emphasizing coal mining, or fossil fuel drilling.
This is scarcity thinking. It’s taking action to preserve and protect what we have, because we don’t think we’ll have enough. We treat justice as though it’s a pie: if you take a piece, there will be less for me.
Justice is not pie. Offering people more rights doesn’t diminish your own. It just creates more rights for more people, much like lighting more candles from one candle produces more light.
And how about you: do you approach life seeing its abundance? Or it’s scarcity? To establish fairness and equity, and enough for all, what are you willing to give up?
How about air conditioning? Flying? Driving everywhere?
How about mortgage deductions, or rental subsidies?
How about the majority status of white people?
Perhaps a better question than ‘what are you willing to give up’ could be: what do you really need?
Much will be asked of us all in the future. The time might be rapidly approaching for a sea change in how we view economic matters, how we view the function of our economy. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the botanist and indigenous author of Braiding Sweetgrass, urges us to remember an older system, called the “gift economy”. Rather than looking at the economy as how we manage scarce resources and commodities and capital, a gift economy sees wealth as having enough to share. In a recent essay she tells the story of an encounter that a linguist, Daniel Everett, had while observing a hunter-gatherer community in the rainforest. A hunter had brought back a large animal, much more than his family could eat. And so the family invited everyone to a feast. Daniel Everett was concerned: after all, they could dry or smoke the remaining meat to save for later. He asked the hunter why they wouldn’t try to store it. “Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter. (Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022. (https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/?fbclid=IwAR23Bo9Xq2eAC1-S__E-24PC5RJ1WM83XYUNj_Bt1IVEzt5MBDXbyz6ng7g)
In a gift economy, older than capitalism, wealth is measured by whether you have enough to give away. And what do you receive in return? Relationship. Again, what is gained is the intangible that never appears on a traditional balance sheet. Caring. Connection. Joy. Perhaps the things we need most.
“And there are those who have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.
There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.” (Khalil Gibran, “On Giving,” in The Prophet.)
My friends, it is hard to think about our future. The turmoil we are experiencing today in so many aspects of our daily lives is a sign of the enormous and consequential changes that we will be facing as we try to imagine the future and our place within it. But today, this hour, is an invitation to think deeply about generosity: to reimagine what generosity means. What do we need to live well? How much is enough? And can we see the abundance that surrounds us, and be mindful, and be grateful?
