I have friends from all over the world, and we love each other as we are. They tell me they feel our sincere mutual respect and friendship regardless of our skin colors, nationalities, gender, who we love or who we worship.
But — but — friends who belong to groups I cannot join remind me that I am not capable of fully understanding their life experiences and therefore am not qualified to be in their shoes no matter how much I want that.
I will never fully understand what it’s like to be a criminal suspect simply because of the color of my skin. I will never fully understand what it is like to walk through your own neighborhood and be told you don’t belong there. I will never fully understand what it is like to be paid 20% less just because of the chromosomes I carry. I will never understand someone insisting God hates me because of who I love. I will never know what it is like to have white immigrants destroy my nation with disease and violence and force us from our ancestral homelands to places they would never live. I will never understand what it is like to be born into abject poverty in a nation where getting ahead is nearly impossible.
My friends lovingly but forcefully remind me I have no right to tell them how they should react to the situations they deal with because of the group they were born into, because I will never be like them, as much as I want to be.
It is true that I can imagine, exercise empathy and listen with my whole soul as they explain their feelings. But, in the end, I will leave that experience behind and return to my group. No matter how powerful the experience, I only live it for a limited time, while my friend lives it from birth to death.
If we as a nation are going to discuss these issues effectively, the dialogue must be owned by the members of that group, not by people who can never be a part that group. The problem must be defined and the solutions crafted by the group living the experiences.
We can, and must, sit with and be with them, walking with them through their experiences, but we are on thin ice when we tell them how they should feel or react. The role for the rest of us is to patiently allow this process to occur, support the solutions put forth and do everything in our power to get those solutions implement in a permanent way.
Until the beautiful day arrives when differences will be celebrated without any hint of judgment, when each and every member of the world family feels loved, respected and dignified by everyone around them, until that blessed day when the group we are born into that matters most is simply the human group, we must trust, respect, love and support each other as we work through what it is to belong to a group we irrevocably joined simply because of the characteristics of our bodies at birth.
Alan Jones
Alan K. Jones, Salt Lake City, has passively benefited from being a white male since birth. Raised in Utah, he has degrees from UCLA and Dartmouth and has written “The Poor in the Scriptures, An Exploration into the Meaning of Poverty and What We Should Do About It.”