“Whites
are accountable for understanding how racism advantages them at the expense of
others . . . Whites have the responsibility to interrogate and resist whiteness
as a social location of unjust structural advantage . . . Exploring the
ubiquitous, and for whites, often invisible, aspects of white advantage is a
lifelong task of gaining religious awareness and engaging moral action. I call
this awareness religious in light of the fact that the world religion comes from the Latin religio, meaning “a moral bond.”
Awareness of white privilege is religious because it deals with discerning how
intimately world-minority white affluent people are bound up with the
world-majority communities of color. However, the quality of this binding together
of overprivileged and underprivileged groups is unjust, demanding of us both
resistance and transformation. Interdependence should be honored within just or
right relations . . . The deepest possible religious awareness is for us to
‘feel our own flesh as vital and vulnerable’ and to be aware of our dependence
on others.”
Mary
Elizabeth Hobgood, “White Economic and Erotic Disempowerment: A Theological
Exploration in the Struggle Against Racism,” in Interrupting White
Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence, eds. Laurie M.
Cassidy and Alex Mikulich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007), 40-41.
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