By Teegrey

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My participation in the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage was one of those transformative experiences of a lifetime. The pilgrimage was a year-long journey retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade in the U.S., the Caribbean, South America and Africa.

The biggest change I experienced because of the Pilgrimage was that my eyes were opened -- WIDE. One African American member of our group said that there is not a single day that passes when she doesn’t have to deal with racism. I thought I had a good understanding of racism and oppressions before I went on the pilgrimage. But through that journey I realized that I had only understood the tiniest fraction of how racism continues today. I was literally blind to it.

Now I see that blindness to racism is almost universal among most white citizens of this country. Our social system is made in such a way that whites are not easily able to become aware of racism--that is one way the unjust system is able to self-perpetuate. Systems of unfair discriminatory practices are embedded in our financial system, health care, employment, criminal laws, etc. And they just continue. That is called institutionalized racism.

Institutionalized racism is a system of unfair and often deadly treatment of people of color, while at the same time giving unearned advantages to white folk. Whites benefit when they are hired instead of a person of color who has the same work credentials. Whites benefit from getting access to financial loans more easily than people of color. A white person benefits by getting a lighter jail sentence as compared to a person of color who has committed the same crime and has a similar history of criminal activity. I am not making this up. There are statistics that prove this. (See "Race to Incarcerate" by Mark Mauer.) The above instances of unearned advantages for white people are what is called "white privilege." And since white people benefit from such a system, either consciously or by default, why would they want to change it?

Well, I will tell you why I want to change it. I see that racism harms all of us. Racism has caused divisions and separations between people of different cultures. The legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism has caused people to distrust and fear each other—some of this distrust is totally justified, while at other times it is completely unwarranted. Needless to say, this underlying distrust makes it very difficult to form relationships and build cooperative bonds between communities of different cultures or race.

How does this affect whites? Many whites live in fear of the "other." This tragic distrust was highlighted during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina when homeless African Americans attempted to flee New Orleans’s deadly flooding conditions and were refused access to certain neighboring towns and resources.

More over, to become white, many of our forbearers had to disown and distance themselves from their ethnic origins and family ties. This lack of connection to our own heritage and roots is a loss. Now, as Mass Slavery Apology says in its commitments, we see the value of transforming our identity from "white" to becoming nothing less than global citizens.