The Temptation of Comfort

Strolling along the seaside town of Sai Kung, Hong Kong recently, I had a significant conversation with two of my wife’s cousins, both in their early 30’s. I have been visiting Hong Kong with Yee Lam since the handover of the colony from British control back to China in 1997, visiting with these girls since they were young. We used to visit every two years, but four years have gone by since we last were in Hong Kong. We were talking about how much has changed in both our countries, and our hearts, since we had last talked face to face.

During the final days of our last trip in 2014, the Ferguson uprising against police brutality began. I have immutable memories of sitting with my wife in our hotel room, watching lines of police officers in riot gear march against angry protesters on CNN.

I have immutable memories of sitting with my wife in our hotel room.

I wondered what had happened in my country. I wanted to get back to the USA. I wanted to try to do something, or at least be with my multiethnic church family back home to be with our friends. Instead, I spent the remaining days of our trip vacillating between saying goodbye to family, comparing Amadou Diallo and Michael Brown, and praying for things back home.

Upon our return to the U.S., I was soon watching similar scenes on TV again, this time of the police spraying protesting crowds of young people in the streets of Hong Kong where I had literally just been. Again I felt powerless, wanting to get back to Hong Kong to be with my extended family. Instead, I could go to prayer vigils and text with family. It didn’t feel like much.

Until the age of 18, I had been dreamily unaware of how the sins of white supremacy and systemic oppression had affected my current world, and how the result of these sins enabled me as a white man to remain very comfortable and ignorant of this reality.

Again I felt powerless, wanting to get back to Hong Kong to be with my extended family.

The L.A. Riots following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 intruded upon this peaceful dream and I began to blink my groggy eyes.

While I had not started dreaming again, Ferguson and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution both alerted me that there was more deep work to be done. As a white man and a U.S. citizen, it was going to force me to confront a social system designed to maintain a comfortable status quo for white people, for the sake of people of color who I love.

It was going to force me to confront a social system designed for white people.

For people in my cousin’s generation, choosing to agitate for democratic liberties forces each of them to choose between a tolerable and financially-rewarding status quo (with the ever-so gradual erosion of democratic liberties), and facing the forces of government who will stop at little to prevent people from self-governance.

For both of us, it is a choice between staying immediately comfortable as privileged individuals, or giving up our personal comfort in an attempt to make a future life which we hope is better for all people. Call it self-interest, protectionism, comfort, or greed, but most of us, when it comes right down to it, will choose immediate comfort over the hope of a better future most of the time.

Most of us will choose immediate comfort over the hope of a better future most of the time.

My wife’s cousins have to calculate for themselves how much resisting their government would cost them. Most of the leaders of the Umbrella Revolution have been arrested or had to flee the country. At times, their future seems hopeless. I can’t stand in their shoes and tell them when and how to resist. I can only work on myself.

So here is how it works in my case as a white male living comfortably in America. Learning about systemic racism and doing something about the racial disparities and injustices in America will put me at odds with other white people… people whom I also happen to love.

But it is more complicated than confronting the legacy of white supremacy from the past to the present. There are systemic issues which disproportionately affect communities of color that continue to manifest themselves every few decades in the United States. New legal policies are regularly created which have the effect of continuing the subjugation and segregation of the poor and people of color.

When we talk about the sins of our nation in the present, we need to talk about politics.

This last sentence might seem extreme to some, and this is often where the work begins, learning to hear each other’s perspectives on the realities of the past and the present. With work, we can come to some general agreement about the sins of the past, but when we talk about the sins of our nation in the present, we need to talk about politics. As white people, we usually don’t like to think about how our whiteness and politics intersect. We don’t like to look at who tends to be the winners and who tends to be the losers of policy initiatives, because too often, our political policies still are created in a way that benefits the white majority, and allows white people to generally stay in power.

But wait a minute! There are more social issues than just race and poverty issues. What about abortion? This is a very valid point. The unborn are definitely a group who are also voiceless and powerless. Let me explore this in an upcoming post.

[Photo by Javier Peñas on Unsplash]