A producer contacted me from the “Watters’ World” program on the Fox cable network hosted by conservative commentator Jesse Watters. She asked if I was interested in appearing to discuss the topic of Christian privilege. Apparently, a major controversy has erupted on the conservative blogosphere after George Washington University had announced it would hold a workshop training session open to students and faculty on this topic four days following Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018. I was to appear the Saturday after the workshop on April 7, 2018.
I have studied and written about issues of dominant group privilege and oppression for decades, and I co-edited a book, Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States, with Khyati Joshi and Ellen Fairchild. I asked the producer how my appearance would be structured and the specific types of questions I was to address.
I have constructed a definition of Christian privilege as the overarching system of advantages bestowed on Christians. It is the institutionalization of a Christian norm or standard, which establishes and perpetuates the notion that all people are or should be Christian thereby privileging Christians and Christianity, and excluding the needs, concerns, ethnic/religious cultural practices, and life experiences of people who are not Christian.
The Fox producer then stated that the order of the interview would go as follows: 1) a general description and definition of the concept of Christian privilege, 2) a connection to professor Robin DiAngelo’s notion of “white fragility,” concluding with 3) a discussion of Jay-Z’s comment on the new David Letterman program that the election of Donald Trump as President may be a “great thing” in the sense that Trump is “bringing out an ugly side of America that we wanted to believe was gone.”
Long before my invitation to appear, I tuned into the Fox channel and specifically to “Watters World” on several occasions to get an overall sense of how this conservative megamedia outlet reflected political issues. Understanding full well Fox’s far-right bias, I accepted the producer’s invitation to appear with very minimal expectations related to the network and host’s “fair and balanced” perspective on the issues to be addressed.
I had assumed, however, by talking with the program’s producer, that the show had at least done its due diligence by constructing a reasonable and well-thought-out agenda. Maybe I was simply unduly optimistic and naïve, but this was why I accepted her invitation to appear.
Christian Privilege
In preparing for my interview, I constructed the points I hoped to address beginning with a historical background:
Alexis de Tocqueville, French political scientist and diplomat, who traveled across the United States for nine months between 1831-1832 conducting research for his epic work, Democracy in America.
He was astounded to find a certain paradox: on one hand, he observed that the United States promoted itself around the world as a country separating “church and state” (which itself is a Christian term since primarily Christians refer to their houses of worship as “churches”), where religious freedom and tolerance were among its defining tenets, but on the other hand, he witnessed that: “There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”
He answered this apparent contradiction by proposing that in this country with no officially-sanctioned governmental religion, denominations were compelled to compete with one another and promote themselves to attract and keep parishioners, thereby making religion even stronger.
While the government was not supporting Christian denominations and churches, per se, religion to Tocqueville should be considered as the first of their political institutions since he observed the enormous influence churches had on the political process.
Though he favored U.S. style democracy, he found its major limitation to be in its stifling of independent thought and independent beliefs. In a country that promoted the notion that the majority rules, this effectively silenced minorities by what Tocqueville termed the “tyranny of the majority.”
This is a crucial point because in a democracy, without specific safeguards of minority rights — in this case minority religious rights — there is a danger of religious domination or tyranny over religious minorities and non-believers. The majority, in religious matters, have historically been adherents to mainline Protestant Christian denominations who often imposed their values and standards upon those who believed otherwise.
I caution us, though, not to conceptualize dominant group privilege monolithically, or as a binary with those who “have it” and those who “don’t have it.” We must factor into the equation issues of context and intersectionality of identities.
In terms of Christian privilege, as there is a spectrum of Christian denominations and traditions, for example, so too is there a hierarchy or continuum of Christian privilege based on 1) historical factors, 2) numbers of practitioners, and 3) degrees of social power.
Social theorist, Gunnar Myrdal, traveled throughout the United States during the late 1940s examining U.S. society following World War II, and he discovered a grave contradiction or inconsistency, which he termed “an American dilemma.”
He found a country, founded on an overriding commitment to democracy, liberty, freedom, human dignity, and egalitarian values, coexisting alongside deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination, privileging white people, while subordinating peoples of color. While racism continues, this contradiction has been powerfully reframed for contemporary consideration by religious scholar, Diana Eck:
“The new American dilemma is real religious pluralism, and it poses challenges to America’s Christian churches that are as difficult and divisive as those of race. Today, the invocation of a Christian America takes on a new set of tensions as our population of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist neighbors grows. The ideal of a Christian America stands in contradiction to the spirit, if not the letter, of America’s foundational principle of religious freedom.”
An inclusive model, one that ensures individuals’ and groups’ freedom of as well as from religion is the concept and a national goal of “cultural and religious pluralism.” The Jewish immigrant and sociologist of Polish and Latvian heritage, Horace Kallen (1915), coined the term “cultural pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he considered to be inherently undemocratic. Kallen envisioned a United States in the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.
Resistance & Myth of Meritocracy
As educators raise issues of dominant group privilege, and we pose questions of power, control, and domination in our classes and in the larger society, invariably we experience resistance.
“This is America. We don’t redistribute wealth. You earn it!”
I witnessed this bumper sticker, decked out in bright red, white, and blue lettering, attached to the post holding my neighbors’ mailbox as I walked my dogs. For my neighbors to display this placard proudly in their front yard, they would have to hold several assumptions not merely related to this country’s economic and social systems, but possibly even more essentially, about its very character.
From the time of our birth and throughout our lives, society feeds and continually refeeds us the Pablum of meritocracy until it becomes an essential element of our nervous systems.
The hegemonic discourse goes something like this: For those of us living in the United States, it matters not from which station of life we came. It matters not about our backgrounds and social or personal identities. We each have been born into a system that guarantees equal and equitable access to opportunities. Success is ours through hard work, study, ambition, merit, and by deferring gratification to later in our lives. We will succeed if we “keep our nose stuck to the grindstone” (ouch!) and “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” (without falling over on our heads).
This concept of “meritocracy” is founded on the premise of “personal responsibility,” and those who do not achieve success must accept personal responsibility for their failures. Maybe they did not try hard enough. Maybe they failed to scale any barriers that could have been placed in their way because they did not have sufficient will and self-control, fortitude, intelligence, character, or because they simply made bad choices.
While of course we are all accountable and liable for our actions, what impact do the social conditions of our nation have on our personal success? This very question triggers immediate reasons in many people, for it challenges the foundation of the United States as a meritocratic nation by asking…
How can patterns of systemic oppression operate within a system of meritocracy? and, How can I have certain unearned dominant group privileges when I was taught to believe that my success or failure rests totally within my own personal control?
Rather than having to sit with and attempt to understand the cognitive dissonance and sense of narcissistic injury these question raise, many people negatively react, resist, deny, and sometimes vehemently attack the very notion of dominant group privilege and those who carry the message, as was evident in my very brief appearance on “Watters’ World.”
Obviously, the fish in “Watters’ World” could not and would not see or feel the water of Christian privilege since it is so pervasive, so taken for granted, so “normalized.”
What I walked into by appearing on the program was a less-than-superficial propaganda segment introduced by Jesse as “an assault on Christianity.” I was led to believe that sufficient time would be given to address three areas of discussion as they outlined. As it turned out, however, I was given approximately three minutes allowing me to speak about 8 sentences with numerous interruptions. I feel as though the show engaged in a bait and switch operation. I left feeling frustrated but, unfortunately, not particularly surprised.
To make matters worse, when I arrived home, I found numerous email, Facebook, and phone messages.
I present only a few of the numerous comments I received within one-two days after leaving the TV station. I present these as they were stated or written editing only for length. After some of these, I present a brief commentary in parentheses. In others, the senders’ words need no further comment.
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Dr. Blumenfeld,
I just finished watching your interview on Fox News. I wish to tell you that you are a disgrace to your people! Jews like you are a very good reason why Gentiles hates Jews…. (The latter sentence confirms the reality that antisemitism remains an active form of oppression in the United States.)
…I’d like to know when your brain had become infected by all this purely Communist agenda driven propaganda? (A throwback to the “Red Scare” of the Cold War era.) Absolutely shocked. “Christian Privilege” and all the rest of these anti-educational social pseudo-science fraud courses conditioning the masses of unsuspecting malleable student minds. (An anti-intellectual and patronizing statement implying a lack of agency and decision-making and critical thinking capacity of youth.)
…An utter disgrace! Please do me a favor and read the Islamic texts, delve into Islamic theopolitical jurisprudence: Sharia…. (An appeal to Islamophobia and false equivalency between Christian power and Islamic power in a Western context.) …Everything and anything to utterly rape the Western – once “Judeo-Christian” freedom loving democratic West – of everything and anything that could possibly contain decency…. (False understanding by raising Christian privilege as a bashing of Christianity.)
Utterly disgraceful. You should be ashamed of yourself for peddling such lobotomized rubbish.
Jeremy D. Valentine
(What some refer to as a “Judeo-Christian” tradition is a misnomer. Beaman, for example argues that “this obscures the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the modern world.” I add that the term disguises the major differences between these two monotheistic religions and denies the primarily Christian antecedents to these practices.
Take, for example, the longstanding controversy related to displaying the “Ten Commandments” in an Alabama courthouse. While the “Ten Commandments” (in the original Hebrew, referred to as ‘aseret hadibbrot — the ten utterances) are, indeed, important traditions of the Jewish faith, the Hebrew or Jewish Bible lists 613 mitzvot (commandments) for Jews to follow. Christians have extracted the “Ten Commandments,” and those fighting to display them in the public square are primarily Evangelical Christians who misleadingly claim “Judeo-Christian” tradition as their battle cry.)
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Mr. Blumenfeld,
…As a Jewess (I don’t recall anyone using this term as a self-descriptor)…Not only are you doing a disservice to students, but you have done a disservice to Jews by going on Fox news and offending a very wide audience of Christian viewers, many of whom support Israel financially and in other ways. (This viewer considers raising issues of Christian privilege as bashing Christians, and that my very presence jeopardizes continued Christian support for the state of Israel. I am more powerful than I could have imagined.)
…Maybe things are so good for you in the U.S. that you’ve forgotten the lessons of history regarding our people. We don’t have many friends and we shouldn’t insult the ones we have. (At lease she acknowledges oppression directed against the Jewish people. Her fear and seeming misunderstand of my intention to appear on the program foregrounded her response.)
Nancy Wolfe
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Hey Warren, you disgraceful ignorant kike and perverted faggot. I’m surprised you haven’t already died of AIDS, but don’t worry, you’ll be dead soon, you kike faggot.
Anonymous phone call, 3:00 a.m., April 8, 2018.
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So you like to suck cock Warren. He is a pink hat bitch. (This person in his vitriol connects homophobia with sexism and misogyny.)
Tom Thompson
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Dude get over yourself. Typical liberal….let’s create some b.s. about Christian Privilege in America just because we’re not happy unless we’re complaining about something. In God we trust. I love how the Americans who complain about everything, they stay here anyway. Why not move elsewhere? Because you have it too good in America. That’s why. Lol. (This sentiment echoes one that arose during the Vietnam War era – “America: Love It Or Leave It” — against those of us who protested the war. We chanted our response: “America: Change It Or Lose It.”)
Jason Woods
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I posted on Facebook: “Now they’re calling my home with antisemitic and homophobic rants. Such sad people.”
You are the idiot who said the stupid shit though. You brought it upon yourself. If you can’t take the heat then get out of the kitchen. (Typical victim blaming.)
Jason Woods
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Saw you on fox mews…I think your position on so called privilege is POROUS AND DISJOINTED….I do however believe that many in acedamia (misspelled) — aka indoctrination centers – feel they are qualified and justified To pass judgement on others with a tone pf perceived moral superiority. (A common anti-intellectual trope on the political right generally and specifically on Fox.)
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I HAVE HEARD A LOT OF CRAP LATELY , ANTI-AMERICAN RHETORIC !! BUT YOURS IS THE WORST!!… (He equates a discussion centering on Christian privilege as being “ANTI-AMERICAN.” How very illuminating!) WARREN IF NOT FOR THE CHRISTIANS IN AMERICA THERE WOULD NOT A SINGLE JEW LEFT ON THIS PLANET!! BECAUSE OF THE NAZI’S, MUSIMS AND THE COMMUNISTS!! YET YOU FEEL IT’S AMERICA’S FAULT?” (I never claimed fault or blame, but this is what he and many people hear when we raise issues of dominant group privilege.)
Christopher KC
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I watched your segment. I find you extremely disingenuous. Christian privilege? In WWII, did America’s ‘Christian privilege’ stop us from fighting HITLER, who KILLED millions of Jews ALL OVER EUROPE? No. Was Jesus a Jew? Yes. Was America founded on Judeo Christianity? Yes….Sad. You are OBVIOUSLY old enough to know that America lost THOUSANDS of men and women in WWII. Millions of Jewish people lost their lives because of Nazis and YOU have the BALLS to complain that Watters DOESN’T KNOW about a specific Jewish holiday? Are you THAT brain dead? Apparently ANYONE can become a professor as long as they hate Christians. You, sir, are a VERY SAD representative of your ancestors. I believe that Americans were thrilled to help fight for their freedom, only for YOU to compare America to Germany today. Christians, how horrible we were to fight for the freedom of your ancestors from German Nazis. How gentiles hatrd jews.”
Joanie Carpenter Maley
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U.S. and the Holocaust
Ethnocentrism continues to rear its head within the United State through anti-immigrant sentiments by political leaders exerting nativist and nationalist (chauvinist, jingoist) warnings. In the year 1939, for example, just before the breakout of war in Europe and prior to the U.S.’s entry, for some refugees, primarily those within Europe’s Jewish communities, the door slammed tightly shut.
During that year, two legislators in the U.S. Congress, Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-MA) proposed an emergency bill, which, if passed, would have increased the immigration quoted by allowing an additional 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14 (10,000 in 1939, and another 10,000 in 1940) from Nazi Germany to come to the United States.
Though the bill was roundly supported by religious and labor organizations, nativist and isolationist groups mounted wide-scale campaigns to prevent its passage. Public opinion polls at the time showed that the overwhelming majority of U.S. residents opposed any increases in immigration. Though First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, implored her husband to advance the bill, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to publicly support it.
In fact, Laura Delano Houghteling, the president’s cousin and wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, James L. Houghteling, sternly warned: “20,000 charming children would all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.” The bill never came up for a full vote in the Congress, and it died, like the children it could have saved.
Also in 1939, on May 13, Germans and other citizens from Eastern European nations, mostly all Jews fleeing Nazis brutality, booked passage on the German transatlantic ocean liner, St. Louis, from the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. Most passengers had applied for U.S. visas, and they planned to wait in Cuba on their previously-approved landing permits and temporary transit visas until U.S. officials accepted them into the U.S.
Even before embarking from Germany, the passengers became the source of bitter political cross-partisan rivalries in Cuba as several nativist/conservative politicians and newspapers demanded the immediate cessation of its policy of admitting Jewish refugees on its land. The Cuban government, therefore, reneged on its offer to honor the passengers’ landing permits when the St. Louis entered Cuban waters.
Faced with this unforeseen development, the ship’s captain, Gustav Schroeder, turned the St. Louis toward the Florida coast of the United States in hopes that U.S. government officials would allow passengers entry on refugee status by processing their visa applications. Unfortunately, though, the political wars transpiring in Cuba on the plight of Jewish refugees were even more intense in the United States. Within the United States, President Roosevelt succumbed to conservative political pressure by following his immigration officials’ decision to deny safe-haven to the ship’s passengers.
The captain had no other choice than to turn his ship around back toward Europe. On route, knowing that returning to Germany meant certain death for his passengers, he negotiated with a few governments, whereby Great Britain allowed entry of 288, the Netherlands admitted 181, Belgium took 214, and France took 224. By the end of the war, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that all but one in Great Britain survived, approximately half of the remainder on the continent, 278, survived the Holocaust, and 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France.
A January 1939 survey conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion and the Gallop Organization (Gallop, 1939) asked residents: “It has been proposed to bring to this country 10,000 refugee children from Germany – most of them Jewish – to be taken care of in American homes. Should the government permit these children to come in?” The results: 30% yes, 61% no, 9% no opinion.
White Fragility
“White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”
Robin DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” referring to the concept that white people are generally reluctant and even unwilling to discuss issues of race and racism, and when these issues are raised, white people often become angry and defensive or shut down and silent. This can as well relate to people of any dominant groups when raising issues of that dominant group’s unearned privileges.
When I raise issues of race in my university courses, often my white students either tell me in my office or write in their papers that they feel uncomfortable discussing the subject because they don’t want to say anything that might offend someone, and they don’t want anyone to tell them that they are racist. The topic of race itself makes them feel guilty and shameful for being white.
I bring into the discussion the negative consequences of sweeping the mess (of racism and all the forms of oppression) under the rug, that democracy is messy, and if we are going to move out of the morass of the legacy of racism (and all the other forms of oppression) in our nation, we must cease the sweeping and truly begin the cleansing (the frank and respectful discussions) of this legacy, which hurts us all of all racial backgrounds.
Jay-Z on Letterman
Jay-Z makes an insightful point when he stated on David Letterman’s new TV program that the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, while seemingly disastrous for many people, is a “great thing” in the sense that Trump is “bringing out an ugly side of America that we wanted to believe was gone.”
Jay-Z’s statement connects directly with my notion that by ceasing to sweep the mess of racism under the proverbial rug, we can work on it and possibly develop a sort of resolution and a larger movement for progressive social change.
As hurtful as it is, when Trump represents Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists, when he calls an Indiana judge unfit to rule on cases affecting him because of the judge’s Mexican heritage, when he demeans members of the Black Lives Matters movement, when he calls for bans against Muslims entering our country, when he calls Haiti, El Salvador, and the entire continent of Africa “shithole countries,” when he states that some neo-Nazis and white supremacists are good guys too, Trump, by placing race and racism front and center in his way, has given us an opportunity to talk about race frankly in the hope of cleansing it.
I like to use preeminent scholar, Sonia Nieto’s, image of the great tapestry in representing our great multicultural society. From the back, all we can see is a giant jumble of threads and knots scattered haphazardly with no apparent order. But from the front – after the process of a mindful and consistent piecing together – we will one day have a beautiful and elegant piece of art.
Andrew Dunn, a viewer of my appearance on Fox, wrote to ask me what is the “end state” of exposing all the forms of dominant group privilege. I responded:
The “end state” for me, and I can only speak for myself, is to aid dominant group members in traveling through a developmental process: from DENIAL-RESISTANCE-RESENTMENT of the concept of dominant group privilege, to AWARENESS of their (our) dominant group privilege, to ACCEPTANCE of the fact that they (we) have dominant group privilege, to ACTION in working to share this privilege with those who do not have it on the basis their minoritized identity statuses.
This is an issue of power and control. I work to change the current system in which dominant groups attempt to exert POWER OVER others within a hierarchy of systemic power differentials to a system whereby people share power, a system of POWER WITH.
One in which the cycle of social oppressions (racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, adultism, ageism, cissexism, religious oppression, ethnocentrism, classism, lookism, xenophobia, etc.) are reduced and greater degrees of equality, liberty, and freedom among people of all social identities are ensured and maintained. I hold out the possibility that this is more than simply a pipe dream.
But as Norman Darish wrote me: “I consider myself open minded…and as such. Have reached the conclusion that we as a species are not ready or equipped to deal with others in a non-hierarchy-authority structure in the present….this will occur in our far distant future… If we survive as a species.”
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