If privilege is just too charged of a word, perhaps just thinking in terms of advantages would help.
Can you forgive an institution? Perhaps, in some sense, but more often than not, it seems like the crimes against humanity by institutions are driven by the people that run them. Yes, it is true that the people that run institutions are often influenced by larger systems, in history and society. But, that doesn’t seem to relieve the need for forgiveness for those who have perpetuated harm on people, especially groups of people (simply because they are a...group of people).
I’ve never really been able to fully shake the impact of the stories of the destruction of the American Indian that I heard as a child. At the time, I thought this kind of unspeakable wrong against indigenous people was a function of a few bad actors. And, while that is certainly true, it really was much bigger than that. Many of the institutions of our society were complicit and, therefore, was systematic. If we can’t be honest about that, then how can we be honest about where crimes are being perpetuated today?
There always is the opportunity for forgiveness. But, that is difficult to do when it’s positioned in the context of something like an institution, because then we can too easily say something like, "Well, it was the institution that was bad." Yes, it was. But it took people to perpetuate those institutions — to develop them, to foster them, to perpetuate them. And, this is the great level of wrong that must be acknowledged, or we’re just burying our head in the sand (pretending that some other fantasy is true). It’s not to say that there weren’t good and ideal things that went on right along side of these evils and other kinds of travesties, but we do ourselves (at a minimum) a disservice to claim that one eclipses the other, or renders the other non-existent. This is a classic move to avoid something uncomfortable.
Crimes against humanity are often only possible (i.e. scalable) through the use of institutions to perpetuate them en masse. The impression on me, as a child, created a kind of sensitivity to how these same dynamics have been perpetuated against other groups of people. For example, I am confident that we will never fully understand the impact of slavery on our African-American communities. For those who claim the truths of the Bible, I believe that we carry the sins of our fathers across multiple generations. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like if it were white people who were enslaved for generations and what the legacy impact of that would be. Would it be that much different than the legacy impact we can observe now in African-American communities? I really don’t know why it wouldn’t be.
Maybe privilege is an imprecise word, even if it is so charged that it’s hard to engage with it (for some). But, what I can't deny is that I have many advantages that other people don't have, particularly people of color, simply because of the position my race has in American history. What I think about most days (and don't have to think about) are quite different because of this reality.
If we don't just plug our ears and run away, we may have to swallow hard over some of this reality. But, being honest can be a gateway and perhaps the real opportunity is to consider what this changes, if we can accept these truths.
Even a child knows we should.
