One Small Voice: White privilege and the accident of birth

by Lynn Mandaville

This is one piece of my family’s folklore as I heard it, and remember it, and relish it. 

My Grandpa Fred Richards and his brother Clarence were real estate brokers and attorneys in Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1900s, after they had done their military duty in World War I. They managed and sold rental properties and houses and performed the related legal work. They were, apparently, quite successful at it and made comfortable livings.

When the Great Depression hit, the brothers agreed to extend Christian charity to everyone to whom they rented homes or held the paper on their mortgages.  No one would be evicted from their homes during the Depression, with the gentlemen’s understanding that payments, no matter how small or random, would be made whenever possible.

Records were duly kept as to the money received, and each account was credited as the dollar bills trickled in. But as conscientious as the brothers were about recording receipts, so were they lax about making bank deposits, and they tended to stuff the ones and fives in a desk drawer and forget about them.

As the legend goes, at the time of their retirement, someone went in to help close up the office and discovered this cache of cash. Not knowing what to do with it, the money was divided equally between Fred and Clarence. I don’t know what Clarence did with his half, but it was decided that Fred would divide his share into three equal parts which were given to his married daughters, my mom and her two sisters.

Such a windfall was overwhelming to my young parents. Pop said that before they settled on a plan for the money, they took all that cash (the amount is unknown, but was probably a couple thousand dollars in small bills), strew it on their bed, and rolled around in it naked.

I have long delighted in this story. First, it has raciness, and told of behavior quite beyond any I would have thought possible by my straight-laced parents.  Second, it told me a bit about the level of financial comfort my grandparents and their three daughters had enjoyed during some of the toughest times in American history (the Depression and WWII). Third, it really touched my heart that Grandpa and his brother felt a duty to the people who made their comfortable livings possible. They would never make a family homeless who made even a token effort to “keep the wolf from their door.”

I share this story because a month ago my curiosity was piqued by a trip I made with my sisters back to our homeland in New Jersey, as to the veracity of such family legend.

Patty flew from Sarasota, Fla. Nancy flew from Ottawa, Ontario. I flew from Phoenix. We landed at Newark International, and each of us mentioned to the others that as we landed we  noticed, adjacent to the airport, the Anheuser Busch plant, which stands on property our great-grandparents had once farmed in the early days of Newark’s history before they sold the land to the brewery.   

We had come back to New Jersey, ostensibly, for an 80th birthday party for one of our favorite high school English teachers. But it was also a great excuse to do what we’d intended for the last ten years to do – bring our Ma’s ashes back to the Jersey shore to be scattered in the Manasquan River at the childhood home she had loved so much.

We visited with the sole cousin who remains living in New Jersey, sharing stories and legends of all our summers at the shore. We visited the two homes in which we grew up, and we poked around in the unchanged Glen Ridge Public Library we used to ride our bikes to every week until we moved to Wayne in 1962.

Many old stories came up, and each of us had her own version of each. Thus, upon returning home, I broke out “An Album of Memories,” a family history/autobiography written by my Ma in 1991, hoping I could flesh out those old stories, and, more importantly, to sort fact from fiction.

I learned from Ma’s history that the above legend has a great deal of fact in it.  Fred and Clarence really did have that gentlemen’s agreement with their clients. They saw more people voluntarily give up their homes than they ever foreclosed on. Virtually no one was forced into destitution if he had a dollar to give the brothers even once in a blue moon. The money had, indeed, been stashed away, but in a strongbox in that desk drawer. And the money, upon its discovery, was distributed as told. (Ma didn’t write about the rolling naked part, but Pop swore to us it was true.)

I also relived, through out mother’s eyes, our entire childhoods — birth through leaving home.

As the month has passed since our trip back to our idyllic past, and my foray into Ma’s family history, I’ve been haunted by something my sister Patty said before we parted ways. With tears in her eyes, she commented that we’d “really, really, really had a remarkably wonderful” upbringing in our very ordinary, white, middle-class, northern New Jersey home.  

She’s right. We did. We really, really did. (Think “Leave It To Beaver.” Think “Ozzie and Harriett.”)

And we can’t take any credit for that remarkable, white, middle-class life. We came by our White Privilege through the accidents of our births.

That we always had a roof over our heads, clothes to wear and food to eat we owed to generations of white people we can trace all the way back to the mid-1600s in America.

When I think, really think, about the blessings I have, I am overwhelmed by the enormity of it. And the randomness of it. How come I am here, a white woman in North America, instead of an aborigine in the outback of Australia? Or, to put a finer point on it, how come I’m not an aging black woman in the projects in Newark, fearing for the lives of her sons and grandsons living in poverty, working crappy, minimum-wage jobs where they’re subject to the whims of an questionably ethical employer? Instead, I’m a retired librarian, living the white good life in the Arizona desert.

Pure chance put me where I am. The accident of my birth.   

There is a quotation that, though more commonly recognized in its  falsely attributed and mangled forms, comes originally from the King James version of the Bible, in Luke 12:48. It goes “for unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”

I translate that to mean that White Privilege is a very real thing, and it means that those of us who have it are obligated to make the world a better place. Obligated.

It would seem that Fred and Clarence, before the term had been coined, knew a little bit about their White Privilege. (Though in their day redlining was probably the rule, and their White Privilege extended only among whites.) And it would seem they practiced a little bit of that Biblical directive.

In light of that anecdote of my family’s history, it then falls to my generation, and then to my children’s and grandchildren’s generations, to pass on the traditions of our White Privilege to the next generations.

In my opinion, foremost among the things we must do is to eliminate White Privilege altogether, so that privilege itself belongs to all people. ALL people.  ALL PEOPLE.

Accident should have no part in it. None.

Culturally, we as Americans have not evolved into a true, one nation, with liberty and justice for all. Culturally we as Americans still cling to one white nation, with liberty and justice for us.

The time has come for America to evolve.