Opportunity Hoarding
I had never heard the phrase “opportunity hoarding” before, and I had no idea that I had been, and maybe still am, doing just that. Oh, when I first heard the phrase, I could easily see how the Church hierarchy had definitely been hoarding opportunities – forever – and grew rather self-righteous and puffed up with pride for having fought against their cache of privilege for such a long time, even on these pages.
Then I took a step back and took a more piercing look into the critical issue of my own white privilege, and I applied the phrase to myself. I knew then that I, that all of us, have to repent, make amends, atone – those old loaded words – for so many opportunities we have hoarded in so many areas of our own lives.
I came across the concept of “opportunity hoarding” in a replay of an NPR On Being interview with Eula Biss, who, several years ago, had written an essay in The New York Times, “White Debt.” The original On Being episode had aired in 2017 but was updated on June 11, 2020 and rebroadcasted because of its relevancy today. Program moderator, Krista Tippett, explained why: “She brings a few moral reckonings of recent years in illuminating interplay….” one of which was to see, with clear eyes for once, exactly what and how we “hoard our opportunities” – even with no malice of intent – and how damaging this has been and continues to be.
Eula Biss began the interview with a heartbreaking admission of damage, one most white people could also have made: “Whiteness is costing me my community. It is the wedge driven between me and my neighbors, between me and other mothers, between me and other workers. Like a bad loan, the kind in which the payments increase over time, the price of whiteness remains hidden behind its promises…Because I think that part of the problem is that the attitude is highly unintentional, it’s highly unexamined. It’s relaxing into your own privilege without even thinking about it.”
She then gave an example of relaxing into privilege through “opportunity hoarding”: This is, for instance, “what white parents do to make sure that their children are getting more than other children are getting.”
Near her home is a racially diverse high school in which typically 90% of white students are enrolled in Advanced Placement classes but only 50% of Black children are. Although, she admitted, there may be many explanations – parental involvement and pressure, racial bias, quality of feeder schools, etc. – maybe white people’s hoarding the opportunities for the betterment of their own children might be as significant a factor: “I thought, well, that’s something I can control for. Like, that’s something I can watch in my own behavior. That’s something that I could have conversations with my neighbors around, and how we’re treating the opportunities that are available to our children, and whether we’re ensuring that those opportunities are available to all the children in our community…especially when we’re talking about limited resources. If those limited resources are hoarded, it necessarily means somebody isn’t getting them.”
Another example she examined came as a result of her buying a house. How many of us consider how we participate in “opportunity hoarding” in this seemingly innocent endeavor? She pointed to author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay, “The Case For Reparations” in which he detailed housing and lending discrimination in Chicago, but really everywhere: “And when you look at that history, you can see a highly-intentional and entirely legal history of white people hoarding both real estate and financial resources like mortgages at the expense of other people…Buying a house was another moment where I felt that I was kind of forced to reflect on how I was benefiting personally from a long history of racist policies in my country.”
So, what do we do with these and so many other insights? I loved this anecdote for the wise answer it gave: Biss’ young son had brought home a book from the library about how the White House had been built by slaves. She had an age-appropriate conversation with him about the history of slavery and the white legacy he had inherited. “’I don’t want to be on this team,’ he said, with his head in his hands. ‘You might be stuck on this team,’ I told him, ‘but you don’t have to play by its rules.’”
And we don’t either. In fact, we have a moral imperative not to do so.
Biss described what had happened in a school in which the student population was majority Black but the gifted program majority white. White parents actually protested. They proclaimed that it could not be true that only white children are gifted. ‘There must be a problem with how we’re deciding who gets into the gifted program. The system itself must be dismantled.’ Of course, it was not easy, but as white parents, they had to say, “We won’t have this,” overcome resistance and obstacles, and come together with Black parents to make the necessary changes. The moral debt had to be paid and the moral wrong redressed.
The point in all of the above, I think, is that we have to look inside ourselves as well as outside when we critique. We know we have to dismantle embedded obvious unjust systems in our Church from which we have suffered but also the less obvious all around us from which we have profited. I’ll let Krista Tippett say it better: “How do we live redemptively, reparatively, rather than destructively?” What does that look like?” And in her follow-up reflection in The Pause: “May I prove myself worthy of the work ahead. May you hold me accountable. May we create space for an ever-widening circle of redemptive white embarrassment and guilt and capacity to transform.”