Oblivious to privilege
I’m responding to Richard Bircher’s letter that was printed Feb. 19.
Bircher refers to “Our Puritan forebears,” which begs the question: who are these “our?” Are Native Americans and French included? A “generalized historical backdrop” indeed. My “generalized historical backdrop” includes the following: I am white, and a direct descendant of a Mayflower Separatist pilgrim; also, I am a fourth-generation descendant of Norwegian immigrants who settled in North Dakota. Henceforth in this letter, I assume that Bircher is white and male, with no awareness of the privileges thereby granted to him.
Bircher lets readers know that “having a local person treat any newcomer with outright disrespect or condensation [condescension?] is certainly inappropriate and hurtful.” Then he must be outraged by the Confederate flags that I’ve seen around here, ICE dragnets, and the stories about people of color (including a female doctor) in these parts being told, to their faces, to “Go home!” Bircher’s statement that “DEI members, specifically, and people of color by and large, would be far wiser to shift gears, and free themselves from blaming white people.” That is a condescending statement — thus, a contradiction to his earlier sentiment quoted in this paragraph.
I wonder what “DEI members” might be? People of color? Non-cisgender people? Women? Immigrants, from outside New England or outside the United States ? Native Americans? Allies to any of the above categories? If the latter, I consider myself a DEI member, albeit an imperfect one. My Black Lives Matter button disintegrated — I need another one, because Black Lives STILL matter. (In 2018, I went to Dartmouth Health in Lebanon for a medical visit. In the waiting room, I noticed a Black man smiling at me. He glanced at the button, with tears in his eyes, and said, “Thank you. Thank you.”) Oppressed people still carry exhausting burdens, which do not allow for the energy of constant political action. The work of DEI that became an initiative of the Biden administration is not complete; indeed is being actively dismantled and erased by the Trump administration.