Hope for Slum Communities: Ethnicity
by Scott BesseneckerExcerpted from forthcoming The Quest for Hope in Slum Communities,
Reprinted with permission ISBN 1932805-192 World Vision Press in partnership with Authentic Media
expected publication date Summer 2005
Community Development
Economics
Ethnicity
I always thought that racism in the USA was reserved for uneducated red-necks, that is, until the day I found it lurking in my own enlightened heart.
Late again for an appointment one morning, I was driving down Monroe Street in Madison, Wisconsin, hoping for green lights. Hemmed in by parked cars on the right and oncoming traffic on the left, I was stuck behind a slightly dilapidated car, dirty and with the side mirror dangling alongside the driver’s door. I saw that the driver was a young, African American kid. I was completely unaware of any sense of internal judgment or bigotry. To me it was just another morning of transportation boredom and mild frustration. The person in front of me was just another young person who didn’t take much pride in his car’s appearance. When I finally had opportunity to pass this young man, I glanced over at him. It was then that I noticed that he was actually a White kid, wearing a black baseball cap with the bill turned backward. I suddenly became aware of a slight shift in my attitude toward this young man. Instead of viewing him as someone with a callous disregard for property, he quickly became a happy-go-lucky teenager who simply didn’t have the time or funds to repair his car. In my mind’s eye, he was transformed from a lazy, unambitious adolescent to a kid just too excited about other things in life to be concerned about his car at the moment. The difference in my attitude is embarrassing for me to admit and exposes the deeply engrained racism that coexists with my passion for people who are marginalized and oppressed. A quiet prejudice lives in me, nearly imperceptible to a heart so eager to believe the best about myself and yet so quick to notice and condemn discrimination in others.
Ethnic division is universal. Not all ethnic division is bad. Gathering together in ethnic-specific groupings helps us to celebrate what is good about our culture and lament our cultural downsides. It allows us to cherish family and enjoy a kind of community connection not available when gathered in ethnically diverse settings. But ethnic division can also play itself out in very harmful and insidious ways. It gives fuel to our human tendency to create structures that favor our own ethnicity and make life hard for people of other ethnicities. Ethnic division allows yet one more avenue to exploit some and favor others.
To engage the process of transformation in slum communities without recognizing the reality of ethnic hatred is seriously shortsighted. Mega-cities are collections of ethnic enclaves pressed tightly together. Where you find a slum community, you will often find an ethnic underclass and sometimes violent ethnic tensions that run in multiple directions.
In their book Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1994), Barbara Harff and Robert Gurr survey the ethnic wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the history behind the hatred. The first chapter examines how the creation of new states after World War II in the 1950s and 1960s and after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union in the 1990s unleashed suppressed ethnic tensions. For some ethnic groups (like the Chechens) it has meant a quest for political autonomy. For others (like the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements) it has meant trying to coalesce ethnicity across geopolitical boundaries. Indigenous peoples and slave descendants in many countries seek simply to be given equal rights and opportunities. Still others (like Croats and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia or Tutsis in Rwanda) have faced genocide and created huge refugee crises.
Finally, the chapter “Excluded Neighborhoods” in Mark Golnik's book To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing inner City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) chronicles the fascinating history of Baltimore’s African American neighborhood known as Sandtown. Author Mark Gornik describes the social forces at work that have contributed to the hardships suffered by the residents of that community. Together these readings give us an appreciation for the role that ethnicity often plays in creating and perpetuating communities trapped in poverty.
Community Development
Economics
Ethnicity
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