No Center

Those with privilege occupy an invisible and arbitrary center. Those without privilege do not. We never talked about it before, but now we have to, or any hopes we had for the democratic experiment will be lost.

During these past four months, when I like many have been spending a lot of time alone with my thoughts, I am developing a new obsession: I can’t stop noticing patterns of privilege, and how randomly some people are assigned to the center, and others to the margins, of our society.

An example of an unlikely place for me to see the tyranny of center-margins assignations was in the book This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me, by Marisa Meltzer (Little, Brown and Company, 2020). When I first started reading, I expected a journalist’s biographical profile of Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch, the Oprah of her day. Instead, I found a combination of an author’s vulnerable memoir about a lifelong struggle with body image, a compassionate portrait of a cultural figure, and a societal critique that changed my perspective.

The societal critique was this: with all the talk about body positivity today, where we are learning how ineffective dieting tends to be, and how unrealistic and cruel are the expectations placed upon us by the popular media, we still put thinness at the center. Even worse, the most progressive voices around weight and culture suggest that body acceptance is the best goal for which we can strive, but body acceptance still places the burden to adjust on the one in the lesser position of power, whose shape does not conform to that which is assigned the privileged center.

I write in Dynamic Discernment: Reason, Emotion, and Power in Change Leadership (The Pilgrim Press, 2019) about liberation theology’s implications for cultural change. One of the key principles we learn in liberation theology is that everyone — not just the oppressed — must be set free from the shackles of assigned societal roles. All must become conscious of the systems that keep the privileged at the center for no good reason, including those who live at that center, who woke up on third base and think they hit a triple.

If we don’t do the work of liberating everybody, the oppressors and the oppressed, then the likely turn of events will be that the oppressed might overthrow the oppressor, but then they will just become Oppressors 2.0. We don’t need those at the margins to rotate into the center. We need to tear down the whole system that privileges some arbitrarily, and then causes them to feel entitled to their spot, willing to do anything or hurt anyone to keep it.

What we must rebuild in place of a center/margin shaped community is a center-less society. Why is it hard to imagine such center-less-ness? Because we’ve never seen it before. 250 years into the American experiment, we’ve stalled out. Getting back on track starts not at the center, and not at the margins, but in our minds.

Try this: when you look at images of people this week, imagine that there is no right and wrong body. It is not the job of people who are relatively bigger to accept themselves. It is the job of all of us to dismantle any expectations of the bodies of others that keep some at the privileged center of what is described as correct or beautiful.

Then, try this: when you listen to comments about anti-Black racism, attune your ears to who is being expected to adjust. Are White people ready to de-center themselves, letting go of the unearned privilege assigned to their race? Or are the well-meaning among them simply wanting to give Black people the occasional opportunity to visit the center if — and only if — they are willing to change, imitate, and conform?

Finally, try this: listen for hints of entitlement when it comes to wealth. We are in the midst of a terrible confluence of cultural crises: political incompetence, pandemic, poverty, and race-based violence. The poverty stream in this confluence is about to blow up, as taxes and rent are coming due, and economists predict a tidal wave of evictions and foreclosures.

We will hear none-too-subtle attacks on the most vulnerable when evictions happen. I saw on a recent Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (the only t.v. news I can tolerate right now) a description of an exchange between a renter and a landlord. The landlord said, “You should have been saving for a rainy day,” and the tenant said, “Actually, you should have been.” Obviously, the landlord has access to more resources, but how easy it was to expect the renter to conform, while the landlord gives up nothing.

It is time not for “fat people” to accept or change their bodies, but for our society not to place arbitrary rules on people’s bodies. It is time to dismantle the assumption that White males belong in corridors of power, and everyone else in those corridors should be considered, at best, a guest. It is time to recognize the sheer randomness of who has and who has not, and to resist assigning outsized moral value to the haves. To de-center the privileged, and create a no-center world, we must liberate our minds.

Jesus teaches us to upend mental structures that prevent us from loving. His most cryptic sermons are about putting the last first. What does that even mean? It means something new in every society, and in every generation, but we know that the starting point is love. In order to embrace transformation, we start by transforming the lenses through which we see the world. We seek first to de-center the arbitrarily privileged, then to build a no-center world.

In that world, no one is preferred, just as Jesus taught us that no one is preferred by God. God loves everyone equally and infinitely. In God’s realm, on which Christians model the blueprint of their individual and communal lives, there is no privileged center needed. Amidst the infinitude of God’s love, there is no scarcity over which to fight. This knowledge is too wonderful for us, but it’s knowledge worthy of our striving, as it just might set us free.