Invisible White Privilege

A few weeks ago a YouTube video surfaced showing two University of Oklahoma white frat boys leading a song that pledged to keep their fraternity racially pure even if it meant lynching a few students. The University moved quickly to close the fraternity's chapter and expel those involved.

The video and its contents did not surprise me. What struck me was that the young men in the video were only 19-years-old, yet they held sway over other students' futures. They possessed what I call invisible white privilege. Invisible to those who possess it, that is, seen by those who do not.

While I have been unable to find a study that places a dollar value on fraternity membership, it is most likely very high. A look among the country's leaders and you will find few who have not emerged from Greek Life with valuable contacts that helped them ascend the ladder to power. One study posits that only two US Presidents since 1825 were not members of fraternities (I actually doubt this because the Military Academies do not have fraternities and two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Harry Truman did not attend college). Still, the number is likely high and the study's more rigorous elements showed a high correlation between fraternity membership and prestigous jobs. In short, fraternities are deeply woven into the mechanics of upward mobility. Blocking someone because of race exhibits the worst traits of the old boy network.

The Oklahoma video comes shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice's report on Ferguson, Missouri. The two events show clear evidence that keeping poor people poor, whether out of prejudice or greed, is a working business/governing model in the U.S. Factor in the student loan industry, the judicial-industrial complex, and the plethora of businesses that benefit from poverty and the decline in upward mobility over the last four decades is no surprise.

The subject of class and race have provided much fertile ground for writing projects. Currently, along with my wife and partner, Anniken Davenport, I am developing a book proposal for a non-fiction book, tentatively titled, The Business of Poverty in which we hope to explore the various interests who benefit from perpetuating poverty. Anniken is also writing a dystopian novel that follows the exploitation curve into the future entitled Labor Force. To get a feel for the novel, check out the Labor Force novel blog.

Finally, a short story I wrote recently attempts to address invisible white privilege in its native habitat, the southern gated community. The story, entitled Lovely People, is now being considered by several magazines for publication.

The Southern gated community is a post-civil rights era phenomenon. As cities became more integrated, upper middle class whites moved to the suburbs. When the suburbs started integrating, the gated community filled the need of the paranoid well-to-do.

Lovely People is an homage of sorts to Flannery O'Connor. I firmly believe that if she were alive today, she would be writing about gated communities. In her staunch Catholicism, Flannery referred to the South as a Christ-haunted land. Her stories exaggerate and ridicule the hot, emotionally-driven fundamentalism so popular in the South. While those elements remain, I would posit that Nat Turner's ghost also haunts the South and his specter has built more gated communities than the carpenter from Nazareth.

The Power of Myth

A recent article circulating around the Internet claims that Christian missionaries rescued a wounded Jihadist whom they took for dead. He miraculously awoke several hours later and claimed God had sent him to hell where all his sins including the beheadings he carried out were shown to him. He repented and was sent back to earth where he converted to Christianity a few days later.

The story ticks all the boxes: selfless Christian missionaries, an epiphany at the gates of hell, and salvation through conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, I've found it difficult to verify any details associated with the story. The wounded Jihadist was allegedly picked up by missionaries from the Saint Dominican Catholic Presbytery of Ayyash. A search for the Saint Dominican Catholic Presbytery of Ayyash only produces multiple copies of this story. In other words, no Internet site independently lists this organization. I even searched the vatican site and found no mention of this supposedly Catholic mission.

To get down in the weeds on this, the term presbytery describes an architectural portion of a church (the area around the altar) or the house where a parish priest lives. A search for Ayyash does not reveal a place as the title would indicate, but rather is a popular Arabic name meaning bread seller. Further the grammar is wrong. The Dominican order takes its name from Saint Dominic, therefore the name should be Saint Dominic Catholic, etc., not Saint Dominican. Don't believe me, just ask Pope Franciscan.

If a story is too good to be true, it probably is. The story is almost verbatim one I heard in the 70s where an ex-US special forces was struck by lightning and forced to relive all the killings he committed in Vietnam. He repented and changed his life. Same story, different details.

One of the themes the Revelation trilogy is how susceptible we can be to deeply engrained myths. When events seem to reinforce those myths, it provides a sort of comfort. Of course, that means that those who manipulate events to conform to those myths may have for less than pure motives.

Eyes Wide Open Heading for the Abyss

When I began work on Revelation 11 two years ago, I thought it was a pretty straight forward story centered around a group of people who either genuinely believed or claimed to believe for their own reasons that we were in the endtimes. I explored this from a purely Christian point of view. Near the end of writing the book, I decided to throw a curve into the mix and have the second witness be a Muslim.

As I began to look for a historical or scriptural basis for this assumption, I found that Islam has a parallel eschatology to the Christian narrative. Most Islamic endtime prophecies are contained in the Hadith. A one-eyed leader called, Masih ad-Dajjal, is the Islamic version of the Anti-Christ. Both religions point to a climactic battle in the Middle East. For Christians this is Armageddon and for Muslims it is Dabiq. As I explained in my previous post, Dabiq is generally considered to be the hamlet of Murj-al-Dabiq that sits just across the border from Iraq in Syria

The Hadith claims that Jesus (Isa) returns to earth to "break the cross" -- meaning He explains that Islam is the one true religion. This may simply be the Islamic version of "from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead."

The parallels seem to have taken on a life of their own in the last two years. Islamic State leaders and fighters apparently believe they are and should be fulfilling the endtimes prophecies--in effect dragging the world toward a climactic battle between Islam and what the Hadith calls the "army of Rome." Under Islamic prophecy, the battle cannot take place until the Caliphate is re-established. Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claims to be the new Caliph.

According to a recent Atlantic article, a legitimate Caliph requires three things to fulfill the prophecy, "being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority." Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is of Quraysh decent, the tribe to which Mohammed belonged. He claims the second requirement, but the article notes there is more to the third requirement than meets the eye. To have "authority" in the sense the prophecy indicates, the Caliph must rule territory and hold the authority over the people living there by enacting and enforcing Sharia law. Islamic State fighters currently control or operate freely in an area larger than the United Kingdom.

Thousands of young Islamic men and women have traveled to the "Caliphate" from Europe and around the world to join the jihad. What is it about this ideology they find so appealing? The article quotes George Orwell when he was asked a similar question about Nazi fanaticism. Orwell describe Fascism as "psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal."