A Classroom in Rural Georgia, 1977
In 1977, teaching positions were hard to find. That summer I spent three weeks in Europe, and when I came home, a letter was waiting for me from a school system in rural central Georgia. They were offering me a job as a Title I reading teacher for seventh and eighth grade. I was young and adventurous, so I packed my things at my parents’ home, threw them into the trunk of my car, and drove south.
Over seven periods a day, I taught 120 students. Two of them were White. The other 118 were Black. When we tested them at the start of the year, most were reading somewhere between a kindergarten and a fourth-grade level. By the end of the year, the average student’s reading level had risen significantly. Those children could learn. What they had been given was something else.
Why were there only two White students in the entire junior high? By 1977, desegregation was the law. It was not the practice. White families had built a private school. They couldn’t legally turn Black students away, so they set tuition low enough for White families to afford and just high enough that Black families could not. Beyond that, the community was still deeply shaped by the Ku Klux Klan. It would have been unthinkable, in that place and time, for a Black family to try to enroll.
The boundaries reached me too. As a White man from the North, I was shut out of friendships with White people there. I was also shut out of the Black community, whose members lived in constant fear of what the Klan might do to anyone who crossed a line.
One day, I asked my students what they planned to do over the summer. Would they swim at the city pool? A boy slowly raised his hand and told me they weren’t allowed to use the pool. I was appalled. After school, my teacher’s aide came to my room and told me I shouldn’t discuss things like that with my students. The Klan, she said, had ears everywhere. I took it as both a warning and a threat.
What I saw that year was a whole way of life built around skin color: in the classroom, in the town’s institutions, and in the laws and customs that held it all together. It raised a question I have carried ever since. Who decided what our skin would mean, and who gains from the answer?
The Invention of Race
Human skin comes in many shades. That much is simply true. What isn’t simply true is the story we have been told about those shades: that humanity divides into a few natural kinds, that each kind has its own character, and that some kinds deserve more standing than others. That story was invented.
The scientists who study human variation say so plainly. The American Association of Biological Anthropologists states that race does not accurately represent human biological diversity, and that the races we recognize socially are not biological categories. In the same breath, they insist that race and racism are real in their effects, down to people’s health and bodies.
That is the point I want to hold onto. Something people created can still shape lives. A category becomes powerful the moment institutions use it to decide who gets a job, a loan, a seat in a classroom or a swim in the city pool. In my own language, an interpretation hardens into an experience. Once a society interprets skin as a ranking, people begin to experience that ranking every day, and their responses to it shape them in turn.
“White” belongs on the list of inventions too. It is easy for those of us called White to think of ourselves as the default, the people without a race. But Whiteness has a history of its own. It was drawn and redrawn over time to mark who counted as fully belonging, and it carried a position of power within those relationships. The town I taught in didn’t treat White as one race among many. It treated White as the standard everyone else was measured against.
Who Gained From Inventing Race
The categories didn’t appear out of nowhere, and they didn’t appear all at once. They were built piece by piece, through laws, customs and justifications, by people who stood to gain. Following the gain is the clearest way I know to see how the invention worked.
The early English colonists in Virginia had no settled law of slavery. As historians Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross explain, they had to work out whether bondage was permanent, whether it passed to children, and whether baptism set a person free. Each answer was a decision, and each decision served someone.
In 1662, Virginia’s assembly ruled that a child would be bond or free according to the condition of the mother. That reversed English custom, which traced a child’s status through the father. The effect was enormous. Every child born to an enslaved woman became property at birth, including children fathered by the men who claimed to own her. One law turned the bodies of enslaved women into a means of producing wealth for generations.
Religion lent its blessing
I spent years in seminary and in the priesthood, so this part of the history is personal for me. In early Virginia, some people of African descent were Christians who claimed their freedom on that basis, and some won it. Slaveholders responded by changing the rules. A 1667 law declared that baptism did not free an enslaved person. Over the following decades, the law came to set “Christian” against “Negro,” until being Christian and being White had become signs of the same privilege.
Churches did more than stand by. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845, in Augusta, Georgia, after Baptists divided over slavery. In 1995, the Convention itself acknowledged that slavery played a role in its formation and that many of its forebears had defended the “right” to own slaves. I give them credit for saying so. But the confession shows how readily faith can be bent to bless an arrangement that profits the faithful.
The church I once served has no grounds to point fingers. For more than a century, the Jesuits of Maryland held people in slavery on their plantations. In 1838, to pay off debts at Georgetown College, they sold the people they had enslaved to plantations in Louisiana, and most of those sold were children. Later, Catholic dioceses and religious orders helped carry out the boarding school policy described below: a recent effort by archivists, historians and tribal members identified 87 Catholic-run boarding schools for Native children. I was ordained into that church. It is not easy to write these sentences, but leaving them out would make me exactly the kind of selective storyteller I am criticizing.
Schools learned to keep the line
The private school in my Georgia town had a history behind it, too. After the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in 1954, White families across the South founded hundreds of private academies. As the Equal Justice Initiative documents, some states even used public money to help, leaving two school systems in many communities: one public and Black, one private and White. My students’ kindergarten-level reading scores didn’t come from their ability. They came from what that arrangement gave them and what it kept from them.
Justifying the unjustifiable
None of this could last on force alone. It needed a story, and the story was natural inferiority. If some people were by nature less than fully human, then the whip, the auction block, the broken family and the lynching rope could be explained away. The story let people who thought of themselves as decent fail to see the humanity in those they harmed, and fail to see the inhumanity in themselves.
No single person or meeting invented all this. It grew over centuries, through many actors with overlapping interests: planters, legislators, clergy, school boards and ordinary people who went along. What they shared was this: the categories worked in their favor.
Who Paid the Price
It is easy to talk about “the oppressed” as if they were one faceless group. They weren’t, and they aren’t. The same machinery of racial ranking landed on different peoples in different ways, and each of them resisted, adapted and created in ways of their own.
For Black Americans, the cost reached across generations. Enslaved people could not own the fruits of their labor, much less pass them on. After emancipation came segregation, exclusion from good jobs, and practices like redlining that kept families out of neighborhoods where homes gained value. The result is visible today. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in 2022 the typical Black family held about 16 cents in wealth for every dollar held by the typical White family. Wealth is more than money. It is the down payment on a first home, the cushion when someone gets sick, and the inheritance that gives the next generation a head start. My students in Georgia were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who had been denied all of it.
The pattern took other forms too:
- Indigenous peoples, as distinct nations rather than one minority group, saw their children taken to federal boarding schools between 1819 and 1969. The Interior Department’s own investigation found that the schools renamed children, cut their hair and suppressed their languages in an effort to strip away who they were.
- Chinese immigrants were singled out by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from entering the country and showed how a racial category could decide who was allowed to belong at all.
- Latino communities show that ranking works by shade as well as by ancestry. In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, a majority of Latino adults said darker skin hurts a person’s chances of getting ahead, and darker-skinned Latinos reported more discrimination, sometimes from other Latinos.
None of these peoples were simply victims. They built churches and schools, kept languages alive in secret, organized, sued, marched and made music and art that changed the whole country. Any honest account has to hold both the harm and that strength.
Who Benefits Now
If the costs were passed down, so were the benefits. They show up in ordinary places: a house inherited from parents who were allowed to buy in a good neighborhood, a family loan for college, a friend of a friend who knows about a job opening, a name on a résumé that never makes an employer hesitate. Perhaps the quietest benefit is simply being treated as normal, never having to explain where you’re “really” from or prove that you belong.
I want to be careful here, because this is where many White readers stop listening. Receiving an advantage is not the same as designing the system that produced it. None of us chose our parents, our neighborhood or the color of our skin. I didn’t create the arrangement I walked into in Georgia. But I benefited from it, even there. I could leave that town at the end of the year. My students could not.
Privilege also doesn’t mean an easy life. A White person can grow up poor, get sick, lose a job or a marriage and suffer greatly. Privilege only means that skin color isn’t one of the obstacles. That is a narrower claim than critics often hear, and a harder one to deny.
Today, the advantages rarely depend on someone openly hostile making each decision. They are carried by familiar practices: school funding tied to local property values, hiring through personal networks, lending based on family wealth. Each practice can look neutral on its own. Together, they keep sorting people in much the same way the old laws did.
That doesn’t make every White person equally powerful, or every person of color equally burdened. A White factory worker and a White senator don’t hold the same power. The point is to follow the mechanisms, not to assign guilt by color. Assigning worth by color is the very thing we are trying to undo.
The Melting Pot as a Harmful Soup
I understand the appeal of the melting pot. Who wouldn’t want a country where people from everywhere share one common life? At its best, the image promises that no one has to stay an outsider forever.
But look at what the pot has actually asked of people. It asked immigrants to drop their accents and shorten their names. It asked Spanish speakers to give up their language in public, and it still does. It asked Black Americans to accept a place at the edge of the table and stay quiet about how they got there. It asked Indigenous children to forget their own languages, enforced by teachers with a strap. The pot was never neutral. Someone had already decided what the soup was supposed to taste like, and it tasted like the people who held power.
That is why I call it a harmful soup. The differences are supposedly dissolved, but the unequal treatment survives the cooking. People are told to give up what made them distinct, and then they discover that their skin still decides how they will be treated. They have lost their own story without being granted full membership in the new one.
There is a real difference between sharing cultures and being made to disappear into someone else’s idea of normal. Sharing is chosen, it goes both ways, and it adds to what everyone has. Disappearance is demanded of some and never of others, and it subtracts. A good neighborhood potluck is the opposite of a melting pot: everyone brings their own dish, and nobody is asked to stop being who they are to get a seat.
Belonging Without Disappearance
Saying that race was invented does not mean pretending it no longer matters. That would be another way of asking people to disappear. The categories were made, but the wounds they caused are real, and so is what people have built in response. Many have turned an identity that was forced on them into a source of community, pride and resistance. No one gets to take that away in the name of being “colorblind.”
“I don’t see color” may be offered as reassurance. But what reassurance does it offer someone whose color has shaped how they are treated? It can become a way of refusing to acknowledge what another person has lived through. And “I have friends who are Black” tells us about someone’s relationships; it does not settle the question of their prejudices. Friendship does not automatically undo what we have learned to assume about people. These familiar lines become excuses whenever they let us stop listening, stop questioning, or declare ourselves beyond examination.
I know a little of what it costs to hide part of yourself in order to belong. As a gay man, and as a priest who chose to leave the priesthood, I learned how belonging can come with conditions attached. My experience is not the same as my students’ experience, and I won’t pretend it is. But it taught me that the demand to fit in is never only about manners. It is about who gets to set the terms.
This is where I think dignity lives. Dignity isn’t a badge some people are issued and others denied. It shows up in how we treat one another, in whether we make room for each other to exist as the particular people we are. Every time a society ranks people by color, it betrays that dignity. Every time we make room for difference without demanding someone’s disappearance, we bring it to life.
So here is something to try this week. Notice whose differences you welcome, whose you merely tolerate, and whose you quietly expect to change. Notice who has to explain themselves in your world, and who never does.
That boy in my Georgia classroom was told he couldn’t swim in his own town’s pool. Nearly fifty years later, I am still living with the question that moment raised: What would it mean to build a shared life in which belonging does not require anyone’s disappearance? I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you see it differently.
