This lecture refers again to Chapter 18 of Mann and Zatz, to issues of privilege, institutional racism, and forgiveness.

This lecture was initiated by a dialog with Mark Yesia at CSUDH. On October 31, Mark wrote:

"I'm a white male with all of these privileges. How can I help others by using this so called advantage? I see some of these but don't understand how I can use this to help others. I feel that right now there is not much I can do. Maybe later in life when I finish my education I will be in a situation to do more. What do you think?

I think that students are in a very special place in the social system. Because of the many changes in the social structure in recent decades you are no longer young people to whom older scholars dispense word and concepts of wisdom. Often you are older than, and may very often have more as well as different experience than the scholars who teach you. So you have more power than we traditionally associate with "the student." You have lives that have given you valuable status and experience. You stand in a mixed relationship to your teachers, for you are part learner, part teacher, part colleague. And you stand in a mixed relationship to the world, for you are part new to the journey of life, and yet part experienced, part shaped already by those experiences, part dependent on what you will become, yet part independent, having already become.

So no pat answer of you will give back to the world when you are grown and have gained authority of your own. No pat answer of you are young and in a preparatory stage, so wait till later to worry about these things. All of us are responsible, all of the time for the cooperative association we create for and with each other.

But we must also bear in mind accountability and forgiveness. There has been for some time a flaw in our collective sense of accountability, generally in equating accountability to a bottom-line approach. If I invest $100,000 in your education, then I expect that over the next five years you will return a profit of some sort near to $100,000. A practical example of such reasoning is the attempt state bar associations made in the early eighties to help minority students study for the bar. Most of them were having to work, and thus could not take off the six weeks or so that might have made the vital difference in whether or not they passed the bar. Many state associations offered scholarships of $2000. Unfortunately, to that scholarship was attached the string that the recipient must then practice, say, two years, in the area of the bar association that awarded the scholarship. So if the student did amazingly well, and was offered a high-powered job on Wall Street because of grades and performance, the accountability requirement of payback for what had been given took precedence.

Accountability cannot and must not be measured as a one-on-one correspondence with immediate payback. We cannot know in what form our good deeds will be repaid. And we cannot know precisely when that will happen. Moreover, we must forgive, for we must not do good with one eye on the investment return. It may be another generation that eventually contributes the fruit of our cooperative association to the group. Those who have long been excluded may need to feel included for years before they feel trusting enough to give. One does not teach, counting on any given student to carry the torch of learning on. One teaches them all, knowing that some will carry that torch on, and we may never know which or how. That is the faith of the cooperative association which governs legitimately.

This brief analysis suggests that recognizing and maintaining an awareness of one's privilege is the greatest assurance one can give of not oppressing further, of not oppressing others, and of not accepting oppression. Cornel West has said that the role of the liberal in conservative times is to keep the story of liberalism alive. I think perhaps the role of justice in difficult times is to keep the awareness of justice alive. The rest will follow in due time.