Okay to be White

Dear Gavin,

It was really great meeting you in person last week. Thanks for making the trek over our way, and it was great worshiping together with you. Our conversation after church really helped me to fill in some of the cracks.

Near the end of our conversation we talked a bit about the consternation that was created that time when somebody posted a bunch of fliers around a campus somewhere that said “It’s okay to be white.” The furious reaction that that received was enough to demonstrate (for good and all) that when it comes to ethnic relations, we are a demented people.

But I wanted to follow up on that part of our conversation because there are some subtleties in it that are often missed. The biblical subtext underneath what I am about to say here has to do with the subjects of contentment, envy, competition, and desire. So, with that said, let me adjust the phrase it’s okay to be white, and apply it directly to you, and say it’s okay for you to be white. I add those words for you because it provides the context and the rationale for the rest of the statement. It is okay for you to be white because that is how God made you. Of course it is okay. Shall the pot say to the potter, “why did you make me like this?” (Rom. 9:20). Who gets to talk back to God? In the same way, and for exactly the same reason, it is okay for a black man to be black.

Rejecting this, or rebelling against it, is the ultimate in futility. And a moment’s thought should reveal that this applies to a host of issues and isms, but particularly to the isms that are tearing our culture apart right now. One person is not content with the biological sex that God assigned to him in his chromosomes, and so he wants to be a woman. The root sin there is discontent and envy, which then leads to the disordered sin of self-mutilation and confusion. The ardent feminist is discontented with the treatment she receives as a woman, and so she becomes an activist working for all the prerogatives and privileges that men have. And anything that springs from envy, rivalry, and competition in such areas is going to end in disorder and chaos.

Now someone is going to ask here if I am saying that it is sinful for work for social justice, trying to correct the inequities that tend to swirl around ethnic differences, or sexual differences. The answer to that is no, and then yes. It is never a sin to work for justice, but the justice you work for must be defined biblically. Biblical injustice is never defined by the simple fact of disparity. When someone says that it is injustice for a white man to make more money than a black man, that is simply the voice of egalitarian envy. The only thing to do there is to repent of that attitude. But if someone else says that it is injustice for a white landowner to withhold the wages he agreed to pay his black harvesters, and he does this because he knows some people and can get away with it, then that really is injustice (Jas. 5:4). Work to get rid of that.

So then, God the Creator sets the baseline for you, and He is setting it for you. He made you a white male, and He did this because—follow me closely here—He wanted you to be a white male. That is why it is okay for you to be a white male. It is more than okay. It is mandatory. It is to be celebrated and received with gratitude. And this is the fundamental attitude that has gone missing from all our ethnic discussions, the attitude of thanksgiving and gratitude.

It is Christmas morning, and all of us are opening our presents. The basic duty that every last one of us has is the duty of gratitude. You opened your present up, and it is the gift of being white and male. The person next to you opens hers up, and she is black and female. God gifted her that way, and she is to be as grateful for that as you are grateful for what you were given.

But alas, this is not only a wonderfully created world, but it is a fallen one. Our first parents sinned, and we sinned in and through them, and so it is that all the children of men are glancing around the room in order to see what everyone else received. And having done this, we start squabbling over the presents.

Now we believe that we have a right to squabble because it seems self-evident to us that some of these gifts are way more valuable than others are. We conclude that God is playing favorites again. We decide that He must be the God of partiality, and so the squabbling starts.

We can start this kind of quarrel in two different ways. We can rejoice in what we got, glance over at the others, and see that we clearly must be the favorite child, and so we go over to taunt them with our shiny new white privilege. That’s one way. The other way is that we can look enviously at what they got, and go over to try to grab it. That’s the other way. Sometimes the two ways combine, and things really get festive.

Now both these reactions are wicked, evil, sinful. And it is only when we try to push this doctrine of contentment into the corners that we discover just how sinful we are, and how slippery the human heart is. If we like what we have received, we get proud of what we have. If we don’t like what we have received, we get envious of others over what they have.

So we have to deal with the pride aspect first. You are white, as I can now testify, having met you. Your demeanor before God is to be profoundly grateful for that. But proud of it? What kind of sense would that make?

The black man who is walking with God is summoned to be as grateful for what he has received as you are for what you have received. It is okay for you to be white. It is not okay for him to be. It is okay for him to be black. It is not okay for you to be.

And obviously, by using the word okay here, I am understating it by a mile. It is fitting and fully appropriate. It is good. It is God’s design, and we have no business arguing with it.

So we deal with the pride first. But let’s deal with the envy now. The temptation for whites when we come to “deal with the envy,” is that of attempting to deal with the envy that lies behind so much of the race-hustling industry. We want to go address their obvious envy. Now if any of those guys happen to read this, I would urge them to go to God and deal with their envy. Sure. The way they talk about white privilege is envious and sinful, and they shouldn’t do it. But a more biblically serious way to live is to always deal with your own temptations first. What about your envy?

Let’s say that you applied to a university and you didn’t get in, and a black friend of yours did get in. You happen to know, because you are friends, that your test scores were higher than his, etc. It is legitimate for you to disagree with the affirmative action approach to admissions, but it is not legitimate for you to envy your friend’s acceptance. If he works hard and does well there, he should be grateful for what he received, and you should be grateful together with him. If you argue in your heart, saying that he didn’t really deserve that break, ask yourself what you should do with breaks that come your way when you didn’t deserve them. Has that ever happened? You should be grateful, and seek to turn a profit on it. If your friend does that, then rejoice with him. If your friend gets conceited and starts feeling entitled, and he begins to coast, then pray for him, and guard your own heart against that same toxic sin of entitlement.

Now of course, in the meantime, you may continue to shake your head at those who get wafted up into positions they are clearly not equipped to handle, but that is not your problem. Incompetent people getting promoted is an ancient phenomenon. We should be used to it by now.

But there is one more layer I need to address. It is okay to be white, but it is not okay to be white trash. It is okay to be black, but it is not okay to cop the pose of some warlord from South Central. As we cultivate what God has assigned to us, we can do it well, we can do it poorly, or we can do it rebelliously. The sin is found in the latter two, and never in the first.

God gave Adam a world that had a bunch of givens in it. There were rivers, and there was gold in Havilah, and there were fruit trees, and there were children to beget, and so on. In this situation, and with those givens, God told Adam to exercise dominion. He was to beget those children, he was to find the gold, he was to build boats for the river, he was to harvest the fruit, and so on. But this charge to exercise dominion did not include any license whatever to mess with the givenness of the creation. He would not have been exercising dominion if he had sought to make the rivers dry, or turn the gold into tin, or the fruit trees barren, or the children non-binary. He was to cut with the grain, and that grain is assigned by God. He was to welcome and embrace the nature of nature, along with the given nature of everything within nature, and he was then to enhance and adorn that.

And we have a moral responsibility to learn how to tell the difference. The fall disrupted our ability to do this well, but it did not remove our responsibility to do it well. The cultural mandate is still with us. So your task as a white kid is to figure out how to grow up into a godly and mature version of that. And if you do that, what you will be fifty years from now . . . will be more than okay.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson