Broken Expectations

2012-03-15

When I was a kid, my family called me the count.  Whenever I was bored, I would count things.  I counted all the lights in the sanctuary of my church, all the cars going the other way on the road, and all the birds eating stale bread off our deck.  I would occasionally announce to my family, “there are 11 birds out there.”  They would smile, look knowingly at each other, and tell me that was nice.

I wonder if my announcements changed them at all.  I wonder if it influenced how they saw the single sparrow, when I announced there were 10 just like it fluttering nearby.   At the time, I was so excited at my ability to gather this data that I felt compelled to announce it to anyone who happened to be nearby.  I never thought about the effect I could have on the people around me by announcing the results of my count.

I am having a spiritual crisis.  I am losing my grip on my expectations.  At first, I thought my life had become too segregated; I was simply surrounded by too many people like me.  But I think the problem is deeper.

I believe that every person is capable of love and greatness.  But somehow that belief is not informing my expectations.  I have been hearing a lot of statistics lately.  I have been hearing percentages of homes that are owner-occupied, percentages of students who are English-language learning or receiving free and reduced lunch, rates of diabetes and obesity among poor folks, different health outcomes for minorities and single-parent families, rates of incarceration for young black men, and that there is something called an achievement gap.  I hate that there is an achievement gap!  But I fear that I have come to expect it.

As much as I believe that every person is capable of greatness, if you were to pluck a middle class white kid from Southwest Minneapolis and a poor black kid from North Minneapolis and ask me if I had the same expectations for what they could achieve, I would say no.  And you know what, I would have the statistics to back me up.

Something weird has happened to prejudice: we have backed it up.  A child is no longer considered inferior because of the color of his skin.  He is considered inferior because of everything else in his life.

I am embarking on a spiritual fight to reclaim my expectations.  I want my expectations to match my beliefs.  The statistics will not tell you this, but I think my beliefs are the reality.  Every person is capable of love and greatness, especially if that is what their community truly expects of them.