By JIM NICHOLS

I could hardly wait until I was eight years old and eligible to play Cub Scout baseball. That was the earliest age at which boys in my city had the option of being in an organized league with dads as coaches, real bases with chalk lines, caps, and t-shirts with major league names on them for uniforms. My Cub career was only three years before I moved to the 3 & 2 league. There you got real uniforms and could wear metal CLEATS, which made you a true baseball player.

As expected, players in the first years of the Cub league had poorly developed skills. I spent my initial year in right field where there were more bees on the clover than hit balls coming that far. Finally, I got moved to the infield and then even to pitcher sometimes. My hitting improved too. 

Because the defense on each team was so bad, any batted ball had some probability of getting the hitter on base; it happened to me sometimes. Occasionally, I got to second or third or even scored. At no point, however, did I ever achieve that on my own with a “well-struck” hit. If I were on third base, it is because events involving others got me there.

It seems to me that there are many people in the world who believe that their position on the third base of life is because they hit a triple. The fact is, they got there because of others helping them. Even more likely is that they were born on third base.

Part of my training in chaplaincy involved taking a “white privilege” test. This was a set of true/false questions that probed our experiences and expectations of certain situations. There are multiple on-line versions of these tests, and the one I took showed me aspects of my life that I had not seen before. For instance (true or false):

When I enter a store, I can freely roam without attracting specific attention from the workers.

When I ask to speak to a manager, I can be confident that the person will be of my race.

When I encounter a police officer, I am not overly nervous.

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without co-workers suspecting I got the position because of my race.

I can be sure that my grandchildren will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

As I worked through the forty statements, I realized my position in human life had been largely determined by my education, gender, family finances, and racial background. I had, in fact, been born on third base.

I also realized that my background, as rich and deep as it was, had ignored or shielded me from certain information. How had I never heard of the Tulsa race riots of 1921 where thirty-five square blocks of the Black neighborhood were destroyed, and many killed? How had I never heard of “red lining” where loans or insurance or other investments could be denied based on racial, ethnic, or resident low income? I did not know what poll taxes were until I started college in another state and the pharmacy was a place you could pay the tax before you could vote. Every day in my boyhood neighborhood I passed by a series of buildings that were preserved as the school for Native American children in the past. We were proud of those buildings; only as adults did we learn that they were the sites of systematic removal of Native American heritage from the children in an attempt to turn them white.

When we see citizens and politicians striving to limit historical study, we realize they do not want the truth known; they do not want people “woke.” 

Everyone faces adversity and accomplishment should be rewarded. Deniers of history, however, ignore that the starting points for all people are not the same. “Trying harder” is not always effective. Historian Michael Sandel notes, “The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility.” That almost sounds like Bible. 

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospice chaplain