- Cruising through Zambia on buses.
Yesterday, I sat in the office of a bus station trying to convince the ticket vendor that “Ruth” really is my surname, and not just my wife’s name. After a few minutes and miles of confusion, he consented and started writing the tickets. He was a man about my age, quick with logistics and very helpful. He sat at a desk littered with the ticket and receipt books for eight scheduled buses. While he sat there in his bright yellow and purple uniform, plainly reading, “Shalom Bus Services,” another young man walked in, looked around the office, and settling his eyes on me, asked coyly, “Can I have 2 tickets for tomorrow at 13?” I chuckled equally coyly and said, “This man here is the boss. You’ll have to ask him.”
It was a brutal, uncamoflauged example of what countless people call, “White Privilege.” Immediately, I felt the centuries of cultural, sociological, anthropological, business, and religious histories conspiring together to give me, as a white male, the “benefit of the doubt.” In this singular case, the benefit of the doubt was strong enough to overcome countless obstacles including the fact that I was sitting in athletic shorts, a t-shirt, flip flops, and a raincoat covered in fresh sweat from a morning in the bush, while the other people in the room wore coordinated uniforms and name badges. Still, when trying to decide the person most likely to be in charge, the “benefit of the doubt” went to the unkempt white man…
READ THE REST OF “THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT” HERE.
This blog post like all posts labeled BLOG on this website, first appeared on the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church blog, Glory Be: A Tale of Two Zambian Trained Missionaries. There, you can find scores of other original blog posts by Andrew Ruth.
The original introduction is reproduced above, but to read the entire post in its original format, please visit “The Benefit of the Doubt.”
Andrew David Ruth 