With Thanksgiving over and a new year on the horizon, I find myself reflecting on this season of contrasts. While some are enjoying holiday shows and glitz and glamour, others are losing their jobs and wondering how they will pay the rent next month. While some are buying gifts for everyone they care about, others are trying to figure out how to keep food on the table as prices keep rising. While some have pies galore around tables and at parties, others never even consider dessert because it’s a luxury. We live in a land of jaw-dropping abundance and mind-numbing scarcity.
Scarcity pie is one of the pillars of the foundation of white supremacy upon which this country was built, and it’s my least favorite pie of all. White supremacy in its most basic form is the idea that whiteness and white people are superior to all other races. Scarcity is both an ideology and a lived reality. Scarcity means there is only one pie that is divided into pieces for all the people, organizations, institutions, leaders, neighborhoods, communities, schools, churches, mosques, temples, synagogues — you get the idea. As a pastor for 33 years, I have seen scarcity at work when congregations compete with each other for what they perceive as a fixed number of people who will become members of churches, instead of working together to help people in their neighborhoods thrive.
Historically, scarcity has functioned to keep the masses fighting each other for scraps because God forbid the day should come when the masses combine efforts and work together for the good of all and not just for the wealthy and white and Christian. When we are bamboozled into thinking there is only one pie, we lean on another pillar of white supremacy called competition. We are schooled from a very young age on how to use competition against each other. Often it begins innocently enough when we are divided into sides and we are coached on how to help our side win and the other to lose.
In the city of Chicago where I live and organize and pastor a church, competition is fierce. If you don’t believe me, check out the race we just endured to elect 10 people to serve on the Chicago Board of Education. Competition is made fiercer by scarcity pie.
Black and brown communities on the South and West sides of the city believe that newly arrived immigrants are eating their already-small or missing slice of the pie. Long-term immigrants who own houses and are well established, but still have not been given a legal pathway to citizenship, believe the newly arrived immigrants are eating their piece of the path-to-citizenship pie. Lower-income white communities have bought into the idea that newly arrived immigrants are eating their piece of the affordable-housing pie. Watching our City Council duke it out with the mayor for a budget that is responsible is a lesson itself in scarcity pie as they trade things that have real-time impact on people’s lives.
Nationally, we have just witnessed an election that was all about pie. The president-elect has promised in advance that the billionaires in this country will get more of the pie than anyone else because they deserve it since they have the most money (and he needs them to keep sending it his way to pay off his criminal defense lawyers). He has promised to stop sharing any of the immigration pie with anyone wanting to enter this country so he will close the borders to refugees and immigrants permanently. His allies have promised to shrink the marriage pie by overturning the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which gave queer couples the right to marry. He has promised to shrink the pie of bodily autonomy and choice so that women and transgender people no longer get to eat of the pie of choice.
The list goes on.
The twist to all of this is that there is plenty of pie to go around. The key is in how it’s distributed. As the host of a dinner, you know that you don’t put everything out all at once. Instead, you have more of everything on hand, and you put it out as it’s needed. Just because we are told we need to share one pie doesn’t mean there aren’t dozens more in the kitchen or the pantry. The $18 billion we have sent to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, to fund the genocide in Gaza? Solid proof there is always more pie.
As we gather around tables of all sorts and sizes this holiday season, what if we all refused to eat of the pies of scarcity and competition and recommitted to the pies of abundance, generosity, sharing and the common good? They taste better anyway.
The Rev. Rev. Beth Brown is a pastor at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church Chicago and director of Faith Community Initiative.
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