Two rulers

Stockton-on-Tees is a town of two postcodes standing almost shoulder to shoulder.

Drive ten minutes one way and you’ll find the kind of streets estate agents fight over. Drive ten minutes the other and you’ll find streets that wouldn’t look out of place on Benefit Street.

Same town. Same council. Two very different lives.

I saw it up close for years.

Deb and I were part of the leadership team at Destiny Church, a congregation that was, almost by accident and certainly by grace, a genuine mix of Black and white, comfortable and struggling.

Every Sunday, people who might otherwise never have met sat in the same room, sang the same songs and then went home carrying completely different burdens.

You learn something in a church like that.

You learn that privilege and disadvantage aren’t opposites.

We often talk about them as though they’re a seesaw. One person has privilege, another has disadvantage, and somehow the two must balance each other out.

But I don’t think life works like that.

A seesaw has one measurement: who’s higher and who’s lower. Life needs more than one ruler.

One ruler might measure race.

Another might measure class.

Another might measure family stability, education, geography or opportunity.

And if you put those rulers against the same person, you can get very different answers.

A young white man can have an advantage because he’s white and a profound disadvantage because he grew up poor.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out.

They don’t contradict each other.

They can both be true.

I’ve been thinking about that congregation again this week because of the seven young men who died on the A66 near Middlesbrough.

You’ve probably seen the headlines. A police pursuit. A terrible crash. Two police officers among the dead, alongside five teenagers and young men.

It’s the kind of story that encourages instant verdicts.

“No sympathy.”

“Look what deprivation does to people.”

But clean verdicts are rarely where the truth lives.

So, at the risk of annoying everyone, I think two things can be true at once.

Two rulers, not one seesaw

Let’s start with the uncomfortable one.

White privilege is real.

That doesn’t mean every white person has an easy life. It doesn’t mean poverty disappears because you’re white. And it certainly doesn’t mean someone growing up on a struggling estate has somehow won the lottery of life.

It simply means that race can make some aspects of life easier for a white person than they would otherwise be.

But here’s the other uncomfortable truth.

Growing up white in South Bank, or in some of the parts of Stoke I know well, or in Pillgwenlly in Newport, can still leave a young man facing educational outcomes, employment prospects and life chances that would horrify someone comparing his life with that of a more comfortable neighbour a few miles away.

These aren’t contradictory statements.

They’re measuring different things.

Race is one ruler.

Class and postcode are another.

Put both rulers against the same young man and you can get two truthful answers.

He can experience advantages because he’s white, while simultaneously being disadvantaged because he grew up poor.

Privilege in one area doesn’t magically cancel disadvantage in another.

That seems obvious to me now.

But it doesn’t always seem obvious in the public conversation.

The boys we keep failing

The educational figures around disadvantaged white boys should make us uncomfortable too.

For years, they have been among the poorest-performing groups educationally. Only a small proportion of the most disadvantaged white British boys go on to university.

Whatever we mean by “white privilege”, it plainly isn’t delivering much privilege in that classroom.

And I’ve seen the consequences of disadvantage elsewhere.

I’ve sat as a magistrate on the North Staffordshire bench. I chair WALK, which works with men coming out of prison and addiction.

And one of the things that has struck me repeatedly isn’t simply wickedness.

It’s the difficulty some young men have in thinking beyond the immediate moment.

There is good evidence that growing up in chronic adversity can affect development, including the ability to regulate behaviour, plan ahead and weigh consequences.

That doesn’t remove responsibility.

But it does help explain why “just think about the consequences” isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

If your childhood has largely trained you to survive tonight, imagining next Tuesday can be a surprisingly difficult skill.

And that brings us back to the A66.

Whatever the circumstances surrounding that terrible night, driving the wrong way down a motorway at speed is an appalling decision.

People died.

Actions have consequences.

But if our only response is, “What sort of idiot would do that?”, we’ve missed something important.

The better question might be:

What sort of childhood produces a young man who can make that decision?

Because by the time he gets behind the wheel at three in the morning, the story has already been running for years.

Responsibility and mercy

There are two obvious objections.

The first is:

“So poverty made him do it? So nobody is responsible?”

No.

I’ve sat on the bench. I believe in consequences.

Not because punishment is inherently good, but because actions have consequences and young people need to understand that their choices affect other people.

Take away responsibility altogether and you don’t get compassion.

You get chaos.

But the other objection is just as wrong:

“So poor white boys simply need to try harder?”

I don’t buy that either.

Nobody chooses the family they’re born into, the stability of their home, the school they’re sent to or the opportunities available in their neighbourhood.

You can’t lecture someone into having had a different childhood.

And that’s the uncomfortable bit.

Responsibility and disadvantage can both be true.

A person can be responsible for what they did and still have been profoundly shaped by circumstances they didn’t choose.

Justice has to be able to hold both truths.

So what actually helps?

This is where I find the work of people like Richard Reeves interesting.

His work on boys and men at the bottom of the economic ladder isn’t about culture-war slogans. It’s about fixing broken rungs in the ladder.

More male teachers, particularly in primary education.

Better vocational and technical education.

Real alternatives for boys who aren’t academically inclined but are perfectly capable of building a good life.

James Heckman’s work on early childhood points in the same direction: intervention early in life can produce much better outcomes than trying to repair everything once a young person is already in crisis.

And Robert Putnam, in Our Kids, makes another observation that rings true to me.

A generation ago, a poor child might still have had access to many of the same things as a wealthy child: a youth club, a football team, a Sunday school, a teacher who cared, a neighbour who noticed when they were getting into trouble.

Much of that informal scaffolding has disappeared from poorer communities.

The problem isn’t simply that poor children have less money.

Sometimes they have fewer people.

That’s one reason WALK matters to me.

The men we work with aren’t simply people who have made bad choices. Many have grown up with pieces of the scaffolding missing: absent fathers, broken homes, schools that gave up on them, youth clubs that disappeared, addiction and chaos becoming normal before adulthood had even begun.

Our job isn’t to excuse what they’ve done.

It’s to help build some scaffolding back.

It isn’t a grand government programme.

Often it’s simply a Tuesday night in a church hall, with somebody showing up again when everyone else has stopped.

Justice, mercy and humility

I keep thinking about Destiny Church.

That room full of people who had very little reason, on paper, to share a building.

Different skin colours. Different bank balances. Different postcodes. Different life experiences.

Nobody pretended those differences didn’t exist.

We simply refused to let them determine who sat next to whom.

Perhaps that’s where I land on the A66 too.

Seven young men are dead.

Two were police officers who left home expecting to come back.

That matters more than winning an argument about privilege or deprivation.

But if all we do is choose between “no sympathy” and “society made them do it”, then we’ve learned very little.

Micah put it better than I ever could:

“What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Not one of those things.

All three.

Justice for the families who have lost people they expected to see again.

Mercy for young people whose lives were shaped by circumstances they never chose.

And humility — enough to recognise that a comfortable upbringing doesn’t qualify me to pass judgement on a life I never had to live.

Perhaps that’s the mistake we keep making.

We keep reaching for the seesaw.

Who has privilege?

Who is disadvantaged?

Who has it worse?

But that’s the wrong question.

Take two rulers instead.

Measure race.

Measure class.

Measure family.

Measure opportunity.

Measure the postcode you were born into.

Put them alongside the same life and don’t force the measurements to agree.

Because they don’t have to.

A young man can be privileged in one dimension and profoundly disadvantaged in another.

Understanding that doesn’t excuse his choices.

It helps us understand the person making them.

And perhaps understanding is where justice, mercy and humility begin.

I don’t have a tidy ending to this.

Perhaps there isn’t one.

But I know which church I’d rather build.

And I know which room I’d rather sit in.

The room where we can name the differences honestly, without pretending that one cancels out the other.

Because sometimes the truth isn’t found at either end of the seesaw.

Sometimes you need two rulers.

One life.