“My name is Mike Kinman and I’m a supporter of Greenline Housing Foundation.
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. A city with a large Latino-Hispanic population and a sizable indigenous population, it was also highly segregated.
My parents bought their house in 1969. I grew up in that house from the time I was a year old until I moved out to go to college. The house was in an all-white neighborhood and I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was because of a history of restricted covenants in that area.
I had what I have experienced to be a fairly typical, white, progressive relationship with race – largely theoretical without the deep learning that comes from proximity to people of other races and with my own race privilege almost entirely unexamined. That didn’t change going to college in central Missouri.
Later, in St. Louis, I served in largely white institutions and then I became the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown St. Louis. St. Louis is also deeply segregated and downtown had been deeply affected by white flight and gentrification was beginning. It was during that time that I began to learn about redlining, the lack of home loans for black and brown people and other ways people of color were shut out from the primary escalator of personal wealth – home ownership.
When Michael Brown was murdered by the Ferguson police in 2014, I was drawn into the uprising that followed and was educated by amazing young, black, activists. I became more aware of my own privilege and was challenged to use it to dismantle systems of white supremacy. Not out of guilt but out of love for the amazing people I was meeting who were continually being traumatized by this system.
By the late 1990’s, my parents had paid offtheir home and it had significantly increased in value. This enabled them to sell the house and buy another house near the Universityof Arizona. They never would’ve been ableto buy that house if not for the wealth theyhad generated from a house they were uniquely able to buy in 1969 because of their whiteness. They lived in that house until my mom died in 2020. When my father died last year, the proceeds from the house sale passed to my brother and I.
I had just attended a Greenline fundraiser at All Saints and signed up to make a monthly donation. Then I realized that the only reason I had the money from my parent’s’ house inthe bank was because they were able to buy into a market that they couldn’t have bought into if they weren’t white. That I literally was holding onto money that was a result ofmy unique privilege.
In our church, we have a theology of the tithe – giving 10% of what we earn or haveas a sign that everything comes from God. I was convicted then to give 10% of my portion of what we netted from the house to Greenline. And as I did that I thought this was a great opportunity to invite others into. If others gavea small percentage of what they net whenthey sell their homes, it could provide a model for reparation that could be transformative.
Giving to Greenline felt incredible. Not only was I able to honor my parents, but there is a deep, deep joy to both living out your values in a bold way and knowing that you have made a life-changing difference in other people’s lives.
There is nothing I could buy with that money that would give me that deep of satisfaction.”
