Seeing the Playing Field with New Eyes

​An All Our Fullness story about cultural identity.
By Ray Wiedmeyer

It was during a walk around Lake Harriet with a friend that the lightning struck. I am not sure how the conversation had developed but he shared something that day that has stuck with me ever since. He had read an article in The Atlantic entitled “The War on Poverty Is Over. The Rich Won.” 

Now I had never considered myself to be rich, or given much thought to what class we might be floating in. The statistic he shared that day was the amount of savings a “rich” person in America owns – their net worth. I realized that day that we were in the top tier of Americans when one considers wealth. I was shocked. After harboring negative thoughts all these years about the well-to-do, I suddenly found I was, in fact, one of them. 

Over time, I was challenged to realize how we had gotten here. Was it just because we had no kids and were frugal? We were not the beneficiaries of much generational wealth. But we were both able to attend college without accruing debt because the government chipped in much more than it does today. We were able to buy a house within five years of marriage because of a government guaranteed assumable loan in a neighborhood where property values would triple overtime. And we could afford to invest fully in government tax-advantaged savings accounts at home and at work that grew quickly.
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What we didn’t have was the need to work two or three poorly paying jobs just to make ends meet. One of us slipped easily into the burgeoning computer industry, learning on the job, in what would turn out to be a well-paying profession. We were able to move smoothly through life because we were white, educated, and had advantages not everyone had available to them.

Ray Wiedmeyer is a longtime member of Unity Church, where he serves on the Racial Justice Team and the Beloved Community Communications Team. In 2024, he served on the Ministerial Search Team that led to a successful call of Rev. Oscar Sinclair. Ray is also a longtime volunteer with Mano a Mano. He lives in St. Paul with his wife, Karen.

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