What Is White Privilege?

 

 

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What Is White Privilege?

via My Feet Only Walk Forward by Brandon Lacy Campos on 9/16/08

Hey folks:

As much as possible, I try and do only original content on my page. But sometimes, as with Rocki's letter and this blog post, there shit that needs circulating. The following is one of those things.

This is Your Nation on White Privilege
By Tim Wise / September 13, 2008

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."


White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.


White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.


White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.


White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.


White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."


White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.


White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.


White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.


White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.


And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain…


White privilege is, in short, the problem.


Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White. He has contributed essays to seventeen books, and is one of several persons featured in White Men Challenging Racism: Thirty-Five Personal Stories, from Duke University Press. A collection of his essays, Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male, will be released in fall 2008.

 

 

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treachery

i know that this may sound like treachery, but i’ve been pondering a question for quite some time now. ever since the reverend wright fracas broke out, i’ve wondered if there is any downside to barack obama being president? for a moment, let’s try and be intellectually honest about the question and set aside bush-rage. i’m not really talking politics here, i am much more interested in race relations with this question that anything else.

i don’t know much about wright, and i don’t think that i really need to. after all, i’m not talking specifics—i’m speaking much more generally than what he may or may not have said in the course of 30 years of sermonizing. i am using wright as a particular kind of embodiment of black thought and black rage. fundamentally, the reaction of america to wright was not merely predicated upon the incendiary or offensive or uncomfortable things he said. i think it was a complete rejection of his entire epistemology. of course, part of the media circus was that he was so intimately connected with a presidential front runner. of course, of course. but, i think that america was asking him, “what do you have to be angry about? your guy is running for president and might actually win. doesn’t that make us even?”

is that a fair assessment of the reaction to wright? *shrug* i think so. i believe that most of america was very, very happy that wright said things that were easy to decry. it was easy to marginalize him—reminiscent of dave chappelle’s defense of people like martin lawrence. chappelle said that calling lawrence crazy (after his exploits in NC during the shooting of the black knight movie) was a successful attempt to marginalize lawrence without trying to understand the pressures under which he lived. the same thing with chappelle’s africa trip. the same thing with wright. and, by extension, the same with black america. i believe that most intellectual black leaders in america knew what he was getting at—i believe that’s why it took so long for b. obama to finally distance himself from wright. the process of distancing himself was so convoluted and tortured b/c b. obama understood the underlying philosophical principles—it’s just that the expression of those principles made it really hard for him to stand up for them.

(i’m loving dashes right now—makes people think that i am taking a dramatic pause—and i am)

so, if you accept that premise, then let us go back to my original question. is there a downside to b. obama being president? i mean, ok, as it pertains specifically to race relations irrespective of your individual political concerns. and, in particular, i’m thinking of this question in two different lights. sub-question one: would there be a sense (overt or otherwise) of “ok, your guy is president now. you can shut up about all inequality crap. i’m tired of dealing with it.” sub-question two: what does an obama presidency mean for the mingling of black culture (no, not hip hop—i mean our cultural identity as slave-descended africans) with mainstream culture?

thoughts?

i love pre-crazy michael jackson, but....

some thoughts on proposals of change...

just a note or two...

last night i was watching c-span (i know), and newt gingrinch was giving a speech at the american enterprise institute. it was an interesting speech...it was full of thoughtful (if flawed) critique and bold ideas. i was in a listening mood because i had just finished listening to eboo patel talking about pluralism and religion...something that i almost always end up rejecting—not because i don’t agree with that idea; it’s because i don’t think that it’s entirely a workable notion when applied to religion and faith. the very notion of religion and faith seem to contradict the foundational principles of pluralism. however, i find it interesting and strangely satisfying to think and talk about. but, i digest (i love the family guy. i also love thunderlip.)

how about the idea as the american consumer as a consumable product? we’ll talk later...

i caught the last half hour or so of newt’s (heh heh) speech. he was talking about some of the challenges faced in determining the course of our future. specifically, he was talking about economics and culture and how the two inform one another. he talked about the situation in detroit...it’s decline and the policies that led to that decline. i don’t really know much about it—he intimated that it was all the fault of liberals and their desire to manage everything and redistribute wealth and their tendency toward bureaucracy. *shrug* could be...i woke up this morning thinking that there are a few things about which liberals need to be honest. the most important of those being not everything system that we humans encounter can be or even should be managed. economic output, the environment (specifically, wilderness), etc., etc. sometimes, i think that it’s just enough to get out of the way. i digested again.

since i didn’t catch the entire speech i didn’t really understand the point of bringing up detroit. maybe he was saying that since it was the site of so many failed liberal policies that it was time to try something that “makes sense.” anyway, he laid out seven proposals (of which i only remember a couple) to radically change or at least stake out a new direction. ( i think in a lot of ways, he’s making the implicit argument that the “great society” experiment has failed, and it’s time to try something else. though, how he can say that while at the same time our country has experienced the greatest economic expansions in the history of mankind is curious.

how bad-ass was david cook the other night on american idol? another reason to love chris cornell, as if i need more.

anyway, the one thing that he said that kind of stuck in my craw was the idea that adolescence was a contrived notion. it was a contrived notion of 19th and 20th century liberals...all of the things to counteract the growing power of monopolistic corporations...labor unions, child labor laws, etc. etc. but, i absolutely disagree with his analysis of social history. i mean, the reason that he addresses adolescence in particular is because of the amount of crime and the amount of leisure associated with the lives of teenagers. i don't disagree with that...i do agree that a great deal of undirected leisure time can lead to some bad stuff. the point of his analysis with which i take umbrage is the notion that somehow the social and economic reforms of the 19th century somehow created a class of people with nothing to do. on the contrary, the growth of the age group called adolescence has more to do with our astounding economic success than any law. it's the same effect that we see in financially successful families. if the parents go to college and do well for themselves, not only will their kids be more likely to do well, but also the parents will have something to leave for the kids and grandkids--and life becomes "easier" for successive generations. makes sense? doesn't it make sense that the same principle could be applied to a society? doesn't it make sense that as the country as a whole (not just a privileged few) became wealthier and moved through demographic transition, children wouldn't have to work to support smaller and more educated families?

The accompaniment

HOW FREAKIN' CUTE IS THIS?!?!

Religious fundamentalism and the Constitution

My friend, Leah the Lawyer, posed an interesting question with regard to the religion, the threat we currently face, and how the Founding Fathers (FF) might have faced the question. Here's a bit of what she wrote...

"I was wondering the other day, as I drove around, what would Thomas Jefferson think about the War on Terror. What would our Founding Fathers think, if they were presented with the knowledge that religious fundamentalists who had no qualms about sending themselves, their wives, or even their children, into battle armed to a T in order implement a suicide bombing."

I revisited my plan for this post Friday night. I was flipping through my Thomas Jefferson reader while I was kicking it at work and I re-read his first inaugural speech. I came across a quote that sort of summed it up for me. He said

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

I think that's the crap shoot right there. That's the whole ballgame...we are asked every day to put aside the process (the Constitutional processes) and trust President Bush. Stop asking questions about Gonzalez, trust me. Stop asking questions about how I manage the war prisons, trust me. I think that TJ would be more alarmed about the manner in which we have decided to prosecute this war than the threat itself. I say this because I believe that the FF's and their contemporaries were living through a time of extreme religious intolerance and violence. The Age of Reason saw the end (essentially) of the modernization of Christianity. Even at the time of the constitutional convention there were instances of religious extremism in America--it was one of the factors that brought about the end of the Articles of Confederation. Ultimately, I believe that TJ would see the war on terror as a more potent threat to our survival than the threat of radical islam.

On a tangential note, is there a policy difference in thinking of radical islam as a strategic threat as opposed to a threat to our way of life? i mean...can we think of radical islam as a threat to the lives of people rather than a wholesale assault on the idea of america? i know that the radicals want to destroy us--not just our lives and property (well, maybe they'll keep our property) but also our ideas. but, have they? i mean have they even come close to hurting our ideas? just a thought or two...i'll expand in a later post, i think.

exasperation...

ford
jack daniels
enterprise
branson tractors
rocky boots
fox sports
wrangler
the US Army
bud light
dickies
big tex (?)

these are just a few of the companies/organizations with whom mike vick should have had endorsement deals. apparently, they aren't shy about benefiting from animal cruelty for the entertainment of the masses--they have ad space on the nationally broadcast bull riding competitions.

this is what they say. *shrug*