More on White Privilege

When last I posted here, my post was little more than a glorified cut-and-paste of someone else's thoughts. I'm comfortable with that, because the someone in question is Tim Wise, and he's far more competent than I am at understanding white privilege.

The article of his I quoted (in it's entirety) was focused on white privilege as it concerns the presidential election. The article is good and poignant, but it assumes some basic understanding of the mechanics of privilege. That's tricky stuff, so his follow-up is an incredibly helpful rundown of what white privilege is. His whole post can be found here.

In addition, there are two points worth highlighting:

That's the point: privilege is the flipside of discrimination. If people of color face discrimination, in housing, employment and elsewhere, then the rest of us are receiving a de facto subsidy, a privilege, an advantage in those realms of daily life. There can be no down without an up, in other words.

The above is white privilege in three sentences, which I don't think I've seen done anywhere as effectively or concise.

The below is the requisite call to action:

One way is by fighting for a society in which those privileges will no longer exist, and in which we will be able to stand on our own two feet, without the artificial crutch of racial advantage to prop us up. We need to commit to fighting for racial equity and challenging injustice at every turn, not only because it harms others, but because it diminishes us as well (even as it pays dividends), and because it squanders the promise of fairness and equity to which we claim to adhere as Americans.

It's about responsibility, not guilt.

Someone Else's Words

I've a lot I've been meaning to say about Sarah Palin, an awful lot really, but as you can probably guess from my last post, I'm more content to point towards others who are saying what I have to say, but better-phrased.

Here, however, I'm not content to just point you in the right direction. Below is the entire text of a post by Tim Wise. His blog deserves the traffic for this, but what he has to say is important enough to be plastered more or less everywhere. (Added bonus: it tackles both White Privilege and Sarah Palin!)

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.

Also, here's another short bit, in video format, that I can't help but recommend.

Stuff White People Do

While not as humorous as "Stuff White People Like", "Stuff White People Do" is a great blog that does the more uncomfortable part about seeking out white behaviors that white people are generally unaware, and the discussion of which makes them uncomfortable. Some of it is in jest (and when it is, it's obvious), but the majority of it is really good, uncomfortable to read stuff. If you're like me and a glutton for this sort of stuff, I recommend starting with either this post (fail to see institutional racism), or this one (think black people are wasting a wealth of opportunities). It's all very good, and while it isn't perfect, it's a fantastic attempt to keep the dialog going, and the writer has shown a lot of improvement since I first checked on the blog several months ago. Give it a shot.

Quoting Jezebel

Jezebel is a blog that maybe you have heard of. It's good, and flawed in its ways like all blogs. What I like about it is the stuff it does as a watchdog on the sexism vs. racism debate among democrats. Particularly striking was a piece today that was a counterpoint to an OP-ED piece Geraldine Ferraro wrote. The counter can be found here. Excerpted below is the best point of the critique:

Racial resentment, Geraldine, is racism. Why can't you see that? People coming up to you and complaining that they can't complain about black people is them complaining for being looked down upon for being racists! And, yes, their time ought to have passed, it should pass, they should learn and understand that racism should have no place in our society and as a party leader, a stalwart, a barrier-breaker you should be breaking it to them that "getting treated fairly for being white" means losing sometimes, and sometimes it means losing to a person of color. It means you are not always going to come out ahead, it means that the advantages your fathers or mothers faced 40 or 50 years ago (or less long ago than that) because of the color of their skin should disappear and you should lose to better-qualified candidates of color and then you should not ever, ever even in the dark recesses of your small, reptilian brain think "Well, that's what affirmative action has wrought in this country," because that, Geraldine is racism. And it's there, and it's palpable and the fact that you are the educated white Reagan Democrats standard bearer for how sexism is worse than racism and it's not really racism if it's just "racial resentment" makes me sick to my fucking stomach.

Sermon on Racism

It isn't up here yet, but it soon will be. Within the week, probably. Here's the blurb about the sermon:

Questions of Power: Race, Class, and Privilege
Presenter: Antonia Won, Ministerial Intern

UUs espouse equality and diversity, yet our congregations remain overwhelmingly white and middle class. Stories from New Orleans and New Mexico help to define the factors that perpetuate racism, and to find questions we can ask of ourselves.

The sermon was good, a remarkably well done handling of a thoroughly uncomfortable topic. How uncomfortable? It was a white female Canadian minister giving a sermon to white educated upper middle class Americans, and added to that setup is the dimension
of New Mexico and racism (White privilege in a climate of more marked skin gradations, the whole Latin America bit about class and race before the American dimension was added on, and the nature of indigenous/Hispanic cultures, as opposed to the more clear cut white/black dynamic). Finally adding to this is New Orleans as a catalyst for anti-racism, and New Orleans has one of the more complex histories of the white/black dynamic (free creole blacks, slave port, Ruby Bridges, and the white exodus/surrounding suburbs following desegregation). The sermon did not, as is almost certainly best, address this whole range of experience, but it touched upon some of it, and it was a remarkably skillful handling of a topic and message that, by its very nature, is designed to make people uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, depending on the goal. This being a sermon, the discomfort was appropriate; anti-racism training and activism can make things uncomfortable on an unforeseen level, designed so that every day you wake up thinking "hey, I need to change things because this system of power and privilege is really, really messed up".

This was not anti racism training. But I'm hoping it sparked some anti-racism impulse, and I'm hoping that translates to anti racism work.

Perception on the Cost of Race

This article was mailed (yes, cut out of the paper, put in an envelope, and mailed) to me last week, and it is one of the most enlightening pieces to hit newspapers about race. Turns out people don't notice privilege when they are swimming in it.

Read it. It's good, it's thought provoking, and far more forgiving than I would be in my analysis. Print it, clip it, pass it around, become a white ally, and use it as an icebreaker when having that awkward conversation about race with your friend who doesn't quite get why the civil rights movement isn't over, why these battles still have to be fought, and why, even though things are better now, they still have a long way to go.

And, don't forget, it's important to not downplay the significance of how far we have come. The problem is thinking nothing has happened/will happen, and thinking that this is a done and over deal. The full context, the history of the struggle for racial equality, is huge, and without that context the debate can't really be meaningful.

(Of, and after all this, go outside. It's a beautiful Sunday here, and it's hard for me to imagine it being unpleasant wherever you are).

Stuff White People Like

This is a well done anthropological perspective on modern white Americans, and as such I found it both entertaining and uncomfortable to read. It's good, it's really good, and it helps to have a perspective analyzing "white" as "other", since assuming white is the default is a fundamental problem in understanding modern racism.

The series is up to 73 posts, ranging from absurd cultural phenomena, detailed popular yet seemingly hypocritical attitudes, and the wonderfully blunt. I recommend reading all of it, but as that's a bit intense, skimming may be advisable.

New to Plastic Manzikert?

Here is a rough and quick guide - the tags are below, and everything I've blogged will fall there somewhere.

I recommend the education posts, as they seem to be the most relevant. Or at least, I can act the most authoritative in them.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, my local paper (Edit-links to the paper still fail to work) ran a series of soundbites from essays written about MLK by in-state high school youth. And I'm of a mixed opinion. Firstly, it is good that thought is being given to King, but when a dozen different children talk about how great ignoring race is, it seems to me that this is a problem.

Priviliege allows colorblindness, since those who are privileged don't have to spend their whole life acknowledging race. To simply ignore this fact of someone's being is to deny them worth as a human. It denies race so that there isn't guilt associated with race. It's the "If you would stop acting Black, we could stop having racism" line of thinking. This is absurd.

Martin Luther King wanted people to be judged by the content of their character, as opposed to being judged by the color of their skin. He did not want people to ignore the color of their skin, he just wanted to make sure that skin color wasn't the determining factor in how people were judged. Ignoring skin color seems to be making as strong a judgement as discriminating because of skin color.

Really, I think the student's essays would have been a lot more valuble if they had to write about Rev. Dr. MLK Jr without citing (or even using at all) his "I have a Dream" speech.