To the Folks Who Don’t Accept that White Privilege Does Exist
Having walked the world as someone who “passes”, I grew up in the fairly unique position of being treated 100% as a white person even though I am not, yet very aware of how my fellow Mexicans were being treated; standing up for them every opportunity I got, shocked, hurt, and appalled at the things that would be said right to my face, shamed by the fact that I wasn’t treated the same. Accepting the existence of white privilege was no stretch for me and so, perhaps I can shed some light on it for you.
(photo by Logan Weaver)
We, as a nation, have made progress: laws and policies established, discriminatory one’s abolished, examples of people of color “making it” materially, etc. But that isn’t the issue. White privilege has to do with the ordinary. Living life day-to-day, observed, criticized, and judged. People bullying you because they know no one will come to your rescue, crossing the street to avoid you, following you around a store because they are sure you will steal, pulling their women close because – in their minds – you want to rape them, or just plain ignoring you; that kind of ordinary. It’s about the actions white people take every single day, consciously or not, rooted in assumptions about those around them, based solely on color. And this “ordinary” is ground zero for decisions about who to befriend, who to dismiss, who to shoot.
You say white privilege doesn’t exist? Pay attention! Notice the little things – every day, all around you, and maybe you’ll see. Remember the French Revolution, caused by the oppression of the masses? Remember the quote attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, as her councilors told her the people were starving as she sat at a sumptuous table, “Let them eat cake”? Don’t be so blinded by the banquet spread before you that you don’t see what others suffer. This puts you in the position of being out of tune with your fellow children of God – YOUR brothers and sisters – and why they are protesting (thankfully, without guillotines). I pray you will allow yourself to take the brave step of questioning your reluctance to see what is so obvious.
As a next step, consider being at the short end of the stick of white privilege – consider how that gets to a person, a life-time of it. As a human being, you surely understand trauma, and have suffered your own, at the hands of perhaps a parent or teacher or friend or stranger. Take that trauma and multiply it – and then multiply it again, and again. A person of color has experience after experience, day after day, from untold numbers of people, conveying the falsehood that they are deemed less-than. Does that seem just to you? Of course not. Here’s your white privilege: you can move away, divorce, leave your family, whatever; you can heal your wounds and get on with life. A person of color doesn’t have that privilege – THEY CANNOT GET AWAY.
Once you see that, once you recognize that we were not created to have such disparity in our daily experiences, that a nation of “Liberty and Justice for All” has yet to be born, at that moment, you make the world a better place.
Once you see it, you, too, will want change in this world. Enlightenment. Equality. Justice. Once you see it, you will know it’s not going to happen until and unless everyone has a place at the round table – black, white, red, yellow, brown.
