You might be a progressive, non-racist, self-aware white person. Even you need a lesson in privilege.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I made a mistake that seems unimaginable to me now. I went to a Halloween party at the home of a black guy I’d recently met…in blackface.
Such was the depth of my white privilege that it had not occurred to me that my makeup was problematic. There was a reasonable explanation for my costume, to be sure; but even during the time it took me to apply brown lipstick (that I had bought from the “ethnic” section of the makeup counter at Sears) over my entire face, I never stopped and thought, “Wait—this could be construed as racist!” Because I hadn’t intended it to be racist. Because I wasn’t racist.
In the context of the epidemic of white-cop-on-unarmed-black-man violence that has beset our country for the last, oh, several hundred years, flaring up again recently with the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the notion of “white privilege” has been a thread in a lot of conversations. Things like this just don’t happen to white people. With few exceptions, they don’t get killed by police officers while trying to surrender. When they gather to express their collective displeasure with perceived injustice at the hands of the government, they don’t get swarmed by militarized police, no matter how unhinged and potentially dangerous they appear to be. It seems clear enough: White people don’t have to worry about these things. People of color do.
I found this article interesting as it comes from a White person and not someone who has actually experienced the life under White privilege. I think those persons like the author have gotten to the place that you can't read us if you can't see us, or you don't know till you've walked a mile in their shoes and has become able to listen knowing that he can't counter because he like O'Reilly don't know remember Rev. Al took O'Reilly to Harlem iconic dinning spot Sylvia's and he could believe we acted just like him expecting expletives to be shouted out while waiting for orders, that experience in one ole in the side of his racist head and out the other because he still spews the same racist rhetoric.
“Privilege” is a dirty word in this country. We want to believe in the meritocracy, and, more importantly, that we are the sole proprietors of our achievements. There is legitimate pride to be taken in the hard work we have done for our moderate success (only the richest of celebrities admit that they are “lucky”) and the obstacles we have overcome; so we resist the notion that we are the benefactors of the cosmic crapshoot that made us be born the preferred color, race, sexuality, sex, etc. It diminishes our heroism in our own story.
But I’m here to tell you, fellow hardworking, non-racist white people, that it doesn’t hurt to admit you had help.
But I’m here to tell you, fellow hardworking, non-racist white people, that it doesn’t hurt to admit you had help. Consider, for instance, your youth. Were you “an angel”? Probably not. When I was a 17-year-old high school student, driving from the Virginia suburbs to a punk show in D.C., I missed my exit. Instead of proceeding to the next exit and backtracking, I decided to go ahead and drive across the vast, grassy median and merge into traffic on the other side.
When the cop who pulled me over stuck his head in the window of my parents’ conversion van, he must have been nearly knocked over by the weed smoke billowing out. And there’s no way he didn’t notice all my friends slamming cans of Old Milwaukee and stashing them behind the back seat. After delivering a quick lecture about how I shouldn’t do dumb stuff to impress my friends, he let me off with a citation for “Driving on the Grass,” and we all had a good laugh about that as we continued on our way to see our favorite straightedge band.
