Embedded Files
WHITE PRIVILEGE
WHITE PRIVILEGE
Ever heard anyone say "Check your privilege"?
What do they mean?
Wikipedia has a pretty good definition:
White privilege "is the societal privilege that benefits people whom society identifies as white in some countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances."
Acknowledging that white people in America have certain privileges that others don't isn't a critique of white people. It's a recognition that race effects and has historically effected social, financial, criminal, etc status...
We don't all get paid the same, arrested and convicted the same, or have the same health. In general, white people do better than people of color.
In this excerpt from Brent Staples' "Black Men and Public Space," the author discusses his experience walking around the city as a PhD student:
"Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when I've been pulled over by the police."
Not having to think about the above when walking down the street is part of white privilege.
Here's a quick exercise in realizing white privilege. Google "nude [any product]" such as stockings, nail polish, t-shirt, lipstick, etc.
Nude is supposed to be a color that is representative of the wearer's skin tone, meaning it can vary. The results are overwhelming white. Part of white privilege is society's assumption that your race is the default.
FURTHER READING
FURTHER READING
"White Privilege : Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh.
"I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. . .
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. . . .
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race."
http://hd.ingham.org/Portals/HD/White%20Priviledge%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf
"Yes, white 'privilege' is still the problem" by Dahleen Glanton.
"If you are a white person in America, you were born privileged. That’s just a fact. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not anybody’s fault. There’s no need to get defensive about it. The best thing to do is just acknowledge it."
Listen
Listen
Interview with Eula Bliss on "On Being" with Krista Tippett.
"... there was a Kenyan woman there who was saying that the way her children looked every day had everything to do with how dangerous she understood it to be black in America. And she talked about the way she dressed her two children, and the way she taught them to talk to strangers, and the way she taught them to act in public. And I was thinking about how few of those concerns I had shared, especially around safety in terms of — I haven’t spent time training my son in ways of being polite, for instance, because I’m afraid that someone will kill him."
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