White PRIVILEGE: What Does That Even Mean?

photo credit: https://medium.com/@nilegirl/why-the-notion-of-anti-white-racism-is-a-purposed-lie-2e442c9703c1

Earlier this week, I was in a conversation with a friend about the recent racial unrest going on in the country and throughout the world. I can’t remember my exact comment, but when I mentioned our White Privilege, she responded like so many white people do: with denial.

“Nothing has ever been handed to me in my life,” she said, earnestly. “I never inherited anything. I’ve had to work hard for everything I’ve got. If I was privileged, I’d be living in a mansion somewhere with a huge bank account, not in this tiny apartment, broke as a joke.”

This is such a common response, that I thought I would address it here and explain my understanding of the term White Privilege. On the surface, it seems like an insult. When someone brings up White Privilege to a white person, what we most often hear is, “You’re white, so you can’t relate to poverty, pain, hardship and discrimination. You’ve had everything handed to you on a silver platter because you’re white.”

It’s also perceived by many white people as a way of undermining any success achieved:

So you have a college degree? That’s because you’re white.

You got a promotion at work? Only because you’re white.

You’re driving a nice car? Must be nice to be white.

But these perceptions are based on a complete misunderstanding of the term White Privilege. It doesn’t have anything to do with wealth or the absence of difficulty. Notions of bestowing money, degrees, opportunities and other markers of success on a person simply for being white are not precisely what is meant by White Privilege, although that is a side-effect.

White Privilege means that being white accords a basic level of respect to white people. It’s the idea that if there are two homeless men, both down on their luck and in need of assistance, the one with white skin is more likely to get the help he needs. This doesn’t mean that he hasn’t had to struggle with homelessness and other difficulties. It means that people are more willing to offer him assistance than they would his black counterpart.

Photo credit: all copyright belongs to the Oprah Winfrey Show.

In the attached video, Josh Solomon medically changed his white skin to black. He had been white all his life, obviously, and this was his first experience of walking about in public without his White Privilege to shield him from the kind of distrust and disrespect that is a natural part of life for black people. Generally speaking, white people have no idea that they possess such a shield. Solomon only noticed it when he realized it was missing: when his skin was black instead of white. The way he was treated and perceived was remarkably and disturbingly different, after he changed the color of his skin.

http://www.oprah.com/own-oprahshow/black-for-a-day-video All copyright for this video clip belongs to the Oprah Winfrey Show.

In late October of 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, conducted a similar experiment, medically changing his skin color to black and then visiting Mississippi to document what it was like to be black in the Deep South. His book, Black Like Me describes his experience in harrowing detail. This was only three short years after the murder of Emmett Till (see my last blog for more about this: https://stormwriter2.wordpress.com/2020/07/02/history-shapes-today-emmett-till/) and the climate was extremely hostile to blacks.

The truth is, although we have come a long way from the bad old days of slavery and the segregated South, we still have a long way to go. In my estimation, a big part of the problem is that because white people are the beneficiaries of White Privilege (whether we know it or not, believe it or not), we don’t feel the need to pursue the issue any further. We wear blinders, whether they were put there unconsciously, or whether we’re clinging to them so we don’t have to look at what we don’t want to acknowledge: that white supremacy is OUR problem. Until we recognize it as such and work together to eradicate it, it will continue to thrive. It’s a noxious and corrosive gas that permeates every aspect of our lives. Yes, even if we feel like we’re insulated from “all that racism stuff.”

Until we are willing to look at it, unflinchingly, with the aim of eradicating it, it will continue to shift and thrive, to evolve and poison future generations. This issue will not disappear on its own. We have to be purposeful and intentional about destroying racism, white supremacy and White Privilege or it will merely adapt as we’ve seen all through history and right up to the present.

© 2020 Tanya Joham—all rights reserved