The concept of white privilege has been mentioned in many opinion pieces recently, inspired by the injustice of the recent grand jury decisions. You can find lots of articles in the media about this concept, along with lots of vigorous debate.
It is a difficult debate: if you don’t agree you are automatically seen as clueless. But I continue to disagree. Not with the facts cited by proponents, not with the stories of terrible bias and injustice, not with the statistics about inequality. But I see the concept as the wrong frame for thinking about issues of racial equality, fairness, education and community development.
The idea of a group being over-privileged is based on a false sense of scarcity. Most of the best things in the world are not a zero-sum equation. One person’s enjoyment a healthy urban community – beautiful parks and landscapes, libraries, books, the arts, vibrant churches, youth programs, fun places to shop and eat, free concerts – does not have to take away from the ability for others to enjoy the same things. The best things in life (“privileges”, community benefits) are not limited commodities.
The guilt/privilege conversation takes attention away from the real work of building healthy communities, strengthening education, removing barriers in job markets, expanding small business opportunities, improving and reforming policing. And it ignores the real strengths and successes and assets of urban communities and families.
The concept of white privilege is built on a flawed idea that the country is fundamentally structured around discrimination and inequality, that nothing is changing, and nothing will change. What message does this give to people are working in their communities, workplaces, schools and churches toward positive social change? Most importantly, what message does this give to children and teens who are assessing their own life goals and options?
A better frame of thinking is a focus on healthy community development and positive youth development. A positive approach focuses on assets, not deficits, honoring the assets, strengths and successes found in people’s lives, families and communities. Children and youth hear messages about the strength of their communities and are encouraged to get involved the good things that the community has to offer.
My two problems with privilege are the assumption that my life must be great because I’m white and that things we all have every right to expect are privileges.
1. Did your father ever have to sit down with you, as a 12-15 year old, and tell you what to do and what not to do when you are confronted by an aggressive cop? Have you ever BEEN confronted by an aggressive cop?
2. How many times has fear made you change how long you stay at an event, how you get home, or who you leave an event with? Have you ever felt afraid to go to a gathering of friends because it’s getting late and you fear for your safety going home?
My issue with this presentation is that it, pretty much by construction, avoids the issue and masks the experience of black men and young women of all races in America.
“Privilege” does not mean that your life “must be great”. It means, instead, that you literally HAVE NO CONCEPTION of a great many things that daily realities for millions of Americans.
There is nothing “flawed” about the concept of white privilege and of male privilege. Of course healthy community development and positive youth development is great.
Talking about those things in the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner murders — and in the context of the two grand jury decisions about the cops who committed those murders — epitomizes what minority communities mean by “white privilege”.
I’m going to guess that jennl is a white poster. I’m sure that she is attempting to offer a positive and constructive message after these two tragedies, and I appreciate that.
Nevertheless, “healthy community development” is NOT an appropriate response to a community besieged by a racist society that places so little value on the lives of their sons, husbands, and fathers.
Since you asked – yes I am white, female. To your questions –
1.) Yes
2.) Yes
As other posters have said, being white isn’t some magic guarantee that your life will be free from injustice. And being white also doesn’t automatically mean clueless. And being white doesn’t mean uninvolved.
To be clear — a focus on healthy community development doesn’t deny the huge problems of bias and injustice, or preclude protest marches and work on reforming policing and legal systems. So, yes, I think that people doing positive work in their communities, schools & youth programs should feel that they are on the right track.
it takes participating in activities like protest marches against specific cruel practices and policies of our government that deny adult and young people of color just treatment in our criminal justice system, access to affordable housing, good education, excellent health care and on and on.
Those of us white women, and I include you jenni, who are neck deep in positive activities that strengthen our neighborhoods, support families, mentor angry young people can also take advantage of the current debate about police brutality and link it to the brutality of racism as the primary reason people of color have in getting “just treatment in our criminal justice system, access to affordable housing, good education, excellent health care and on and on.”
It has been overwhelming to sit in a community meeting and hear the everyday stories faced by black and brown people in my neighborhood. Some are 4th generation citizens who take discrimination and danger for granted and drive their kids everywhere so they won’t be taken as victims or perpetrators. Some are new comers living underground who thought they had escaped danger and lack of opportunity to thrive.
We cannot go about our business and be silent.
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.Martin Luther King, Jr.
peace
…but my point is that being able to answer no is not a privilege. They are expectations and rights. It’s not a problem that I can answer no; the problem is that others have to answer yes. Privilege to me sounds like I got something above and beyond expectation.
You’d be even less privileged were you black or brown.
The problem is you’re looking at the problem as an individual. It’s a matter of privileged class. Some individuals transcend their lack of privilege, but the groups don’t.
of these decisions by America’s government and businesses:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-racist-housing-policies-that-built-ferguson/381595/
these things are not erased because white people have suddenly gotten “nicer”>
Perhaps some of this kind of reaction comes from thinking of racial discrimination as a sort of attitudinal problem that has a mild negative effect on African-Americans. This forgets a number of things.
First off, approval for black-white marriage has now reached a “whopping” 87%. On reflection, you might realize that that’s appallingly low, but Gallop reports that it has been a very slow climb. In 1959, only 4% of Americans approved of black-white marriages. That number took until the early nineties to climb all the way to the shockingly low rate of 48%. It wasn’t until the mid nineties that it crossed into a majority.
Slavery ended when again?
However, marriage is just the latest thing to change. Before that, the idea of integrated education didn’t just get disapproval but disgust from white people. And reaching back into the nineteenth century we get disapproval of black behavior that rises above obsequiousness. African-Americans were required, for decades after emancipation, to continue to display the social manners of slaves. These attitudes persisted a long time.
Now, we white people might congratulate ourselves on how wonderfully open-minded we’ve become, how delightfully honest we might be about our own racial prejudices, and how admirably committed we are to overcoming them. But African Americans have endured centuries of enforced poverty that included systematically denying them any tool to escape it. That included some forms of prejudice almost inconceivable now.
And one might reflect that i would be weird to be asked whether one opposed or supported native, white Americans marrying Irish people. Yes, there was harsh and quite awful anti-Irish discrimination. It was systematic too, but there’s a striking difference of degree, isn’t there?
I’m more than willing to recognize how lucky I am not to be subjected to certain things, but I think it’s a political loser to tell people struggling to make ends meet how “privileged” they are.
I also agree that it frames the issue incorrectly. The word “privilege” is ambiguous. In the constitution, the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship are basic rights. But given the public’s more common understanding of the word as denoting special favors granted based on merit or status, it’ muddies the message.
Decent treatment of every citizen in a free and just society should be the baseline expectation for all, not a special favor bestowed upon one group.
The problem is that many white people are treated in accordance with that baseline while other people too often are not, and that’s not acceptable. It’s not that white people are getting “privileges,” in an absolute sense, they shouldn’t get.
I completely agree that the term “white privilege” is politically poisonous — even if socially and historically accurate.
That difference should be a shame to an advanced, liberal society, though. It should be something we seek to overcome.
… right up until this line.
I actually do think that this country is fundamentally structured around discrimination and inequality (including gender discrimination and inequality). I also agree that it sometime seems like nothing is changing and nothing will change…. People will put up with a lot until it gets to a point they can’t put up with anymore. Thomas Jefferson had words to that affect in the Declaration of Independence.
I think this is true, but somewhat naive. The term “privilege” is just comparison… and it’s often a relative comparison: people who use it are comparing two people, or two classes of people, and either finding one lacking or finding the other over-reaching. I think your terms are absolute –and I agree with them, completely– but, sadly, that’s not what people want. They want to compare… or they live in a world in which such comparisons are thrust upon them daily. We’re having a discussion now over Mark Wahlbergss request for a pardon. One astute poster (I forget whom) brought it up in the context of recent protests: Mark Wahlberg lived to ask for a pardon while Michael Brown did not…
And I think, further, that ‘healthy community development” and “positive youth development” are things that we should do, but will, themselves, require having to confront the discrimination and inequality that, fundamentally, structures this country.
The word “privilege” in the phrase “white privilege”: Seems that black people just get the concept and a lot of white people have a hard time with it. Referencing Merriam-Webster:
So if you don’t like the word, ignore it. But at least understand where someone is coming from when they use the phrase. But remember that word “benefit” for later.
Another take on this was Sebastian Stockman’s piece in the Globe op-ed section yesterday.
That is the privilege given to most white people: The benefit of the doubt. Put a black kid in that situation and, if I were a betting person, I’d put money down on a different outcome.
If people took the word only as the definition you gave, I’d be fine with it. My thing is the word, as colloquially understood, can be taken to mean special treatment above the norm. The privileged few. A prep school kid from a privileged background.
We want to make clear that decent treatment and opportunity should be considered the norm. And should in fact be the norm. They should not be considered something special only a lucky few get. It’s semantic but semantics matter.
That is a white POV. Substitute “white people” for “people” in what you wrote.
From a black perspective, given the historical context added to the common experiences from the present, privilege is an appropriate term.
Now, if what you are saying is that we have a problem because the whites can’t understand the framing the blacks are using, I can see that as an issue. Although the irony is rather rich. “Black people, please don’t use the phrase ‘white privilege’ because, well, um, OK, it’s a white thing. You just wouldn’t understand.”
If there is a better way to frame the fact that encounters that blacks have with police are much more worrisome than those whites have – one easily understood by everyone – that would be great.
My main concern is that getting stuck on the phrase/word can make some of you – whom I consider my allies – sound like you are denying the problem. Try not to do that (please).
I get the problem. I’m saying the word invites defensiveness and backlash in an era when many working class white Americans have seen their prospects go downward. As a practical matter, if the point is to win allies instead of winning a debate on principle, insisting on the word is not worth it.
I also think the word sets the baseline in the wrong place, precisely because of how millions of Americans understand it. This should be a country where certain things are a given. Black Americans have never really been invited to that party. They still are not, it’s painfully clear. They should be. They must be. That should be the message. It conveys the very real racial disparity without raising as many hackles.
But go ahead, folks, call me shamefully ignorant and carry on. I’m sure it will work.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” ~
Lyndon Johnson
Even as one whose emphasis on this thread hasn’t particularly aligned with fenway49’s, I see this response to him seems to as unfairly implying fenway49 wrote something that he didn’t write and that I can’t ever imagine him intending to mean.
Maybe you’re just not used to thinking about how to win things politically — as opposed to some kind of Manichean struggle between Good and Evil?
No Manichean struggle between Good and Evil. Just something to add into the mix.
to fenway49 when it is not a reply to fenway49?
That’s totally evil.
Nope. Just friendly conversation. Relax. You are with friends as is “fenway49”.
Thanks to kbusch for defending me. I don’t think johntmay was trying to say anything about me. His comment could have been freestanding rather than a reply, but perhaps something in my comment triggered his idea.
There is great truth in the quote johntmay cited. The national Republican Party’s been capitalizing on that unfortunate reality for nearly 50 years, and I believe Mr. Atwater publicly copped to it. In my mind that phenomenon only bolsters my point.
I see it like this: There are three broad groups of white Americans. The first, which includes most people on this board, doesn’t mind being called privileged because they are aware of the historical and ongoing disparities and abhor them. At the opposite pole are people who have no interest whatsoever in promoting racial justice. They’re the ones mentioned in johntmay’s comment. Many such people have revealed themselves following recent events.
Then there’s the pretty big group in the middle, not particularly politicized or left-wing but decent people uncomfortable with stark injustice. Given the economic hardships faced by so many Americans these days, which have been building for decades, I don’t see many in this group receptive to a “privilege” argument, especially since they’re hearing all the time the (false) argument that black Americans now “have it easier.” I do think many would be receptive to a “decent treatment and justice for all” argument when presented with stark facts.
You can say the refusal to adopt the frame itself is their white privilege speaking. Does it matter? My firm belief is that embracing a theoretical framework of “white privilege,” all the rage among people of academic bent who see themselves leaning left, cannot be the price of admission to a coalition building greater justice. It is a recipe for political failure.
It sounds like your point is about tactics rather than goals.
I have no question about goals. I just think insisting all white Americans, even those working three minimum-wage jobs to scrape by, acknowledge their “privilege” or else they’re as bad as the Klan is no way to build broad consensus behind those goals. But that’s exactly what some people do (here’s looking at you, Daily Kos).
First on this point:
I largely rejected the lefty Zinn spouting students and teachers I had at CRLS since their methods, which I found ideologically sympathetic, but felt smacked too much of a prism rather than an objective view of the facts. I largely agreed with the historiography of my favorite teacher who was a self identified conservative Democrat who voted for Liebermen in the primary and Bush in the general.
So I wasn’t inoculated with this, and my parents perspectives were those of hard working people-ma once on welfare, sister still in public housing, and my dad on disability. Hardly the wine and brie set, and they definitely would agree with porcupine and jennl on this thread.
The reason why I moved away from that, not due to U Chicago, but due to interactions with black peers and friends in college and high school that convinced me white privilege is not an academic fad but the day to day reality of existence for black America. As I described to Christopher-it’s not something extra, something given, or something undeserved. Rather-it’s the consequence of not living every day of your life with the realization that you are a minority in a country that still has not fully embraced your citizenship, equality, or even your very personhood.
My reality came to me via friends in the Black Student Organization, persistent police targeting of black U Chicago students, and incidents that every single black friend at U of C could tell me about, and that incident I discussed with the police.
No one is insisting this, that is a conservative caricature of what we are arguing. We are not arguing that whites should feel guilty, should lose their status, or have to endure some kind of punishment or sanction to make blacks better off. We are simply answering the question ‘why haven’t they lifted themselves up yet?’ with a cold dose of history and reality.
We are indicting the fact that the American system that can put Barack Obama in the White House (a truly American accomplishment it will be a cold day in hell before socialist France ever does) still incarcerates and kills young black males at the hands of the state at far higher rates than their white peers-even when accounting for income and education levels. That is a system we should all be ashamed of being a part of and one we should work everyday to change.
I honestly see the fight to lift poor whites in Appalachia or Dayton out of poverty intricately linked with the fight to end white privilege. Particularly when what used to be considered conventional wisdom from the likes of Monyihan, the soon to be defunct New Republic, and most mainstream liberals that the blacks somehow had a cultural pathology that produced bad economic outcomes is becoming increasingly debunked. The research now shows poor whites adopting the same pathologies–the bad economic circumstances is the cause of the cultural breakdown-not the other way around.
We are not losing white working class voters due to our policies on race, policing, or affirmative action-we are losing them because we fail to offer a bold economic vision that would put them back to meaningful work. I wholeheartedly reject the notion we need to return to the politics of sister souljah in this dire moment of moral clarity. Give the guy in southie a good paying union job-and he has a black gay neighbor these days anyway-and he will come back to his granddaddys party. Ditto the guy in Dayton or Charleston WV. And it’s the best way to help Baltimore and Detroit too.
I would never dispute the vast disparity between everyday existence for white and black Americans. There’s no questioning, from me at least, that we need to fix that. As CMD helpfully pointed out, I demur only on tactics and semantics.
The privilege framing makes little sense to me, because I reject the idea that disparity in treatment necessarily means the better-treated group is privileged. Privilege sounds like something given or conferred from above. University lIbraries give “borrowing privileges” to outsiders. Gyms offer “pool privileges” to non-members under conscribed circumstances. Parents might give their kids “TV privileges.” All of those circumstances suggest that the “privilege” is bestowed from above, is contingent upon satisfying certain conditions, and can be revoked. How many times have you heard “_________ is a privilege, not a right,” which clearly implies privileges must be earned and can be denied or revoked if the privilegee does not live up to her end of the bargain?
I don’t think being treated by the police with respect, or having your 4th Amendment rights honored, not to mention your right not to be shot for no good reason should be considered a “privilege.” In a nation born of the concepts of self-determination, equality, and liberty, in a nation that put the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment into its supreme law, those things are rights.
We have failed miserably at providing those rights on an equal basis, at “living out the true meaning of [our] creed.” But we should not define shabby, violent treatment the norm and decent treatment as the norm, and decent treatment as a special privilege granted above that norm. We should consider the treatment white Americans generally get as the norm, and the shabby treatment black Americans generally get as the unacceptable deviation from the norm.
It’s not so clear-cut. You yourself said your parents wouldn’t be so quick to adopt the privilege framework. You may not have become comfortable with it if you hadn’t developed, at the University of Chicago, a certain intellectual detachment and an openness to academic concepts. I know people in my own family, and friends, who are smart people but blue collar to the core. They have flat-out scoffed at the idea of “white privilege” when it’s presented in those terms. They haven’t scoffed at the idea that black people are harassed by cops and followed by security in stores.
We can argue about precisely which dictionary definition of the word “privilege” is meant until the end of time, but I think it’s sufficiently ambiguous to be useless as a political term.
It may not be what you’re arguing but it’s not a caricature. Go to Daily Kos. Post a comment saying you think “white privilege” will be a hard sell among working-class white people as a political message. Sit back and watch the downrates, accusations of racism, assertions that you don’t get it, assertions that you’re a false flag desperate to preserve your privilege, and threats to ban you from the site. Even on this thread, I’ve had to explain a few different times that I understand the terrible disparities and want to eliminate them just as much as anyone else.
I hope you’re not confusing my position with “Sister Souljah” politics. If so, that would bolster my Daily Kos point. I’m all for calling out injustice and pointing fingers at the real causes. I just don’t like using the expression “white privilege.”
Your guy in Southie may have a gay black neighbor, but there’s a decent chance he doesn’t like him and he calls him a “liberal,” which is not meant as a compliment, and he votes for Scott Brown largely because of him.
You might have guessed I don’t entirely agree. I think it’s been the combination that’s been fatal, not just the economic component. There is no question that the “Southern Strategy” worked wonders, economic policies not withstanding, and that race had a ton to do with that. It didn’t take long for the phenomenon to move north. You’ll never convince me race wasn’t a key factor in Reagan Democrats’ decision to back a union-busting supply-sider over economically liberal Democrats. I’ll see your Howie Carr and raise you a Shaunna O’Connell.
Of course, I agree that a bold vision to improve the fortunes of working Americans would convince some – not all – white, working class voters to vote Democratic. Despite the racial aspects, not because they don’t matter. I’ve wanted to do it for years because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s a key reason I still don’t like Bill Clinton.
What does white privilege mean
When you say this, it’s clear we need to be on the same page
Christopher pointed out the oft held liberal quote, health care is a right not a privilege. That is an ideal, that is a place we all want to go. The statement, health care is a privilege not a right is true for conservatives ideologically, and true for all Americans as a question of practicality. The reality remains, sadly, is that for some this basic right is an unattainable privilege.
Similarly for your above quote, all liberals are in complete agreement that those things ought to be rights for everyone. Universal rights in fact. But, until they are, the fact that whites generally don’t need to worry about a host of social and economic realities that blacks confront on a daily basis puts us in a privileged position relative to blacks. And I would argue this is true once we mitigate for class and compare within class ranges and possibly even across class ranges. Acknowledging white privilege is simply acknowledging that we still live in a fundamentally separate and unequal society, one where whites are valued more than blacks on a relative basis. Obviously, rich whites are valued more than poor whites. Again, we live in a fundamentally separate and unequal society when it comes to class too.
And this point is right on:
Exactly. And ending white privilege ensures that these norms are truly universalized. Once that happens they will cease to be privileges reserved for one race and be rights enjoyed by all Americans per the Constitution and basic morality. Saying white privilege doesn’t exist or is an unfair aspersion on whites fundamentally denies the fact that we do not live in this reality.
MLK and the civil rights movement was half the battle, but we haven’t seen his mountaintop yet. Too many people, including many folks like Nate Cohn and Jonathan Chait on our own side think we live in a world where those rights exist in practice as well as theory, and that we truly live in a world where people are judged by the character and not their color.
Opponents of affirmative action pervert Dr. King’s vision and use that quote to argue that the injustices have already been rectified, as if racism was merely a bad attitude to avoid and not a perverse system of structural inequality embedded in law for hundreds of years and continued in practice to this day outside of the law. This is the feel good narrative used to oppose the Voting Rights Act-the argument that the job is done and the work is finished. The narrative of white privilege reminds us that we are only half way done.
Is white privilege a good framing for progressives? Depends on what you are doing
It is essential for grassroots activists on the front lines of social justice. I think if you are committed to ending structural inequality and want to protest and continue the non-violent struggle that Dr. King and others started it is essential. Particularly for white allies, particularly for educators, and particularly for those on the front lines on the activist front.
It’s functionally useless within the halls of power and a political campaign. Not something I would talk about if I was canvassing white working class neighborhoods, and not something we can campaign on. This thread demonstrates how easily misunderstood and fraught these terms are among a group of white liberals-who knows how much of a deal breaker this discourse would be if we had it on the campaign trail or a white or black progressive candidate tried to discuss it.
How can ending racism inform our approach to progressive economics?
That said, the campaign front needs to focus on ending racism and ending income inequality and treating them as part of the same fight. And I would argue we have done a lousy job of that. Sister Souljah is one extreme where the party takes a dump on blacks to win back Reagan Democrats, but even the nice liberal paradigm-where Obama meekly adopting white narratives about black pathologies “black fathers gotta turn off sports center’ and making his young man initiative the only response to the Trayvon slaying puts the onus back on black people to pull themselves up, be twice as good, and follow Booker T Washington into a land of limited opportunities and closed doors.
We gotta adopt the DuBois side and really challenge the actual power structures that exist and that intentionally thrive by pitting blacks against whites so workers won’t be pitted against bosses. It is incidentally what the labor movement is doing. Raise class consciousness, fight for raises for everyone not just union members. Fight for living wages. Fight for policies that lift everyone up and create authentic, genuine, multiracial working class coalitions. It’s what the Moral Monday movement is doing in North Carolina, and how the SEIU won big victories in LA. that exist to intentionally divide black and white and empower the wealthy.
Tom Edsall has a great piece in the Times on this subject with a great quote from a new book:
By restoring broad based middle class prosperity to all working people, we can win back many white working class voters. We don’t do this by eliminating affirmative action, quotas, minority preference contracting and they like-we do it by expanding opportunity to working class whites. Considering programs like basic income, wage insurance, cooperative owned corporations, and returning to having a strong industrial policy where Americans buy American made products. And adopting an anti-elitist attitude, not just on economics but on culture as well. It doesn’t mean moving to the right on culture, it means looking at culture from a broader perspective.
It means focusing on the family. Recognizing that economic inequality causes the cultural breakdown the right obsesses over: teen pregnancy, school drop outs, crime patterns, the abortion rate, the collapse of the family, and even secularization. All these can be mitigated by a real plan to put breadwinners back to work with living wages and dignified conditions. We should also subsidize stay at home parenting to encourage more of that, and allowing paternity leave to be just as generous as maternity leave. Maybe subsidizing marriage, maybe expanding the mortgage deduction to renters and co-housing. Liberals gotta take it away from identity politics and sexual liberation and focus on bringing the family back from economic obsolescence. It’s a program that would aid struggling whites and blacks alike while allowing us to reclaim the mantle as defenders of the family.
…can we please add this to the list of phrases that liberals actively try to wrest away from the Right which thinks it has a monopoly on it (looking at you, James Dobson!)?:)
Life is unfair. We all start out with a different set of circumstances. Republicans and their ilk would like you to think that life is like the game of Monopoly where we all start out with $1,500 and take turns rolling the dice, where luck plays a small role and the player’s skill and judgement plays a larger role. Few of us want to admit that what we have or do not have is simply a matter of random chance, or as Camus put it, the benign indifference of the universe. We ought to expand the examination of white privilege. As Paul Krugman wrote, “If you admit that life is unfair, and that there’s only so much you can do about that at the starting line, then you can try to ameliorate the consequences of that unfairness.” Once we clear that hurdle, we all live better lives.
Using Monopoly is a good analogy. Try setting up a game with a conservative friend, but when you start, he has to start with his $1,500, and you get $5,000 plus ownership of 1/4 of the property on the board.
When he refuses to play by those rules, then explain to him that this just might be why poor people aren’t overly concerned with following society’s rules down a straight and narrow path. No one wants to play a game they know is rigged.
In real world Monopoly, the player with the most money gets $200 and the opportunity to change one rule of the game each time he or she passes “GO”.
Let’s review the history please.
African-Americans were brought to this country as a form of real estate, as property. They were forced to work very long hours, whipped mercilessly if they didn’t. Their families were broken up purely based on commercial and arbitrary considerations. They were subject to abuse of all kinds.
Emancipation, which came about as a military tactic, did not lead to a righting of the injustice of slavery. Think about people who have worked hard for decades and earned nothing for it. There was no redistribution of land. There was no thought of it, and frankly that never made the agenda. Essentially, former slaves were dumped into poverty, and it was only with the weak help supplied by Radical Reconstruction that weren’t pushed back into a form of slavery in name only.
People who think slavery sits comfortably and forgettably in our past really need to think long and hard about how land was not distributed after the Civil War. I mean f***ing really think about it.
Suffrage was granted African-Americans. Why? As a tactic for the Republican Party of the time to retain its political majorities — and not because people like Sen Sumners and Rep Thaddeus Stevens were advocating for social equality. This was followed by violent actions by the first Ku Klux Klan, red shirts, and the so-called Redeemers to keep African Americans from voting. Before the large emigration north, African Americans constituted absolute majorities in a number of Southern states. Before the cruel and violent repression, they were actively political and voted in large percentages. It was only by that suppression that Republican governments fell one by one in the South until none remained in the 1880s.
Attempts during the Grant Administration to suppress the cruel and unfair violence (fomented by the way by the white leadership of the South) were met with northern (white) opposition because they were regarded as federal overreach into the domain of states rights. This was followed by Supreme Court decisions holding anti-Klan laws unconstitutional and ridiculously circumscribing the meaning of suffrage and equal protection of the laws. It should be pointed out that the violence of such groups as the red shirts, the KKK, and so on were aimed at decapitating the leadership of black communities, by killing leaders, teachers, preachers, and elected officials. Whites at the time regarded African American success as something to be actively prevented.
This was in turn follow by a century in which (1) African-Americans were forced to work plots of land and denied the privilege of bargaining for wages, (2) they were not guaranteed fair payment at harvest time, and (3) their lack of legal representation was used to seize property from by fraudulent and cruel misuse of the legal system. One might think of lynching as an appalling random act, but in fact it was a political act too aimed to prevent any accumulation of wealth or power.
The northern emigration greeted African Americans with a strict regime of housing segregation which again worked to suppress the accumulation of wealth or power on the part of blacks.
So let me state this strongly. Complaints about the term “white privilege” are based on ignorance — and shameful ignorance at that.
The concept of white privilege is built in the heavily researched facts of our history that this country was fundamentally structured and founded on a principle of white supremacy. Even in the North, even during the New Deal when black maids were exempted from social security collection and taxes and longtime multigenerational American black men couldn’t get the CCC jobs my first generation fresh off the boat Italian great uncles got. Those are just two examples, forgetting also that school and housing segregation was the states policy and even the goals of most of our liberal programs right through the 60s and 70s.
Frankly, no white liberal should talk about race without reading Ta Nehisi Coates and his arguments on reparations, without reading Professor Gates and his research demonstrating the effects of slavery to this day, or without reason the earlier works of W. E.B DuBois and Franz Fanon to really understand how pathological and imbedded racism and white supremacy were in every major governmental policy and decision right through to recent times. As it is today.
Brown, Garner and Martin would still be alive if they were white. Cops don’t kill innocent white people, they just don’t so it-but these incidents number in the hundreds every year. Only now that whites and blacks are coming together to protest this and shut down major streets and highways is it becoming the national conversation.
Lastly, by pretending it’s not there or denying it’s very existence we will never overcome it. Acknowledging the reality of persistent racism in our past and present is the only way we can eradicate it in our future. I used to make these arguments, that the Irish are entitled to affirmative action since we were denied work, or buy into the fix the culture/up from the bootstraps arguments of conservatives and white liberals alike. But it hasn’t worked.
Structural inequality that is conditioned on the basis if white supremacy and black inferiority-in an institutionalized way-persists to this day. It is incumbent on whites to recognize that we can never feel this lain or fully comprehend it-but we can shout “no more! Not in our name!”.
We will never be color blind, while racism is an artificial social construct- we can only overcome it by recognizing it and calling it by name.
Sorry that you are so pessimistic. We certainly should be colorblind, but it takes each person to make an individual commitment to be so, which I for one have.
A similarly optimistic view could, for example, have been held by libertarians during World War II: Nazism, after all, would have been an inefficient economic system. In the end, it would have collapsed when faced with the challenge of non-dictatorial forms of capitalism.
Without quoting Keynes’ famous line about the future, “we will never be color blind” is probably a closer approximation to the truth then its rivals. Given the enormity of racism and decades long insufficient soft, soft efforts to address it, “always” is certainly true for government purposes.
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Meditation assignment.
Fix your attention please on the beautiful equestrian statue of Wade Hampton that graces the capitol in South Carolina. Then remember that this was the guy that the Red Shirts catapulted into office through a campaign of intimidation and disenfranchisement. The link I’ve offered is notably silent about this too.
The New York Times article from 1906 indicates that it is quite a nice statue too.
It’ll be there for a while.
..than its economic system. I have mixed feelings about how we deal with history, but what I’m hoping for and really don’t see any excuse for not happening is that all persons treat all other persons in a way they themselves would want to be treated regardless of skin color. This just boils down to the basic Golden Rule, which every major religion also has as a tenet.
I only raised it because libertarianism seems to be so full of excellent things that come to pass way later in the future — sometimes after calamities. (No need to regulate drugs: the market will push out the bad ones — after dozens are killed by them though. Just be optimistic. Trust the markets.)
Certainly your optimism on the elimination of prejudice may be less outlandish and less impractical — but it is nonetheless not something anyone looking at the evidence would contemplate will happen within time foreseeable.
You are absolutely correct that your view, at least, just boils down to the basic Golden Rule. You are also absolutely correct that every major religion also includes that as a tenet.
That has been the case for many millennia. The religious traditions that dominate America have embraced this tenet for something like six thousand years. It therefore seems to me that relying on our religious conviction regarding this issue is in reality a prescription for “no change”.
The fallacy of “colorblind” approaches to addressing problems of discrimination is that they result in NO CHANGE to the status quo. We must add HOT fluid to heat a cup of lukewarm coffee.
Not surprisingly, those who most loudly call for “colorblind” approaches are those whose cups are already steaming hot.
I am hoping for that too. Identifying our privilege as white males, reconciling ourselves to that, and going out of our way to remove that privilege is essential to ensuring all people are treated equally regardless of their race. I can see why some are reluctant to use the term from a political framing perspective-it polarizes, makes whites feel uncomfortable, and may alienate allies. But I see no reason to deny the historical truth behind the claim that white privilege existed, exists, and will continue to exist if we refuse to acknowledge it.
That to me is making excuses-so is the victim blaming that occurs when O’Reilly or Rudy say ‘why don’t we talk about black on black crime?’, well for one, white on white crime is a far bigger problem, and for another-it’s all we regularly talk about when we focus on problems in the black community. We rarely discuss police on black crime, because it makes us profoundly uncomfortable. But we have to discuss it now.
I am certainly not arguing that blacks should be treated better than whites, people like porcupine and the OP may be confusing what we are talking about when we say white privilege needs to end the playing field needs to be level. They assume, incorrectly, that we could end affirmative action or otherwise take race out of the picture and suddenly racism ends, and our meritocratic system will ensure that the naturally talented will rise. But evidence demonstrates this is false.
For every Horatio Alger black success story there are 9 tales where a black child was denied the right to an equal education, equal healthcare, and certainly a right to life and presumption of innocence that white children enjoy as a birthright. Acknowledging that this status quo is morally unacceptable is the first step in making it history. Every child should enjoy that birthright.
jconway wrote: “They assume, incorrectly, that we could end affirmative action or otherwise take race out of the picture ” I (OP) definitely didn’t say that, and I don’t think anyone else commenting on the post did either. The post was about the concept of white privilege as an approach. I don’t see any disagreement with anyone who has posted here about goals.
But the approach seems to beg for a clean slate when it comes to questions of injustice. Prominent blacks argued this way as well, among them Bayard Rustin who felt that talk of reparations got in the way of a universal basic income-something he felt would lift everyone up to the same starting point-some at the time opposed affirmative action from the same standpoint.
The idea of removing this framing is to remove the idea of collective responsibility from the discussion. To say that a bad subset of whites exploited a large subset of blacks-and focus on the specific and extreme indignities like the Jim Crow south, lynchings and the like fails to account for the fact that even poor whites were given preferential treatment when it came to social welfare, public housing, public jobs programs, and the like. That the default consideration for most American policy is framed around white values, white needs and white concerns. If we seek to solve our racial problems we have to first identify why they still persist.
Why do red states that stand benefit the most from the Medicaid expansion refuse the money? Why has Hillary-the victim of many conspiracy theories herself-faced zero questions around her American birth or religious affiliation? When we leave even questions of criminal justice and policing out of it-we still see disparities and we see a lot of liberals and conservatives alike blaming the very victims of those disparities for their own troubles. By failing to account for this tangled legacy we produce false post-racial hopes and delusions.
In fact, my grandmother was a domestic in that era, as fresh of the boat as your uncles (to the point where my father may or may not have been born here, as he had no birth certificate). She was also cut out of SS, never had a job where she earned it. Other relatives were agricultural (potato farms in Maine) and also excluded. Second generation people like me have trouble with feeling responsible – only the ‘you didn’t build that’ covers us, and ignores the work of our people to make their children more secure.
Imagine moving to Ireland and being told that you are responsible for the potato famine and religious persecution.
But the laws governing domestic us and sharecroppers were explicitly exempted to win Southern Democratic support for the New Deal-and they disproportionately hurt blacks more than whites.
And I used the Irish famine argument as well when I used to oppose affirmative action and these kinda of arguments. The point is-the government favored white over black-in many cases it still does-and we all suffer from that-but nowhere compared to what blacks are suffering from this status quo. So let’s resolve to fix it and complete the work of making this a more perfect union. We don’t so it by shifting blame to the victim or denying collective responsibility.
I have never lived in California and never benefitted from internment as many white families did-but I am very happy my tax dollars have gone to compensate the victims. I didn’t vote to deny pensions to Filipino soldiers who fought under our flag-but I’m glad those tax dollars rectified that injustice. I was there when that monthly check came in and saw how much tic rut bought for my fiancées family. I am sure most Germans weren’t related to the Nazi party-but they have done a much better job than we have in addressing these injustices and seeking forgiveness from those the wronged. I’m sure most South Africans my age revere Mandela as much as their black friends-but they would also be the first to say that the system needed changing and the Truth and Reconciliation process had to happen. This process has yet to happen in the United States.
Of varying degrees of innocence. Proportionally, they harrass, assault and blacks more often, but whites get killed as well.
I wasn’t trying to argue they do not, I am saying there are no racially biased killings of whites by black cops, or whites by other white cops. This is a profoundly unjust subset that needs to be rectified. But certainly we should demilitarize police departments, make it harder for the average citizen to have that firepower to protect police and the public alike, and restore the balance between liberty and security that has been out of whack since 9/11.
For black America, it is a balance that has been out of whack since the time of the founding. And that is something that shouldn’t be relegated or put on the back burner. Too many libertarians are offering the analysis that government is the problem, or police are the problem on a generalized basis and refuse to consider the fraught racial history that also must be addressed.
But yeah-a white kid with Downes syndrome was gunned down for no reason by the police in Maryland and a grand jury refused to indict. That is definitely part of a far larger problem with these grand juries and the systems in place to police the police. But we can’t use it’s existence as proof that race isn’t a factor.
In our discussions about “white privilege”, I fear we lose sight of the also pervasive MALE privilege. Many of the observations we are making about white privilege are, I think, more accurately described as “white male privilege”.
Structural discrimination against women is also wired into the innards of our society. Women received suffrage FIVE DECADES after blacks. Black women are treated worse than black men, white women are treated worse than white men, in many circumstances white women are treated worse than black men (black men do NOT generally have to fear walking home alone on any given evening in any given neighborhood, white and black women do).
I reject the assertions that “privilege” is inappropriate or misused, even in political terms. The objections to the term come from, by and large, not surprisingly, those on the favored side of the privileged/non-privileged divide.
Yes, living without fear of police and without fear of assault is a right. The fact remains that black men and women of all races DO experience both fears every day. White men experience neither.
White men ARE privileged in that regard.
but a comment like this on a thread like this often leads into weird and unproductive, “Which is worse?” discussions.
Maybe a factual correction, though, is useful.
While the constitutional amendment granting universal male suffrage was indeed passed long before women were given the vote, African-Americans quite effectively lost the ability to vote in the South long before 1920 when women won that right. African Americans of either gender did not regain the ability to exercise that right until at least the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Additionally, there was some rather distasteful rhetoric going into 1870 as to how “savages” were going to be given the right to vote but more “civilized” were denied it. This led to somewhat of a split between abolitionists and feminists.
Weighing these two forms of oppression, in the hopes of figuring out which is worse, is also likely to lead to distasteful rhetoric.
Surely we can have a conversation about two inter-related problems?
I appreciate and am aware of the distinction you draw between legal and actual voting rights. Still, African-Americans WERE allowed to LEAVE the south and vote fifty years before women.
It is no accident that many of the same voices that find reasons to argue against working to end “white privilege” also find reasons to end “male privilege”.
Rather than split them apart, or argue about which is worse, I suggest that it is more constructive to identify the common underlying driver that produces both and ask how we solve it.
That denying that the privilege exists or arguing that it doesn’t exist certainly is counter productive to ending either problem-since we aren’t even identifying them. Race, gender, and class are all connected and all three play a far too deterministic role in our society, making the very idea of ‘meritocracy’ a myth. But recognizing biases, especially our own, is the first step in solving the problem.
From “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell:
The heads of big companies are, as I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5’9″ that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. …..Is this a deliberate prejudice? Of course not. No one ever says, dismissively, of a potential CEO candidate that ‘he’s too short.’ This is quite clearly the kind of unconscious prejudice that the IAT picks up. Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense, in our minds, of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations
Food for thought.
Washington and Jefferson were more than six feet and I believe the taller of the two major nominees has nearly always won the presidency.
..I’m reading a lot of comments on this post and find the weight of history is bearing down.
Insofar as Jennl, the OP, looks towards the future her diary is a good one. I think some people are losing sight of that. I daresay that, if we could start with a clean slate and begin to build that future her intentions would be ones we should all wish to emulate. To the extent, however, that past sins are cumulative, that aforementioned slate is not clean. What to do? Well… my first reaction is to confront… (I don’t mean confront each other but to confront our own attitudes and assumptions. ) …and to understand our part of it all. Sounds simple but it is not.
The discussion started by positing the “privilege doctrine”: the notion that “privilege” was equated with a zero-sum exceptionalism; and because it is zero-sum a privileged class is, de facto, redefining other classes downward. Jennl posits that this is not only incorrect but counter productive: we live in a land of great resources and, by the numbers there is no scarcity whatsoever; we have enough for everyone. In fact, to underline her point, let me note that a very real problem our poor face is, in fact, obesity… Which is a reversal from once, long ago and far away, where obesity was considered a sign of flagrant wealth.
Myself, and others, stopped and parked at the notion that structural inequality was an unnecessary construct by which we can measure our society. I think I understand what she meant: that such thinking is not necessary to move to the future and, indeed, it may be that kind of thinking which is holding us back. My concern is that it sounds like she’s eliding the very real structural inequality that does exist and, frankly, it’s not that easy to just ‘step out of it.’ That’s where the weight of history started picking up momentum and we turned to a(n entirely legit) list of grievances and past injustices. I, and others, point out that this will need to be addressed.
But I’d like to bring it back to the word ‘privilege’ for a moment: I think that “privilege” is to “normal” as “injustice” is to “unfair”; they are concepts that have been put through a transitive process but which come out having exploded with extra meaning. “Privilege”, that is to say, is not just more “normal” in the same way that “injustice” isn’t just more “unfair”… they gain, somewhere in the process, a gravity and a meaning apart for the, apparent, derivation. Indeed, I would make a further distinction between ‘injustice’ and ‘unfair’ and note the stochastic, coincidental and organic processes behind ‘unfairness’ that are lacking when it comes to ‘injustice’: ‘injustice’ requires a will and an ability where ‘unfairness’ might be a simple fact of existing in a complex world..
In a comparison, however, my ‘normal’ becomes your ‘privileged’. I, in particular, don’t feel that I enjoy any ‘privilege’ whatsoever and that my life is, more or less, ‘normal’. I entirely understand how someone might look at my life and see it as privileged in comparison to theirs. I have never been able to understand the converse: the notion that I’m privileged because your situation is dire. Maybe racism isn’t anything other than intense training in that kind of thinking…
And I think an inverse kind of elisions happen between ‘unfair’ and ‘injustice’ where those who may be unwilling or unable to face ‘injustice’ wish to make it merely the ‘unfair’ vicissitudes of life that happen to you and them’s the breaks. Too bad for you. “injustice’ is whittled down to ‘unfair’ so that they won’t have to decide that it is, in fact, injustice and therefore won’t have to do anything about it.
I think that’s what we’re dealing with here: some movement, along a spectrum of understanding between ‘normal’ and ‘privilege’ that depends more on the viewer and his/her experiences than on any actual privilege. And I think that might be what the OP was getting at when she posits that we discard this frame. I’m down with that. The counter argument, however, is that injustice and oppression have forced this view upon the oppressed and that they don’t really have much choice while, at the same time, the oppressors turn their oppression around and whittle it down, as claimed, to unfairness. The OP wonders at the implicit ‘messages’ sent to communities without, frankly, taking into account the overt, darn near explicit, messages that are re-enforced daily.
I’m glad I posted this on this forum — there are a lot of thoughtful responses. (And I’m really glad that the post resonates with a few readers.) Some people are uncomfortable with what I said, and so I posted a couple of follow-up comments to make sure I was clear about what I was and wasn’t saying.
I think the biggest area of debate with what I wrote is about whether the U.S. is “fundamentally” a racist society. I said it is not, and that seems like an uncomfortable thing to say, in the face of so much terrible history and current events.
What’s the difference between saying that the nation has a long and painful legacy of racism vs. saying that the country is fundamentally racist?
It seems strange to apply this type of analytical reasoning to such as deeply-felt issue. But the conclusion is really exciting:
I think that in a highly dynamic economy, such as what the U.S. has had since around the post-WWII years (1950s forward) the whole society benefits from removing racial barriers. In the same way that immigration feeds economic growth, and in the same way that high-quality education for all is seen as an economic as well as social goal, full participation by all citizens fuels economic growth and social well-being. Therefore the whole country and the whole society benefits from addressing racism. Not a zero-sum equation. EVERYONE benefits from racial justice and equality.
If this is true (and I think it is!) then it makes sense to say that positive efforts (community development, youth development, reform of policing and courts, expanding small business opportunities, removing barriers in job markets, improving education) are a valid approach toward moving forward.
I need to emphasize that YES I agree that it is important for everyone to learn about the issues that face society; face difficult facts of history; uncover injustices; protest; advocate for reforms. This is vital! But the messaging and frame of thinking is important. Messages that imply a zero-sum world can cause hopelessness rather than action.
I posted because I’ve seen teens (of all races) who were hurt or insulted by well-intentioned messages about ideas of privilege, disadvantage and race. I’ve seen curriculum that has such a narrow focus on social justice that it omits all the other things that are exciting for children and teens to learn.
I’ve been working on these thoughts — and chose this forum to post these thoughts — because people on this forum would tend to share the same goals and would feel comfortable looking at the different frames of thinking.
It is exciting to think about positive approaches — if it is true that you can tell a child or teen that the whole world is theirs, then you can think about the types of things that make children and teens eyes light up with excitement … robotics, cool technology, building things, exploring nature, enjoying the arts, theater, music…. this is the idea of saying “the whole world is yours.”
As such, while there are still plenty of racially charged attitudes and actions, for reasons that passeth all understanding, we ceased being a “fundamentally racist society” about 50 years ago.
BTW, if you really want fireworks post this at Daily Kos. They seem to overwhelmingly adhere to the privilege doctrine there.
Thanks — it’s interesting to look at the 1950s/1960s as a turning point economically and socially. Also to look at how the present is tangled up with the past.
(And that’s funny! I think BlueMassGroup is a kinder, gentler forum. I’ve only posted here a couple of times before but I follow this forum all the time.)
What started happening 50/60 years ago is that the most blatant, visible forms of racism (particular Jim Crow) diminished. But I’d like to hear from any black readers of this forum what they think about the statement “we ceased being a ‘fundamentally racist society’ about 50 years ago”. It is easy to make such a statement if you aren’t the target and if you don’t see the daily affects of the continuing racism.
As would I, this thread and other threads on this subject would certainly benefit from that perspective. I am not sure if it’s really been articulated here before, which is another area our movement and party need to work on.
…that anyone who might reply would, after reading all this, just shake their head and think “where the hell do I start?”
…but here is the perspecitive of one prominent black man.
I get the distinct impression though, that BMG is a very white forum.
What you imply is no doubt accurate regarding the black experience, but as far as I am aware there is no longer any legal basis for it. Segregation and discrimination on of basis of race are illegal. There are also provisions for some forms of affirmative action in some cases.
What I’m missing is what your approach actually is. How do you reconcile telling a kid that “the whole world is theirs” while also having to tell him that if he has a confrontation with the cops, he’d better be polite and all “yes sir/maam” and not sass off so that he can, in the worst case, be picked up later at the police station (rather than being identified at the morgue)?
…I would advise anyone of any background to keep their cool and mind their manners with a police officer. If you get a citation you think is unjust you can fight it later. Once I even got out of a $150 ticket from a cop who was being a bully by making sure I did not contribute to escalating the situation.
Here’s the problem: A comment like that makes it sound like you are trying to minimize the experience many black have with the cops, even if that isn’t your intent. “Everyone should do that.” The difference is in the consequences. The worst I’m going to end up with is a night in jail, maybe a bruise or two, and a headache.
I was walking home late at night after a Thanksgivig weekend party at my friends Harvars dorm, while wearing a hoodie. A squad car pulled up, shines it’s car light at me and the cops said over the loudspeaker to get on the fence and put my hands up. I complied-slightly terrified and worried they’d smell the beer on my breath (I was underage at the time). But when the officer got out and looked at my face he said “he’s white” to his colleague very briskly and moved back to the car. The other officer (both were white I might add) said sorta sheepishly “um, the suspects black, home invasion and they said he was wearing a hoodie and going down walden, sorry to bother you sir”.
I am convinced if I was black this entire episode would’ve been different-no matter how I acted. Because all the cops had was “suspect, black”. The initial hostility and authority of the encounter would’ve stayed, ID’s would’ve been checked, questions would follow, and maybe having to get in the car with then. And if the only difference was my race, I could still be a nice middle class kid walking home from a Harvard party-but would they believe that? How could I convince them in not the suspect?
None of these scenarios were even considered since their demeanor changed entirely when they saw I wasn’t black-I wasn’t the ‘guy’ they has in their head. But had that one, totally irrelevant part of me (my skin color) been the wrong color that evening-who knows what would have happened.
…if they had been looking for a suspect in a particular crime who they knew to be white your experience I suspect would be a bit different. Looking for a suspect with limited descriptive information I think is more understandable, though I still don’t understand is why training does not suggest de-escalation on the part of the cops.
…only black people should have to worry about how they interact with a cop.
I saw on a Cleveland friends’ facebook some terrible comments his friends made about the kid that got killed. Watch the video-he didn’t have a chance. But they kept saying it was the parents fault for not teaching the kid how to talk to police, or the kids fault for having a realistic looking gun and putting it in his pants ‘like a thug’-everything but blaming the trigger happy cop-who the small town of Independence OH had deemed unfit for service in their community not a year before.
My point with my interaction was to show I did act deferentially, but I was also treated vastly differently when my race had been identified as white like there’s. Perhaps if the suspect had been a young white male in a hoodie, many of these same issues would’ve cross applied-but I also feel like the quick and sharp change in tone from a hostile encounter to a relatively friendly one (they even apologized to me!) demonstrates that there are other aspects at work.
Life can be confusing, for adults as well as kids. But by the time they are pre-teens or teens, kids are pretty good at dealing with paradoxes and ambiguities.
So yes, of course. We help kids make sense of all these things. How our hearts go out to the families who have lost sons. How to be careful about confrontations with police. Acknowledging our shared frustration and anger. The goals of the protest marches and the efficacy of protest. How people work for change in policing and court systems. And yes, we still do everything in our power to make it clear that the world (very imperfect!) has lots of offer and that there is a whole world out there for them to explore.
But they weren’t and you’re dangerously wrong jennl. I mean really.
The history here is that people worked for over a century as slaves. When emancipated, they received no property. When emancipated, they were denied all forms of credit. When Reconstruction ended, they lost all political power. Segregation was so strong that in 1956 only 4% of Americans felt inter-racial marriage was okay. So one has this essentially socially isolated group denied things like credit and equal housing. Most of us who have had family stories involving upward mobility have relied on the availability of credit. From emancipation until well into our times, African Americans have been starved of it.
What do you think the net effect has been in our “dynamic” economy, the one that no, no, no benefits from diversity in such marvelous ways?
Let’s look at the freaking numbers.
The median net worth of white households is $112,00. Care to guess what the median net worth of Black households is? It isn’t $60,000. No, it is $6,000. Six thousand dollars. That’s all. $6,000.
So it is like the country has been robbing these people for centuries, and now we’re going to say, “Good luck, Black people, we have great optimism in your abilities! We are going to become super nice to you! So everything’s better. See! No structural racism!”
Structural bullshit too.
However, we cannot rewrite history or control what our ancestors did. We should focus on making equal opportunity and justice under the law a reality for this and future generations. I for one don’t think that’s best accomplished by wringing our hands and rending our garments about how the white experience being supposedly too good. Actual opportunity based on class, rather than assumed opportunity based on race, should be the focus of any assistance or affirmative action, but focusing on race unfortunately just provides some with more excuses to see other races in a negative light.
African Americans deserved to receive land after the Civil War. They never got it. Now their median net worth is $6000.
n/t
…but I’m not sure it does with a 150-year gap. There are too many questions in my mind about who qualifies, who would have to sacrifice, and the like. Take the President, for example. Do we assume all black people should qualify? The President is not slave-decended. Even if he were he’s only black on his father’s side, so does he qualify for only 50% reparations? What about the First Lady, who has said that she has the blood of both slaves and slave-owners in her veins? No, I think I would prefer to focus on opportunity in the present than trying to rectify the past.
Something worse than happy talk.
…but I can’t very well rewrite that either.
It’s as if a group of people had been invited into our midst, we robbed them, and spit on them, made them into outcasts and pariahs, and ensured through multiple means that neither they nor their heirs would ever catch up economically.
Now, years later, we say we can’t rewrite history but we promise not to spit on them.
Awfully nice of us.
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What the OP and others on this thread seem to miss, it is not just the pariah/outcast part. It’s also the poverty part.
…I’m all for it. We should be doing a lot more of that. I have become increasingly convinced that tolerance of poverty is a choice a society makes and we unfortunately have made such a choice. There’s really no reason for it to exist among any race in the richest country in the world.
If everyone you know, everyone you can rely on is poor, things are much worse.
As far as I can tell it does very little, except provide certain whites a new way to lord it over their less enlightened (probably poorer and perhaps less educated) cousins. Preachy treatises on the culture and history are helpful only insofar as they end with concrete proposals. I don’t think they make people nicer, in general. Specifically, though, there has been very little proposed (besides body cameras) that might actually help to rein in the police, despite this being a perfect opportunity to build nationwide consensus around police brutality and excessive force. I’m honestly not sure whether framing police misconduct and militarization as entirely a racial issue is helpful or harmful to the goal of stopping these abuses.
And when black people use the frame of white privilege, who are they trying to lord it over?
That’s my biggest problem with this whole thread. The views of the people who are actually the subject of the racism are missing and few here seem to be actually making any effort to go out and check the numerous articles, blog entries, Tweets, etc. that will fill in the blanks (in the absence of any black participation here).
In general, though, I think there is a desire among blacks for concrete reforms, which seem increasingly unlikely to materialize. Eventually the protests will fade out. And we will all go through this horrible process again in a year, or two, or six months when it happens again.
In practice, it may be better to point out that there have been white victims of police shootings too, and try and get a cross cultural consensus against these practices that do threaten all of our liberties most broadly. From warrantless phone wiretap vans in Chicago during the protests to small town police forces using anti-insurgent equipment. Sen. Paul is clearly trying to steer the conversation in that direction to mixed results, but at least he is one conservative willing to go against the badge.
Part of me thinks that obscures the fact that no white child I can think of would be gunned down this quickly or coldly as the one in Cleveland. And that there is a strong racial tinge to the patterns of who gets victimized by police in what manner. But it is their community that is mournful and fearful right now, and I don’t think it would be productive to sublimate that to a broader concern. It is essential that whites join the protests and make these arguments as well-and I think we can get the cross cultural coalition in that manner.
I found this piece from the Washington Post by an ex-St. Louis cop pretty enlightening.
I never posted on there, but found a lot of comments troubling, to say the least. I think police on the whole tend to be more conservative. The people apt to post on these kind of sites have more in common with people who comment on articles on newspaper sites and answer unscientific polls on local television websites. Still, their comments can be enlightening.
At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna when it comes to cops, Holyoke just fired a cop for pulling a gun on a colleague during an argument and Springfield fired the cop that beat up a suspect so bad he is now blind in one eye. The cop was also tried, convicted, and did time. There is a good argument to be made that he should have been fired long before this incident, and that none of this would have happened had a bystander not video-recorded it. The DA that prosecuted the case is now the federal judge for the Springfield district.
If you don’t have any respect for the community and people you are charged with policing, you have no business policing that community. I’m still trying to understand why there seems to be a disproportionate level of racism among cops.
I was struck by the real racial diversity I observed during my day at the CPD academy during my Mayoral fellowship-not just among the students but among the instructors. Chicago is not immune to problems with it’s policing by any stretch, but consciously making sure your police force actually lives in your city and looks like your city seems to be a no brainer to me.
In the Cleveland tragedy, the officer who killed the unarmed child was himself asked to leave a much smaller and less sophisticated police force when his superiors there found him unfit for duty. The Cleveland Police Department apparently had no idea of this when he was hired to be an officer there. If a small all white town determined he was too emotionally unstable for police work-how he end up in a big black city?
Fixing that not only keeps cops with racist or sexist histories from transferring elsewhere, but also seems like a no brainer to keep former criminals, pedophiles, etc. from becoming or staying cops.
Teachers unions have taken great strides in showing they hold their own members accountable, I don’t see why police unions which have a worse track record in this regard are held to a different standard.
Speaking of structural, I’ve wondered for a while whether there isn’t something about policing that doesn’t reinforce such thinking. It’s as common as it is poisonous.
A recent op ed in the New York Times spoke of police officers touching the locker of a fallen colleague before going out on they’re beat. There must be something about feeling survival is at risk that tilts one’s moral calculus and one’s perception of threat.
In response to: “That’s my biggest problem with this whole thread.”
I agree – it’s probably time for someone to start a new thread – perhaps focused on some strategies for action – and then move the conversation there. I posted this here, as I mentioned, to work on some ideas about messaging, frames of thinking, and the “non-zero sum” concept that I think are important. There’s been a lot of passionate debate but it feels like it’s time to move to a new thread.
I come from a lower middle class white background, my sister has lived in public housing her entire adult life, I got a cousin and a nephew in jail, and my ma and sis were on welfare at different times. I even remember getting cereal from WIC when I was a kid.
My point is precisely that-I know what it’s like to be on the edge of poverty, and I still recognize that I have enjoyed significantly better treatment at the hands of this country than any of my black friends, colleagues, bosses, or co-workers. That is just a fact. And by stating the fact, I am no way arguing that whites need to do worse than blacks, simply arguing that the era when blacks do worse than whites has got to come to an end if this country is to move foward.
I’ve lived my life in a working class white community and have plenty of acquaintances on the margin. Friends who lost their houses from predatory lending. Acquaintances that are heroin addicts. Whose children have died from heroin overdoses. People who are basically homeless. People who bounce around the edges of the law as minor drug dealers. People who inherit and blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on drugs. People who went to jail. People who started out working in factories and “started their own business” and don’t claim all their work on their taxes so they can make a decent living.
These people are underprivileged too. Privilege is a great heuristic concept. It’s not perfect, not marketable. We all have various privileges. But we ignore white privilege–as we do male or class privilege–at our peril.
And the Irish? We didn’t just work our way out of poverty. We stole it. We took over the government with corruption, but we also made it work for us. Tammany Hall was the predecessor of Al Smith. And of course, the Irish were able to inter-marry with other ethnicities. Black folks were largely unable to do so until my life-time, and it was still regarded as outre when I was a kid. The fact is, the Irish could integrate. They were white. They could vote. And they were organized.
No one here is saying the white experience is too good, I am saying the black experience in America continues to be downright oppressive, awful, with limited mobility as KBusch has helpfully pointed out. The average white household has a vastly higher networth than the average black household, by over a 100,000 degree of difference.
Granted, my negative net worth is significantly below both averages, but you don’t see me arguing that my class based experience is somehow worse than the experience of the black American. Nor am I arguing I am not entitled to enjoy the rights and privileges that I do have-simply identifying the fact that most black people in America still can’t enjoy them does not somehow diminish them for me. If anything-I want them to have the exact same rights and privileges. White privilege ends when white privilege ends-and it means everyone can enjoy the same privileges regardless of their race. It doesn’t end by pretending it doesn’t exist, and expecting a race of people that have been systemically deprived of property for over four centuries-with the full support of American law and society for the bulk of that time -to suddenly pull themselves up like the rest of us.
The main reason my old argument, that porcupine made in this thread, that the Irish were worse off than blacks when we got off the boat in Boston belies the fact that at least we choose to get on these boats. We may have been fleeing very real British oppression, religious discrimination, and economic squalor-and the boats were awful and full of disease ridden food-but damn-we choose to get on those boats. And it took us a lot less time to get one of our own in the White House even though they’ve been here longer. Nobody asked to see Jack’s birth certificate, even if they did ask to see the tunnel to the Vatican.
Read TNC. Read WEB DuBois. Read Charles Ogletree. If the Germans could pay reparations to the Israeli’s, if we could pay the Japanese reparations for internment, pay back the Filipino soldiers whose pensions we refused to honor, and finally give some autonomy back to the tribal councils-than the least we can do is debate the question and see if it’s even feasible. The least we can do is get the morality behind them codified in law, even if they may be entirely impractical in practice.
It is something extra. Yes, whites have on balance a better experience than blacks, but like health care I see the experience we enjoy as a right not a privilege. I wasn’t necessarily referring to you, but some who talk about privilege seem to want to lay the guilt on pretty thick and seem to imply that a white existence is automatically a privileged one. I’m sure we agree on the desired outcome so let’s focus on that (and while you’re at it could you do me the personal favor of dialing back the language just a touch).
something either you have or you don’t. Privilege is something extra, but you can only have privilege compared to someone else. Jennifer’s thesis, and yours Christopher, runs a huge risk, not of guilt, but of ignorance. Perspective matters. It’s notoriously difficult for white people to see the their privilege as anything other than normal.
Jennifer writes:
Many things are not a zero-sum equation, but privilege is by definition zero-sum. The idea of power relations is zero-sum. That’s what privilege is about. Power relations. Not social programs. White people have unearned power as a result of their majority and their race. It’s nice to pretend we just need to make sure we offer the right social programs; it lets white people off the hook, not just for our society’s wrongs, but for questioning our privilege at all.
In response to this comment – I think “social programs” is the wrong term to use to refer to education, career development, business opportunities, police reform, community development. These aren’t programs, these are core community functions.
Also, I’ve wanted to note that one poster referred to my ideas as “white people being nicer.” which is very much a mischaracterization. Community development is a city-wide & region-wide ongoing process that involves everyone of all races, neighborhoods, & community sectors (businesses residents, etc.). It would be weird to think of these as things that just white people do. I hope the poster who said that didn’t mean to say that.
The people who have been writing and sharing about disparities in white/black experience do a good job in raising awareness of the subtle day-to-day differences in experience as well as the huge injustices. And these disparities/differences are visible in day-to-day life in any city or town. So the more you notice, the more you might resolve to take positive action. So that’s the positive outcome of the consciousness-raising work (even while the “privilege” framing could be reconsidered).
But don’t belittle positive action —
I appreciate you wanted to post on this difficult subject and have taken the criticism and pushback pretty well. I also appreciate that you said you work in your community and acknowledge you probably do a whole lot more than I do on a daily basis.
So I would answer your question with-keep doing what you are doing, but recognize that while white privilege is definitely real-your work can help eliminate it if you are conscious it’s there and work on ways to assuage it.
I think the response of the white community has to be support and solidarity, while recognizing our empathy can only get us so far in our understanding and not inserting ourselves in places we aren’t asked to go.
And I am actively looking for teaching positions in Chicago and Boston, I was going down this road anyway, but the discussions I’ve seen show me that the education I got in Cambridge public schools was an outlier-and far too many people are unaware of black history, labor history, or the civil and women’s rights movements. Social history as it were. And while I also find military history more exciting and interesting in the abstract-finding a way to tell these stories is arguably more important than who won what battle and has more immediate ramifications on the day to day.
you up since you were kind enough to include some biographical information. Like most of the commenters here, I’m pretty involved in positive political action.
If you read my subsequent comments, you’ll see that my concern about privilege is more academic than practical. You don’t include any links to op-ed’s talking about white privilege, but I suspect that they probably don’t understand the concept very well. White privilege is a complex concept. As I said elsewhere, it’s about power relations.
I disagree with pretty much everything you’ve written about white privilege. I think we have the same goals in mind. I’m ambivalent about guilt. It’s not a huge motivator for me or for most people, and as far as white privilege goes, though it would be cool if people could actually recognize it and see things from the perspectives of others. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.
You are clearly involved in making Rochester, a city with an extremely high rate of violence, a better place. I’m sure I assume correctly that you work conscientiously to see things from the perspective of the black people who benefit from your programs.
Funny! Yes — the internet is an open place and I choose not to write anonymously. But I do have a common name, and I don’t live in Rochester. That must be someone else with my name.
Seemed funny to live in Rochester and post in Massachusetts. That Jennifer Leonard graduated from Wellesley, though not Mt. Holyoke. I live in Granby. My wife graduated from MHC in 1987. Sloppy research on my part. I don’t usually make those mistakes.
There’s also a marketing type in Halifax and an interior designer in Oregon. I don’t have those kind of echoes with my name.
Disagreement aside, welcome to BMG.
Much better.
Someone wrote
If the example of privilege is we get treated better, all that needs to happen is for ALL people to enjoy the same treatment. If black people as a rule tomorrow all started being looked at by cops less suspiciously, which of course would be great, I do not expect that to require that cops start looking at me more suspiciously because I’m white. I neither want nor expect my white experience to change at all, only that the black experience rise to the level of mine.
The only difference is our answer to the question why hasn’t the black experience risen to yours. And for me the answer is white privilege-and as Mark Bail explains below-its a privilege that really seeps into everyday life.
When you are meeting a doctor you haven’t seen before and assume he will be a fellow white male, that’s privilege. When you cross the side of the street at night reflexively to avoid a black man, that’s privilege. When you assume your default interactions with cops will be civil and fair, that’s privilege. When you assume your sending your kids off to school and they will be treated fairly by the teachers and administrators without regard to their race, that’s privilege. When you assume your daughter can buy a Barbie or watch a superhero movie and the doll or hero looks like them, that’s privilege. When you assume you’re colleague getting a raise has nothing to do with race, when you assume you’re bank denying you credit has nothing to do with your race, all of these day to day assumptions white people don’t have to worry about-is part of the privilege. We are America’s default.
If you ask a Japanese man, a Korean man, a Filipino, or an African what an ‘American’ looks like-odds are the image in their head will look like you and me and not our President. Just for being white, people in the Philippines assumed I was American. They had no idea if my fiancee met a Canadian or Australian (the latter of whom visit the Philippines far more frequently) in college, they assumed the white guy in the photo was an American.
Put it another way, Julian Bond said this to a group of us at U Chicago, every day we (meaning white people) wake up without thinking about our race. At all, we rarely have to interact with it. But for black Americans it is their defining feature they think about on a daily basis that affects all their interactions. Not having to think about or worry about our race is our biggest privilege.
…but as with all the other so-called privileges the trick is getting to the point when all of us can have that experience. For the record, though, not all of us cross the street to avoid a black man, but yes we probably do make assumptions about professions that while not absolute probably do have some basis in statistics (e. g. I suspect American doctors really are disproportionately white men.)
Healthcare is a perfect example. It is a right in theory-it’s still a privilege in practice in modern America. Something that is extra, that certainly costs extra, and is an add on benefit many vulnerable people still have. I just got health insurance via work and am privileged vis a vis myself six months ago using an ACA plan and paying out of pocket for it-and privileged in relative terms compared to those without any affordable coverage at all.
Racial equality is nice in theory-it’s a value and an outcome we are all committed to. Something even most conservatives support in theory. Where it gets dicey is in practice-and white privilege refers to the practice and the reality in America that a white person at any income scale is comparatively better off than a black person at the same income level. We balance for class and we still see this comparison.
Ma was a clerk at Watertown high-dad was a mental health counselor for the state-both took courses at north shore and bunker hill cc but never for degrees. My buddy is half black, half Thai and lived a privileged existence compared to me when it comes to his education (Andover and Harvars), his parents (a doctor and a consultant-both Ivy grads), the cars they drove (a Saab convertible and Volvo suv) and the vacations they had (house on plum island later traded up to the Vineyard-family trips to New Zealand, etc).
But as a black looking male-he has faced harassment from Cambridge and Harvard police-harassment from NYPD and SFPD has he has moved about-and harassment when he lived abroad in Germany and Turkey I wouldn’t have. All on account of his race, maybe his dress (he is a DJ), and the way he acts. As a nerdy black kid in high school he had a hard time relating to the Rindge kids who were black and never felt fully comfortable with the nerdy white set. Those feelings got more pronounced at Harvard-not quite a fit for the black student org or the Asian one-(as for Andover to public transfer-the racism he encountered part of the reason he switched).
So I have white privilege compared to him on those experiences, while we can also agree he has privileges I don’t on account of his income. But tackling one doesn’t exclude tackling the other , while denying one prevents is from tackling either.
And will also apologize to him for my language earlier, I think now that we have clarified where we are both coming from a little better, this discussion shouldn’t be as fraught.
I’m not expert at white privilege. it’s actually an academic concept that is probably being misused and abused in general discourse. I realized what being white meant when I was in grad school in my 40s. It wasn’t guilt that struck me, rather the idea that there is no “normal,” no objective baseline, that everyone can be. Being white, I can’t experience life as a black person. I can’t easily see things from the perspective of a black person. I can sympathize. I can work to understand the perspective. I can connect on the level where we’re all human beings. But it’s extraordinarily time-consuming and difficult to see things from a non-white perspective.
That doesn’t mean that we’re wrong for being white. The idea, at least for me, is that we don’t assume there’s a neutral vantage point to view things from. Part of white privilege is to believe in that neutral, vantage point, which is typically the white, middle-class vantage point.
it meant when I read “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity” by Beverly Tatum. It was that book that made me realize that I wasn’t just normal. I was white. Seeing myself as “normal” was very white of me.
And helpful examples
… is hard work.
To me, ‘normal’ is being who you are because of who you are… not because somebody forced either a degradation of identity upon you or bequeathed your identity by inheritance. Normal is what is without deliberate interference. And I see in our countries racism and sexism throughout the nations history, clear example after clear example of deliberate interference. I guess you could say not having that deliberate interference is a ‘privilege’… but I would just say that’s sorta putting the baby, the bathwater and the cart all before the horse.. and then tossing them out. Yes, I deliberately made that twisted reference because when we try to describe one thing, and come out with another… well, there’s something of that here, I feel.
I think the concept of ‘privilege’ is so slippery because we want to find a way to express how those of us who may be seen, fairly or not, as enjoying the fruits of oppression without actually calling out — or even calling it — oppression. This second order expression itself gets re-twisted in the term ‘under-privileged’ which, if you think about it, is less a deliberate turning of bights and loops and more a passive aggression of u-turn syllogisms and conflicting ratiocinations that only resembles a Gordian Knot. And, like the Gordian Knot, It will not be ‘solved’ by straightening the loops and uncurling the bights, but by cleaving it altogether, right down the middle.
So, given all this, I don’t think black people feel ‘normal’. How could they? I feel ‘normal’, because nobody (other than my busybody mother) has deliberately interfered in my life. I don’t feel ‘privileged’ because nobody has deliberately given me anything special either (including my full-of-advice but nonetheless parsimonious busybody mother…). But I think the lack of normality on the part of black people isn’t a reflection of my ‘privilege’ — because my privilege doesn’t exist– rather it’s a reflection of several hundred years of deliberate oppression followed hard after by another century and a half of inconsistent, indistinct and often blunted attempts to overturn prior oppression without actual repentance and, yes, reparations. We can elide all this by saying I’m ‘privileged’ and they are not but that gets us back to where the horse, the baby, the bathwater and the cart have all been tossed out the window… It says nothing about how that so called ‘privilege’ came about.
is slippery. I don’t see privilege with over- and under-. It’s a binary. Zero sum. The term may also be dated. It’s certainly misunderstood.
Interestingly, the idea of male and female privilege most recently originates at Wellesley College with a Peggy McIntosh‘s article, White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Backpack (1989). It’s been pretty significant. She wrote it to go beyond racism as overt acts. She coined the term because she “was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”
The article is the source of the most recent usage of “white privilege.” McIntosh’s goal was explicitly to deal with oppression:
I think the usage that Jennifer opposes runs contrary to McIntosh’s intention and into what you suggest is an avoidance of oppression. As a Women’s Studies professor, McIntosh was very much about oppression. She’s not about guilt. She’s about self-examination and people exploring their identities so that they work to destroy the oppression that started hundreds of years ago.
McIntosh says she has not been taught to see herself as an oppressor, and I strongly suspect she personally is not one. Telling most people they are oppressors will probably go over even worse than telling them that they are privileged. The instant response will be, “Hey, what did I do!?” We cannot be held responsible for anything other than our own actions and it is inappropriate to assume that being white automatically equates to supporting oppression or in any way taking advantage of it. I explained upthread how and why I disagree with the concept that privilege is zero-sum and I stand by it. In my fantasy world we would ALL be privileged.
your non-action that is a problem? Hypothetical: You can’t help it if you’re white, but you get a job over a black candidate because of his race. You’ve taken no action, but you have benefited from this systemic racism. If like all the whites before you, you see no problem with this, then you are part of the problem. It’s up to you to decide whether to take action about that system. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Is your inaction an action?
We’re talking about two different things: 1) message framing 2) issue analysis.I wouldn’t go around telling people they are oppressors. Nor would I suggest telling people they have “white privilege.” Peggy McIntosh doesn’t either. Her work is focused on people telling their stories and recognizing the points of views of others. Her interview in the New Yorker is most informative in this regard.
I’m arguing for the concept, not as framing, but as a concept. The point is to see yourself within the system of oppression. I disagree with Jennifer that the predicate of white privilege is guilt. It can be, though I’m still bourgeois enough to leave guilt to the individual conscience. But the reason for the concept is awareness; it is a lever to pry open systemic racism.
Ta-Nahesi Coates might bridge the gap for us: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/07/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-white-privilege/60387.
…but I hope if I finally get an actual job (a sensitive spot for me – I feel like I’ve done all the right things in terms of acquiring credentials and adhering to society’s expectations and yes, I do belong to all the historically advantaged groups, but I have never been fully employed) you are not expecting me to double check that an applicant of another race is more qualified and yield to that person. Yes, it is a problem if someone is discriminated against on the basis of his race, but I’m not sure what you reasonably expect me to do beyond advocate anti-discrimination enforcement and treat others fairly in my own actions.
think you should do. You do what you are doing. You recognize the inequality inherent in the system and take the action you think appropriate.
The point is, you have to recognize the systemic aspect of the racism. Structural racism is more than the sum of individual actions. The point of identifying white privilege is to see structural racism.
1. You do NOT argue against affirmative action
2. You do NOT argue for “color blind” government policies
3. You do NOT dismiss real experiences of real people
The most effective way (perhaps even the only way) for white privilege to be eradicated from our society is for those of us who enjoy that white privilege to remain vigilantly aware of its continued existence and do all in our power to change the systems that perpetuate it.
Minorities in America do not currently have the power to make these changes. They do not control the mainstream media. They do not control the power-brokers. They do not control the government. Even when we elect a black President, we learn — after he is in office — that he lacks the combination of courage, personal security, or personal will to forcefully and vigorously work to eliminate this cancer. Another example is Clarence Thomas.
We see white privilege being extended by our dismantling of affirmative action programs. We see it being extended by widespread imposition of “voter ID” laws that hearken back to the Jim Crow abuses against black Americans. We see it in the simultaneous explosion of police militarization, government surveillance, and the shredding of constitutional protections. We see it in the steadfast refusal to prosecute or even seriously investigate police who murder.
One of the things I suggest you do NOT do is dismiss those of us who express serious concern about this spreading cancer as suffering from a “60s mentality” or a “Coakley Personality Disorder”.
In fact, there are many things we can do and many things we should not do. The burden is on us, as the unwitting beneficiaries of white privilege, to end white privilege.
…to advocate 1 and 2 if we truly want to eliminate race and color from our consciousness, though reasonable people can disagree. If we want to get to a point of judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character we need to just make the decision to do it. If racism is like a bad habit or addiction society has I am calling on us to quit cold turkey. Please tell me you did not just compare Barack Obama to Clarence Thomas! What does Coakley have to do with this?
So recognizing that racism will ways exist-we have to continue affirmative action and government programs targeted to benefit minorities. The effect of a color blind policy is to deny the very real reality of pervasive racism.
You may be color blind-I won’t trust that the law truly is until we get real criminal justice reform that doesn’t disproportionately incarcerate blacks, real education reform that integrates schools and erases the achievement gap, real health care reform that bridges the life expectancy gap, real economic reforms that bridge the income gaps, housing reforms that bridge the home ownership gap. As soon as we see real racial parity we can talk about scaling back-since we are still decades away from that let’s not put earplugs in and stop listening to the cries of a hurt people begging for justice simply because the reality of racism conflicts with the ideals we hold our country to.
…but the motivation should be to lift ALL people up and targeting should be based on actual rather than assumed opportunity or lack thereof. Much of what you refer to should just be seen as basic human rights – period. They also have a strong class component and if we are truly committed to leaving nobody behind the race component will work itself out.
When we account for class, there are still persistent racial disparities that we see between whites and blacks. Granted, as I stated earlier in this thread, many poor whites are starting to fall behind compared to rich whites and Asians (even if we account for class) in many of the same metrics.
I guess what I don’t get is why it has to be mutually exclusive. I think its entirely unfair to say to black Americans, this happened in the past, we’re sorry, but you’ll get lumped in with everyone else who needs help. Trayvon Martin was a middle class kid living in a mostly white neighborhood, he got gunned down because of his race. Ferguson for all it’s flaws, is a community blacks who successfully escaped the St. Louis ghettos turned to when they got a modicum of prosperity due to its good schools and housing. The vast majority of the blacks there are already homeowners for instance.
So some of these incidents and disparities cannot be explained away by class, and won’t be mitigated by a purely class based approach. A rising tide lifts all boats is still the core of liberalism-but we have to focus on the fact that some boats might need a more targeted tide in order to rise, or particularly anchors thrown overboard first before they can rise to the level of the others.
We do not see an epidemic of police shooting against poor white kids. We do not see an epidemic of poor white kids getting incarcerated at disproportionate rates. We can achieve social and economic justice at the same time as linked priorities rather than competitive ones.
…but I was specifically referring to the gaps you previously brought up. There’s no excuse for what George Zimmerman did to Trayvon Martin. Stand Your Ground is a bad law that I have all along argued was misapplied here anyway because he didn’t stand his ground – he ADVANCED it! He did, however, ultimately get tried and (most unfortunately IMO) acquitted. Regarding actual law enforcement (as opposed to wannabes like Zimmerman) there needs to be a lot better training with a focus on de-escalation, not firing unless fired upon (That’s what vests are for.), and sensitivity. There needs to be either a special prosecutor or federal involvement for shootings involving a cop to avoid any appearance of conflict. However I don’t believe Trayvon Martin was shot because he didn’t benefit from affirmative action; he got shot because his neighbor was a racist jerk who thought vigilantism was appropriate.
Which leads me to a bit of a rant that’s been bubbling up inside me as we’ve gone through this thread. To those who do in fact see a non-white as less than you are FOR CRYING OUT LOUD JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY AND GROW THE HECK UP! I’m sure you interact every day with people who have different color eyes and hair than you do and don’t give it a second thought, but all of sudden you encounter someone with skin a few shades darker than yours and you judge him differently? On what grounds? So, you once had an unpleasant run-in with someone of similar color – that makes all of them like that now? You must have been the schoolyard bully, making fun of a classmate with freckles, or who wore glasses or braces, but you’re an adult now so act like it! You say that’s what your parents taught? Great, but every generation rebels a bit so how about doing so with this one, or do you still literally believe in a fat man in a red suit who brings presents (or maybe coal if this is the way you behave). Speaking of Santa Claus I bet you claim to be Christian, so how about following the teachings? Love your neighbor as yourself, keeping in mind that Jesus used a Samaritan (ie the “other” in that context) in the parable to further illustrate His point. See ALL of your fellow humans as children of God and brothers/sisters in Christ.
If you are law enforcement, show some respect for your community and the people in it. It will make your job overall easier anyway. People will trust you, and if they trust you they will help you. OTOH, if you treat them like dirt and that is their experience with white people, congratulations, you have just contributed to continuing the cycle of racial mistrust and made your profession and YOUR race look bad! So put the gun down; the Wild West ceased to exist at least a century ago, and don’t be so quick to break in your new “toys” you received courtesy of Pentagon surplus.
Color-blindness is just not that hard. I, and I believe many in my circles, do it pretty well. We need to strive for it and call out people who are not.
That’s what the protests are for and that’s what the discussion of white privilege is about. When we call out white privilege and identify it we are in effect-calling out and identify those people, and more importantly, those systems, that are failing to be color blind. Let’s create that society together. I refuse to believe we are there now or it’s just an attitude adjustment that is needed-the facts indicate there is structural racism endemic in all facets of our society. Calling it white privilege and working to end it will create the color blind society you seek.
…so it is for the people who make up the system to decide to be colorblind, but framing it as privilege is counterproductive. I agree almost completely with everything Fenway49, who I think has been more eloquent than I, has said on this thread
But we saw with the Senate CIA Report that many low-level officials and figures in the CIA recoiled at what they were doing, asked higher ups what was going on, and questioned the validity of the program. Not to mention many did report that officials on the ground were lying to Congress and their superiors and juking the stats. The Village Voice just published an excellent four part series of an NYPD cop who secretly taped his colleagues revealing a force under tremendous pressure to have “good data” to report up to to command. This has lead to higher rates of arrest just to look good-hurting innocent people with trumped up drug chargers and breaking the bonds between communities and the police. Both examples show noble individuals who are stuck in systems that are fundamentally unethical. Their choices to whistleblow or resign succeed in bringing daylight to these operations but end their careers and prevent other good guys from rising through the ranks. Those that shut up and keep their head down and eyes closed get promoted.
So if we are to recognize that the status quo of America is a system that is endemically racist from a systematic level-something you seem willing to concede-than merely being not racist in our own lives is insufficient-we also have to call out the system and those who are taking advantage of it. It means calling out Markey Mark or Bill Bratton, not just the Bull Connors of the world.
A good insight — I’ve been thinking about how much police are driven by their “stats” because I see and hear it often in community meetings. Police stats include number of crimes in their district as well as number of incidents that remain open or closed. The drive toward resolving crimes is good. Community members ask for police action to reduce crime and increase public safety. But like any evaluation system, there should be paired measures, so that a measure doesn’t distort motivation and lead to unintended consequences.
A whole other thread of conversation is about what specific policing reforms — recruitment, training, management, equipment, evaluation, oversight, etc., would be most effective.
From the Village Voice-worth the read, longform journalism at it’s finest.
Regarding my 1 & 2, I disagree. You are seeking to to “eliminate race and color from our consciousness”. I am attempting to end white privilege. I suggest that the former can only happen after the latter is accomplished.
We have discussed this before. The reality that your argument again misses is structural, or systemic, racism. When a white male takes a phone call for an interview that a black male is not even considered for (if the black male, for example, doesn’t travel in the business circles of the employer, or has a degree from a school that the employer doesn’t recognize, etc), the white male doesn’t “judge” anybody. He still receives the benefit of white privilege. Your approach worsens that problem by dismantling the programs and processes that help the black man get back on to the employer’s radar screen.
I’m not sure that “compare” is the word I’d use. I suggest that both Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas made it through the very selective screen that white power brokers use for such appointments. They are, of course, very different men being considered by very different power brokers for very different positions. Still, I suggest that the common thread that joins Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama — and has everything to do with why they made it through their respective filters — is that neither will rock the boat of white privilege too seriously. As a consequence each man has been singularly ineffective at correcting this pervasive problem.
Each man is frequently cited as evidence of “how far we’ve come”. The GOP proudly touts Clarence Thomas as evidence of its “support for minorities”. The Democrats and mass media proudly offer Barack Obama as similar evidence of a similar claim. Both claims essentially deny the reality that American society today is dreadfully oppressive to blacks and to black men in particular.
Mr. Obama has shared with multiple sources his concern about being viewed as “an angry black man”. That concern has hobbled his willingness to take the bold steps that might have accomplished so much.
My reference to Ms. Coakley was a reference to a comment offered here during the campaign that characterized my views as a “Martha Coakley Derangement Disorder”, and your subsequent repetition of it. When you discount people in such ways (“60s mentality”, “Coakley Derangement Syndrome”), you inoculate yourself against receiving information about issues like this.
I don’t see how she is relevant at all to this discussion and am sick of going down that rabbit hole.
Your other points are succinct and valid.
You said in your first paragraph above that eliminating color consciousness can only happen once white privilege has ended. I actually very strongly believe the reverse to be true, that any privilege will end only when people decide not to see or at least not be influenced by color.
In my view, your argument is a tautology, and an impossible one as well. As I sketched above, a white applicant who never even knows about the hundreds of black applicants who were excluded from even applying for the job he just got can be totally color-blind and the systemic racism will continue.
It doesn’t require explicit and intentional racism to cause black children to fail at school because they’re hungry (because they’re poor) or because nobody in their neighborhood values school, or because nobody they know has time for school. In urban neighborhoods where the most prosperous and powerful people a 12 year old sees are gang leaders and drug dealers, it doesn’t require explicit and intentional racism to cause the 12 year old to fall off the cliff into poverty, crime, and despair.
All those things happen right now, and the black community bears the overwhelming brunt of the results right now. That’s been happening since the civil war. Your suggestion of suddenly, in this context, making society color blind, is nothing less than turning your back on the obligations and consequences of two centuries of white mistreatment of blacks. It is the kind of exquisite rationalization that people of privilege have always used, throughout human history, to assuage their guilt and excuse their implicit participation in continuing the system of exploitation.
It is, simply, wrong.
This is a good comment because it brings the discussion back to the needs of children, teens & young adults. So my original point — it’s important to nurture youth programs, community development, local small business development, etc., so that the 12-year-old you mention will see thriving businesses in his community, as well as participate in arts, sports, etc., in his community.
Paragraph one – the hiring authority is not colorblind, and that’s a problem.
Paragraph two – is primarily about class and needs to be fixed without regard to race
Paragraph three – it takes all of us to become colorblind, and I fundamentally disagree with your analysis.
Paragraph one – the best solution we’ve discovered until now is affirmative action. A colorblind approach to hiring means, at best, that new hires will be proportionally represented among applicants.
Just to put some numbers on what we’re talking about, consider a typical “small” business (as defined by the SBA) with 200 employees. Suppose that employer has a 1% minority representation — that’s TWO minority employees. A typical turnover rate for a healthy company is 10%. That’s 20 new employees per year. If the applicant pool has 10% minority representation and a colorblind hiring policy is applied, that means that the company will hire 2 minority employees per year. The question is how long it takes for the company to have 20 minority employees — 18 of which must be new hires.
Even in the most optimistic scenario (no layoffs, no minority employees leave), it takes NINE years for the company to achieve parity. That’s essentially forever in today’s world. A more realistic scenario reflects several unfortunate facts:
– New hires are much more likely to be laid off or leave than employees with more seniority
– The same company culture that results in a 1% minority representation is likely to result in disproportionally high termination rates for minority employees
In the real world, “colorblind” hiring practices produce NO change for employers who already have de facto segregation in place. This reality is why affirmative action programs were originally created.
The reality is that today minorities are dramatically under-represented even in applications because they’ve already been excluded by systemic racism in education (especially college), prior work experience, and simple economics (they don’t have ANY college degree because they couldn’t afford college).
Paragraph two – an immediate start towards fixing this is to pay reparations today reflecting the trillions of dollars stolen from this population.
Neither one nor two can be successfully addressed by a colorblind solution (the hot water in coffee analog).
I don’t doubt that you disagree with my analysis. My purpose in commenting is to refute the argument you make, whether or not you agree.