This Is What White Privilege Looks Like
My uncle likes to tell a story about his life in Georgia. He rides motorcycles, occasionally at speeds slightly exceeding the legal limit. A few years back, he was in the process of passing a car when he glanced over and realized it was a police vehicle. He pulled in ahead of the vehicle, assuming that he was about to be issued a ticket; he was unfazed several miles later when the officer turned on his lights. Upon stopping his motorcycle, my uncle took off his protective gear to reveal that he was a 50+ year old white man; when the officer approached and asked "Do you know why I pulled you over?" my uncle responded "That depends - how long have you been following me?"
The police officer laughed and let him go with a warning. It's a funny story and one that my uncle likes to tell often; however, he agrees with me that invisible privilege made this interaction possible.
Clearly the politically correct strategy of just not talking about race isn't working out well; refusing to discuss race in polite company creates a dialogue between only impolite voices. I'm not an activist, I'm an engineer - I spend 99% of my work time staring at broken systems, wondering how they failed and trying to find solutions. During the Obama years I didn't have a strong opinion on racial politics; with Trump's election our system is revealed to be so visibly broken that I can't in good conscience be silent about it.
An Ethiopian/Canadian friend of mine said it best - a few years ago, we discussed the difference between raising his daughter in Toronto versus Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia). He was unequivocal: "I plan to raise my daughter in Africa; in Canada, no matter what she does, she'll always be a second-class citizen. In Addis she'll be a citizen."
Being white and male is really useful; I’ve never been pulled over in America. I've never experienced any other perspective in the States, but I've been a minority in many recent African situations (the only white guy in the club/village/church) - it's awkward as hell even when the assumptions about me are all positive, it must be terrible if people have negative assumptions about you. My three years in rural Africa have been defined by constant attention from strangers, constant reminders that I don't look the way they do and constant interactions based on the color of my skin (a whole lot of children ask me for money on a daily basis). These interactions are a large part of why bleeding-heart types burn out in Africa; being the "other" is exhausting.
In Africa, I've seen some quite obvious examples of white privilege - a bar that I once visited was notorious for requesting identification off every black person and letting white people walk in uninspected. Similar unmistakably deferential treatment at security screenings/borders/police checkpoints is common. White privilege in Africa is impossible to ignore; in America it's subtler.
White privilege made my Uncle’s motorcycle story possible; it allows hidden second chances and the presumption of innocence by authority figures. White privilege makes it possible to reply "I'd prefer not to take that at this time" in response to a requested drug screening and still get the job; for a teenager caught shoplifting to be given a warning rather than face criminal prosecution; for a man accused of shooting at his neighbors to calmly explain the situation and avoid being arrested, with no charges filed (I'm not going to name names but some crazy stories come out at our family reunions).
If I interact with the police, I don't have to worry that they'll shoot me over a trivial misdemeanor. I don't have to think about the color of my skin when walking into a job interview. I can write an article like this and not be seen as a dangerous radical by future employers (fingers crossed on that one).
White privilege (especially Northern liberal privilege, the type I'm most familiar with) makes it possible to name a mountain "White Face" and then wonder why minorities don't visit the local tourist town to buy "North Face" branded gear; to walk into a crowded bar or concert venue and not even notice that every face is the same color; to think that watching The Wire or voting for Obama is enough to put you on the "good" side.
The truth is that we're all affected by the history of slavery and colonialism. The causality may be direct or subtle, but quite literally the entire modern world has its foundations in slave labor and raw materials from colonies. The industrial revolution itself was spurred by the need to process cheap cotton quickly; countries that banned slavery outright (like the UK) were still indirectly profiting from the "peculiar institution". My family has a tradition of management careers within the NY State prison system; the accumulated wealth that put me through college was largely derived from mass incarceration of American citizens, a disproportionate percentage of them black.
Better writers than I have documented the economic inequality between White people and Black people in detail; the statistics are unambiguous. White families have nearly ten times the median net worth of black families. White high school dropouts are equally as likely to land jobs as black college students. White job applicants with a criminal record are about as likely to get hired as black applicants without a record. This is pervasive, it's intentional and it's not going away if everyone pretends it doesn't exist.
One of the most common responses to these arguments is "I'm not privileged. My family is poor/rural/irish/catholic/jewish, we've faced plenty of discrimination for it. Don't talk to me about privilege when I'm struggling already." I heard a lot of complaints in my rural high school about affirmative action, especially how "affirmative action means you have to hire unqualified minorities instead of qualified people." I've even heard the converse of this argument - "If a coworker is a minority, they must be employed here due to affirmative action and therefore unqualified" (one of my few life regrets is that I didn't start an argument with the person who said that last phrase, I should have contradicted him at the time instead of awkwardly changing the subject).
As clumsy and awkward as quota systems may feel, I'd argue that they're in White peoples’ best interest. There's a simple reason for this:
We're Not Playing a Zero-Sum Game.
Phrased another way - taking away wealth, privilege and fundamental rights from one social group doesn't mean that another group directly benefits. From personal experience I've seen how the existence of a perpetually impoverished and desperate underclass benefits no one. A lot of my time in Africa has been spent in gated, protected compounds with private security guards and heavy policing. Most of my apartments over the last few years have been built out of solid concrete, with bars on the windows and razor wire on the walls; the line between luxury apartment and prison cell blurs together (with a really important distinction being who controls the keys to all the padlocks). Only an utter psychopath would prefer a world of guards and gates over a world of freedom - high economic inequality means that the rich have the privilege of living in cages. These may be fancy cages with nice things inside, but cages nonetheless.
Freedom cuts both ways; if the underprivileged have more economic freedom and security, then the overprivileged have more freedom to travel and live their lives without constant fear for their own safety. Having a permanent impoverished underclass doesn't make the privileged safer or more free; it means that we all have to be more fearful, more insular, more concerned about ending up in the "wrong" neighborhood.
I'm hardly the first to say the obvious truth - social inequality hurts us all. Whatever steps we as the overprivileged can take to alleviate social inequality are in our own best interests; if this requires clumsy and awkward programs like affirmative action or more drastic actions like reparations then it's way, way past time to have these discussions.
The world is small now; the recent refugee influx into Europe makes it painfully obvious that you can't just build a wall and hope to keep the poor people out. However, the resource shortages that originally drove colonization and slavery are basically fixed now; global society has more resource production capacity than we know what to do with. Manufacturing enough physical goods for everyone on the planet to live a dignified, healthy, free life would be trivial; our social systems make distributing these goods to the impoverished difficult. There's no physical need for our current social inequality to persist - there's more than enough stuff for everyone. We just need to re-evaluate how that stuff gets distributed.
I can't pretend to have any real answers with regards to race or what the right actions would look like; race is complicated and difficult. All I can do is try to listen to the people who have experienced racism and adopt the line "I have no idea what that feels like."
The immediate next step for every white person reading this should be to acknowledge these uncomfortable truths in your own life:
Finally, reach out to people in your network who’ve expressed racism in the past - either dog whistle or explicit. This is going to be awkward as hell, but I’m planning to do just that by sending this article to people in my network. Polite, non-confrontational behavior when faced with casual racism only validates it. If you want to build a better world, avoiding controversy via polite acquiescence won’t help.
The police officer laughed and let him go with a warning. It's a funny story and one that my uncle likes to tell often; however, he agrees with me that invisible privilege made this interaction possible.
Clearly the politically correct strategy of just not talking about race isn't working out well; refusing to discuss race in polite company creates a dialogue between only impolite voices. I'm not an activist, I'm an engineer - I spend 99% of my work time staring at broken systems, wondering how they failed and trying to find solutions. During the Obama years I didn't have a strong opinion on racial politics; with Trump's election our system is revealed to be so visibly broken that I can't in good conscience be silent about it.
1. White Privilege is the power of being "default"; of not having to think about race
An Ethiopian/Canadian friend of mine said it best - a few years ago, we discussed the difference between raising his daughter in Toronto versus Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia). He was unequivocal: "I plan to raise my daughter in Africa; in Canada, no matter what she does, she'll always be a second-class citizen. In Addis she'll be a citizen."
Being white and male is really useful; I’ve never been pulled over in America. I've never experienced any other perspective in the States, but I've been a minority in many recent African situations (the only white guy in the club/village/church) - it's awkward as hell even when the assumptions about me are all positive, it must be terrible if people have negative assumptions about you. My three years in rural Africa have been defined by constant attention from strangers, constant reminders that I don't look the way they do and constant interactions based on the color of my skin (a whole lot of children ask me for money on a daily basis). These interactions are a large part of why bleeding-heart types burn out in Africa; being the "other" is exhausting.
In Africa, I've seen some quite obvious examples of white privilege - a bar that I once visited was notorious for requesting identification off every black person and letting white people walk in uninspected. Similar unmistakably deferential treatment at security screenings/borders/police checkpoints is common. White privilege in Africa is impossible to ignore; in America it's subtler.
2. White privilege in America manifests as the absence of consequences
White privilege made my Uncle’s motorcycle story possible; it allows hidden second chances and the presumption of innocence by authority figures. White privilege makes it possible to reply "I'd prefer not to take that at this time" in response to a requested drug screening and still get the job; for a teenager caught shoplifting to be given a warning rather than face criminal prosecution; for a man accused of shooting at his neighbors to calmly explain the situation and avoid being arrested, with no charges filed (I'm not going to name names but some crazy stories come out at our family reunions).
If I interact with the police, I don't have to worry that they'll shoot me over a trivial misdemeanor. I don't have to think about the color of my skin when walking into a job interview. I can write an article like this and not be seen as a dangerous radical by future employers (fingers crossed on that one).
White privilege (especially Northern liberal privilege, the type I'm most familiar with) makes it possible to name a mountain "White Face" and then wonder why minorities don't visit the local tourist town to buy "North Face" branded gear; to walk into a crowded bar or concert venue and not even notice that every face is the same color; to think that watching The Wire or voting for Obama is enough to put you on the "good" side.
3. White privilege is economic power
The truth is that we're all affected by the history of slavery and colonialism. The causality may be direct or subtle, but quite literally the entire modern world has its foundations in slave labor and raw materials from colonies. The industrial revolution itself was spurred by the need to process cheap cotton quickly; countries that banned slavery outright (like the UK) were still indirectly profiting from the "peculiar institution". My family has a tradition of management careers within the NY State prison system; the accumulated wealth that put me through college was largely derived from mass incarceration of American citizens, a disproportionate percentage of them black.
Better writers than I have documented the economic inequality between White people and Black people in detail; the statistics are unambiguous. White families have nearly ten times the median net worth of black families. White high school dropouts are equally as likely to land jobs as black college students. White job applicants with a criminal record are about as likely to get hired as black applicants without a record. This is pervasive, it's intentional and it's not going away if everyone pretends it doesn't exist.
4. Inequality hurts all of us
One of the most common responses to these arguments is "I'm not privileged. My family is poor/rural/irish/catholic/jewish, we've faced plenty of discrimination for it. Don't talk to me about privilege when I'm struggling already." I heard a lot of complaints in my rural high school about affirmative action, especially how "affirmative action means you have to hire unqualified minorities instead of qualified people." I've even heard the converse of this argument - "If a coworker is a minority, they must be employed here due to affirmative action and therefore unqualified" (one of my few life regrets is that I didn't start an argument with the person who said that last phrase, I should have contradicted him at the time instead of awkwardly changing the subject).
As clumsy and awkward as quota systems may feel, I'd argue that they're in White peoples’ best interest. There's a simple reason for this:
We're Not Playing a Zero-Sum Game.
Phrased another way - taking away wealth, privilege and fundamental rights from one social group doesn't mean that another group directly benefits. From personal experience I've seen how the existence of a perpetually impoverished and desperate underclass benefits no one. A lot of my time in Africa has been spent in gated, protected compounds with private security guards and heavy policing. Most of my apartments over the last few years have been built out of solid concrete, with bars on the windows and razor wire on the walls; the line between luxury apartment and prison cell blurs together (with a really important distinction being who controls the keys to all the padlocks). Only an utter psychopath would prefer a world of guards and gates over a world of freedom - high economic inequality means that the rich have the privilege of living in cages. These may be fancy cages with nice things inside, but cages nonetheless.
Freedom cuts both ways; if the underprivileged have more economic freedom and security, then the overprivileged have more freedom to travel and live their lives without constant fear for their own safety. Having a permanent impoverished underclass doesn't make the privileged safer or more free; it means that we all have to be more fearful, more insular, more concerned about ending up in the "wrong" neighborhood.
I'm hardly the first to say the obvious truth - social inequality hurts us all. Whatever steps we as the overprivileged can take to alleviate social inequality are in our own best interests; if this requires clumsy and awkward programs like affirmative action or more drastic actions like reparations then it's way, way past time to have these discussions.
5. What happens next?
The world is small now; the recent refugee influx into Europe makes it painfully obvious that you can't just build a wall and hope to keep the poor people out. However, the resource shortages that originally drove colonization and slavery are basically fixed now; global society has more resource production capacity than we know what to do with. Manufacturing enough physical goods for everyone on the planet to live a dignified, healthy, free life would be trivial; our social systems make distributing these goods to the impoverished difficult. There's no physical need for our current social inequality to persist - there's more than enough stuff for everyone. We just need to re-evaluate how that stuff gets distributed.
I can't pretend to have any real answers with regards to race or what the right actions would look like; race is complicated and difficult. All I can do is try to listen to the people who have experienced racism and adopt the line "I have no idea what that feels like."
The immediate next step for every white person reading this should be to acknowledge these uncomfortable truths in your own life:
- The money, resources and politics leftover from slavery, colonization and the industrial revolution they spurred have indirectly made my life much easier, often in subtle ways.
- The first step towards finding solutions is to listen to people who've been affected by racism, even when doing so is awkward. Read Malcolm X and Ta-Nehisi Coates; read authors who make you uncomfortable and talk to people with whom you disagree.
- I don't have to be perfect to be better. Donald Trump saying "I'm the least racist person in the world" is a great example of how not to do this. Acknowledging racism in your own worldview is really embarrassing and troubling but vital if things are ever going to improve.
- Claiming that I have no special privileges makes me part of the problem.
Finally, reach out to people in your network who’ve expressed racism in the past - either dog whistle or explicit. This is going to be awkward as hell, but I’m planning to do just that by sending this article to people in my network. Polite, non-confrontational behavior when faced with casual racism only validates it. If you want to build a better world, avoiding controversy via polite acquiescence won’t help.
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