Because I recognize that my words live in the public sphere on this blog, I feel like I should elaborate a bit on white privilege and my thoughts on it. This is precipitated by a small dust-up over my quoting of an alumnus from my college, who, you'll recall from my last post, did not believe in white privilege. He contacted me and, in the resulting minor dust-up, I was able to articulate more of my feelings about the unearned, often unquestioned, power of whiteness. I'm sharing them here, with the full disclosure that I did not change the mind of my interlocutor and I doubt I would be able to: we were at loggerheads at the end of the discussion, with me believing that white privilege exists and him believing that all inequity could be accounted for by racism, and believing, in fact, that the idea of white privilege itself was racist (because it ascribes a characteristic--power--to a race) and appealed to "some people, most of whom have a sheltered, self-absorbed, self-centered view of the world."
Needless to say, I do agree with this at all.
We spoke specifically about jobs--employment being one of those places where I feel like white privilege is very often in play and very infrequently questioned. Given the whiteness of board rooms, my interlocutor offered, "Perhaps there are more white people applying for a job than their(sic) are non-white people...." I ask: if one asked WHY more white people might apply for a job than would non-white people, what would that answer reflect? The simple racism of a landlord of a building in the area of the job, who did not want to rent to a non-white person, thereby keeping the person less conveniently near the job site? The simple racism of the corporation, putting forth a front (spoken or not--and if it is unspoken, what might lead one to hear it? You know my answer to that last bit...) that non-whites need not apply? The simple racism of an individual college admissions board member who didn't want to let a black student into a school that might have given that student an alumnus connection to someone who works at the corporation? Possibly even the simple racism of a non-white applicant who sees a white possible HR manager, a white possible boss, a coterie of white possible coworkers, and decides not to put in for a job because she doesn't want to work with white people?
My interlocutor offers this defense: that if 3 of 4 candidates for a job are white, all else being equal, there's a 75% chance that the hiree will be white if no acts of racism occur. And I say that "all else" will *not* be equal even if no overt, concerted racism is exercised because white privilege pervades the backstories and operational realities of all of the candidates. Ask the deeper questions, get the deeper answers.
I see an undercurrent that defines WHITE as the default, WHITE as the norm, WHITE as the prevalent racio-cultural experience, WHITE as the assumption in places as varied as the board room and the grocery store (where a another friend reports that a Mexican-American friend once went looking for a brown man's food and the white clerk did not recognize that food).
I do not understand how one can believe that there is racism in the world but deny that whiteness has advantages that are owed only to whiteness. I don't mean to put forth that white privilege is a *special kind* of racism. It's certainly tied up with racism. But my view and experience of the world has white privilege operating alongside racism as a force of continuing, behind-the-scenes empowerment of one group, by its own hand, over others.
So here's my thesis: White privilege is not something that non-white people hand over to white people, it is something that white people (that is to say, those "raced as white," which has not always been the same group it might be today) have had, historically, the luxury of benefiting from through other white peoples' own political, social, and cultural systems that have been--yes--racist. White privilege is the societal child of institutionalized racism let lose in the day care center of a wider world.
All of which is to say, there once were three fish. One swam by the other two and said "mornin' y'all, how's the water?" and the other two looked at each other and one said to the other, "what's water?"
This thread has my approval.