“What Is White Privilege?”: Something You Would Barely Notice Unless It Were Suddenly Taken Away
Taking it for granted that when you’re shopping alone, you probably won’t be followed or harassed.
Knowing that if you ask to speak to “the person in charge,” you’ll almost certainly be facing someone of your own race.
Being able to think about different social, political or professional options without asking whether someone of your race would be accepted or allowed to do what you want to do.
Assuming that if you buy a house in a nice neighborhood, your neighbors will be pleasant or neutral toward you.
Feeling welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
What is white privilege? It’s the level of societal advantage that comes with being seen as the norm in America, automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender or other factors. It makes life smoother, but it’s something you would barely notice unless it were suddenly taken away — or unless it had never applied to you in the first place.
In 1988, the professor Peggy McIntosh used the paper White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack to describe it as a set of unearned assets that a white person in America can count on cashing in each day but to which they remain largely oblivious. The concept has been percolating in academic circles ever since and is nearing widespread use among young people on the political left. Yet as Post reporter Janell Ross noted earlier this week, it’s also a term that many Americans “instinctively don’t trust or believe to be real,” despite reams of evidence to the contrary. Black children– 4-year-olds! — comprise 18 percent of preschool enrollment but are given nearly 50 percent of all out-of-school suspensions. Job applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called in for an interview. Black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than white defendants for the same crime.
Why does such a fraught piece of academic lingo matter now? Because people are finally beginning to talk about what it means in their own lives. At a time when minorities are becoming more vocal about the ways in which their experiences in America differ from those of their white counterparts, the term might be finally entering the mainstream. On Monday night, at a forum for presidential hopefuls held in Iowa, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was asked by an audience member to explain what white privilege meant to her, and how it had affected her life. Her response? “Look, where do I start?”
Yet for every instance in which white privilege is acknowledged, there is an inevitable backlash.
Commentators quickly jump in to remind us that “not all white people are privileged,” a clear (and perhaps willful) misreading of the term. Obviously not all white people are wealthy, and yes, there are minorities who have achieved this and other marks of status. But white privilege is something specific and different – it’s the idea that just by virtue of being a white person of any kind, you’re part of the dominant group, which tends to be respected, assumed the best of, and given the benefit of the doubt. That just isn’t the case for people of other races, no matter how wealthy, smart or hard-working they might be.
Others denounce the term as a weapon used to guilt, shame, and silence, pointing at presumably well-meaning students told by holier-than-thou faculty and classmates to “check their privilege.” Yet while the term can be used to silence, that’s more the fault of a rude terminology-wielder than of the concept itself. All sorts of normally harmless words have been deployed to guilt people and suppress speech — “unpatriotic” and “elitist” come to mind. A reminder to acknowledge one’s privilege is just a reminder to be aware — aware that you might not be able to fully understand someone else’s experiences, or that the assumptions you were brought up with may be blinding you to certain concerns. That awareness that is key to any sort of civil discussion, about race, class or anything else.
Before everyone gets too defensive (and let’s be honest — it’s probably too late), a few notes of clarification: Pointing out that white privilege exists isn’t the same as accusing every white person of being a racist. Acknowledging that you might benefit from such privilege isn’t equivalent to self-hatred or kowtowing to detested “social justice warriors.”
The thing about white privilege is that it tends to be unintentional, unconscious, uncomfortable to recognize but easy to take for granted. But it’s that very invisibility that makes it that much more important to understand: Without confronting what exists, there’s no chance of leveling the field.
By: Christine Emba, Editor of In Theory; Opionins Section, The Washington Post, January 18, 2016
“Justice Is Supposed To Be Blind”: The Oregon Standoff And America’s Double Standards On Race And Religion
What do you think the response would be if a bunch of black people, filled with rage and armed to the teeth, took over a federal government installation and defied officials to kick them out? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be wait-and-see.
Probably more like point-and-shoot.
Or what if the occupiers were Mexican American? They wouldn’t be described with the semi-legitimizing term “militia,” harking to the days of the patriots. And if the gun-toting citizens happened to be Muslim, heaven forbid, there would be wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the “terrorist assault.” I can hear Donald Trump braying for blood.
Not to worry, however, because the extremists who seized the remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon on Saturday are white. As such, they are permitted to engage in a “standoff” with authorities who keep their distance lest there be needless loss of life.
Such courtesy was not extended to Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was playing with a toy gun in a park on Nov. 22, 2014. Within seconds of arriving on the scene, police officer Timothy Loehmann shot the boy, who died the next day. Prosecutors led a grand jury investigation and announced last month that Loehmann would face no charges. A “perfect storm of human error” was blamed, and apparently storms cannot be held accountable.
Such courtesy, in fact, is routinely denied to unarmed black men and boys who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know the litany of names — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray. And you know how these stories end. Just weeks ago, a Baltimore jury failed to reach a verdict in the trial of the first of six officers charged with Gray’s death. Another perfect storm, I guess.
I probably sound cynical, but in truth I’m just weary. And worried.
Justice is supposed to be blind. Race, ethnicity and religion are not supposed to matter. Yet we’re constantly reminded that these factors can make the difference between justifiable and unjustifiable killing — and between life and death.
The yahoos in Oregon are protesting the Bureau of Land Management’s policies, hardly a red-button issue for most Americans. The federal building they seized is in a wildlife refuge, which means that by definition it’s in the middle of nowhere; the nearest sizable city is Boise, Idaho, about 200 miles away. The protesters’ guns pose more of a threat to bears than people.
So no, I don’t think authorities have any immediate reason to blast their way into the woods with a column of armored vehicles. But I would argue there was no good reason to do so on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., either. Is the salient difference that the Oregon protesters are believed to be heavily armed? If so, what message does that send? Does somebody need to found a Minority Rifle Association so that communities of color are given similar deference?
The organization’s name would have to be changed in a few decades, anyway, when whites in the United States cease to constitute a racial majority. This inexorable demographic shift, I believe, helps explain why the world of politics seems to have gone insane of late.
What I want is that African Americans, Latino Americans, Muslim Americans and other “outsiders” be seen as the Americans we are. What I want is acknowledgment that we, too, have a stake in our democracy and its future course. What I want is the recognition that no one can “take back” the country — which happens to be led by its first African American president — because it belongs to me as much as to you.
These are not the sentiments we’re hearing in the presidential campaign, though — at least, not on the Republican side. Following Trump’s lead, candidates are competing to sound angrier and more embittered. That’s why I am so worried.
You’d think there might be at least a few prominent voices on the right expressing horror and outrage at the wrongful killing of a 12-year-old boy. You’d think that Republicans running for president might find the time to condemn the armed takeover of federal property by zealots. Yet all we hear is crickets chirping.
The GOP candidates have apparently concluded that voicing hope, embracing change and broadening our concept of the American mainstream constitute a losing strategy. They see Trump’s success and mimic him in fostering a sense of “beleaguered” us vs. “menacing” them. This may be an effective way to pursue the nomination, but it’s a terrible disservice to the country.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 4, 2016
“Off We Go, Into The New Year”: Where Each Of Us Will Have The Chance To Do Better
After a certain age, favorite holiday memories tend to meld into tales too good to be true. This is human nature. We want to believe we’re better than the evidence suggests. This is a good habit of our species, especially at the end of this year, in which we’ve seen so much of the worst in us.
There is no such thing as perfection whenever we add memories of past holiday experiences to the combustible mix of family and friends. Add booze and a couple of sturdy grudges and Grey Gardens has nothing over the drama unfolding in front of us as we shake our heads.
Nevertheless, with the passage of time, we will yet again enshrine these get-togethers as something magical. This speaks to something good in us. Most of us want to be people who love people, so we manage the willpower to love even the people who get on our last nerve. Which at least one of them surely will; we just know it.
You will note that I am laying blame elsewhere for all that might annoy us this holiday season. I employ this nifty trick of memory so that, at least for the duration of this column, we can all feel superior and terribly misunderstood. My gift to you. Merry Christmas, if you celebrate. Otherwise: Happy Solstice Week. Be sure to look out the window tomorrow morning. Already, the darkness is ending a teensy bit sooner.
This has been a rough year in our lives, even if we harbor no personal grievance because of what is churning out there all around us. Just this once, let’s not rattle off the list. Many of us will continue to stake out our own little patches of righteousness, but this is the time of year when we should at least try to acknowledge the truth of the matter: We are all in this together.
Former astronaut John Glenn, a dear friend, once described for me what it was like to hover 150 miles above the Earth and get a good look at the rest of us:
“On a map, every nation has a different color,” he said. “Well, the Earth looks much different from space. You realize our borders are so artificial. Some are political; some have developed along ethnic lines. But all those lines disappear when you’re looking down from space. And you can’t help but see all that we have in common and think about how much we foul things up by focusing on our differences rather than our sameness.”
I don’t expect us to link arms and sing to the heavens. For one thing, there’d be that unpleasant argument over which version of heaven and another over whose version of God would be listening. And that’s just among the believers.
Pass.
Instead, I ask that, in the spirit of the season, we pause to consider what we still have in common with one another. It’s there, in every single person we can imagine.
I know, I know. Work through the wince. Breathe.
Three days before Christmas, I was about to start dinner, when my friend Jackie called. She and her wife, Kate, live just down the street.
“Go to the Square,” she said.
“Why?” I asked as I shut off the burner.
“I’m not telling you. Just go — and bring your camera.”
My husband and I threw on our jackets and began the short walk to the community park that greets everyone who enters our neighborhood in Cleveland.
Dozens of luminarias flickered on the ground around the gazebo. Two deer ventured forth as we walked among the lights and offered nods to the fat moon competing for attention.
I loved watching neighbors pulling in to the development after a long day at work and slowing their cars to a crawl to take in the sight of this unexpected kindness. I have no idea which neighbors made the effort to do this, but I know we need more people like them. I am grateful for the reminder that small gestures can ignite big hopes and that there are many ways to light the darkness.
To those who don’t celebrate Christmas, thank you for putting up with those of us who do. If you are struggling right now, may the holiday land gently.
Off we go, into the new year, where each of us will have the chance to do better.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, December 24, 2015
“Papers Please”: Remember What Happened The Last Time A Republican President Had A ‘Round Up Of Illegal’ Immigrants?
Ed Kilgore is right to be…um…”skeptical” that Peggy Noonan has tapped into some great Latino love for Donald Trump. She found one Dominican who is angry at illegal immigrants. Noonan bought his story because that’s what she wants to believe.
But I’ll give you one good reason why most brown people (Latino as well as other nationalities) in this country are terrified of what Donald Trump is saying he would do. It’s because some of them (and a few of us) remember what happened the last time a Republican president decided to round up a bunch of illegal immigrants and ship them home. We remember because it wasn’t that long ago.
Here’s what happened when ICE raided Howard Industries in Laurel, MS in 2008.
ICE´s approach humiliated all Latino workers in the plant with their Racial Profiling. Witnesses said ICE provided all White and Black workers Blue Armbands. All the Latino workers were put in line and forced to prove their legal status. ICE, in their uniforms and wearing side arms, caused ALL Latino workers to shiver in fear as they went through this ritual. The exits were sealed. Some Latino workers were sprayed with Mace.
Here’s how an ACLU press release (link no longer available) described what happened.
“We are deeply concerned by reports that workers at the factory where the raid occurred were segregated by race or ethnicity and interrogated, the factory was locked down for several hours, workers were denied access to counsel, and ICE failed to inform family members and lawyers following the raid where the workers were being jailed,” said Monica Ramirez, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project who has traveled to Mississippi to meet with family members and lawyers about the government’s actions.
So you see, brown people know that if Trump’s plan to “deport ’em all” was ever implemented, they’re all likely to be subjected to “papers please” interrogations – regardless of their legal status. It hasn’t been that long since that is exactly what happened in this country.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 29, 2015
“The Attitude Is The Thing”: Donald Trump, The Swaggering Blond Supervillain Of The GOP
Back in 1957, when Donald Trump and I were both in middle school, I used to have this running argument with my grandfather, Bill Connors. A retired railroad worker and a drinking man, Pop lived in Elizabethport, New Jersey, a couple of blocks from where the tracks running down Broadway ended at the harbor.
When visiting grandchildren proved too much for the old man, he’d retreat to his linoleum-floored front room and watch pro wrestling on his little black-and-white TV. As long as I’d keep still and fetch his beer, he’d let me stay. Sitting there with a spittoon at his feet and a cold one in his hand, Pop sometimes got agitated at the choreographed antics on the screen.
See, like millions of Republicans seemingly enchanted by Donald Trump’s updated impersonation of Dr. Jerry Graham, the swaggering blonde supervillain of the old World Wide Wrestling Federation, the old man believed the contests were for real.
If I wanted to keep watching—and I was already what Trump would call a HUGE fan of the Graham Brothers, Johnny Valentine, Ludwig von Krupp, and the other posturing bleach-blonde villains of the era—I had to be careful how I acted.
In his day, the old man had been a legendary brawler.
“Grandpa,” I’d say, “you’ve been in fights. A guy gets slammed over the head with a chair, it’s over.”
The old man would growl something about the cheating SOBs and the damn referees, as if my smart-aleck attitude would spoil all the fun. Back home, my pals and I had constructed our own wrestling ring, and actually dyed our hair to impersonate our bombastic heroes. We worked on our Atomic Elbow Smashes, Flying Drop Kicks, and personalized submission holds.
To us, WWWF wrestling was the most vivid thing on TV—totally unreal as an athletic event, but entirely dramatic in what it symbolized.
See, quite like Trump’s presidential campaign, 1950s-style pro-wrestling was all about ethnicity and race. I’d bet anything that young Donald Trump was also a fan of the broadcasts from Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, quite close to his childhood home. He appears to have adopted the entire Dr. Jerry Graham playbook as his signature style: the boasting, the strutting, the insults, and the elaborate blonde pompadour too!
Graham was the WWWF showman of the era, masterful at inciting crowds. He’d enter the ring for a tag-team match in a sequined cape accompanied by a mouthy manager and his “brother” Eddie, another bleached-blonde poser.
“I have the body that men fear and women adore,” Graham would say, posing with flexed biceps and his head thrown back haughtily. Never mind that he also had a watermelon belly and comparatively skinny legs to carry it on. The attitude was the thing. He exuded sheer superiority.
Why losers like “Golden Boy” Arnold Skaaland even showed up was beyond Graham’s power to imagine. Billed on TV as “the Jewish Champ,” who the Golden Boy beat to earn that title was unclear. (Skaaland was apparently of Norwegian descent. So what? “Bobo Brazil” came from Little Rock; Hans Schmidt, “The Teuton Terror,” was really Guy Larose of Quebec.)
Dr. Jerry Graham’s gimmick was that he supposedly had a PhD from the University of Arizona, which back then might as well have been on Saturn. See, also like Donald Trump, he was smarter than you.
What kind of doctorate, an announcer once asked?
“He’s a tree surgeon,” Graham’s manager said.
Often on those Sunnyside Gardens TV cards, some more formidable opponent such as Antonino Rocca, the barefoot “Bull of the Pampas,” would be in the audience. Indignant at the Graham Brothers’ dirty tricks, Rocca would leap into the ring to defend their hapless opponents, whereupon the previously supine referee would spring into action, restraining the hero while the bad guys went to work with beer pitchers, blades concealed in their trunks, whatever.
Theatrical blood flowed freely.
However, if you wanted to see Antonino Rocca get his revenge, you had to buy a ticket to Madison Square Garden. One of the great grudge matches of the era took place there in November 1957, when Dr. Graham and Dick the Bruiser took on Rocca and Édouard “The Flying Frenchman” Carpentier. A riot erupted. Hundreds of fans got arrested. Several cops got hurt by flying chairs. Order was restored only after Rocca stood on the ring ropes saluting the “Star Spangled Banner.” It made the front page of the New York Times.
So you bet I’m looking forward to Thursday’s Fox News debate, featuring Trump versus a bunch of Koch brothers marionettes, as he recently dubbed them. Would anybody be astonished to see The Donald enter wearing a sequined robe?
If he voted at all, my Grandfather Connors certainly never voted Republican. But he’d never have missed the show.
It’s sure to be HUGE!
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 5, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 