White Privilege Understanding and Acknowledging

White Privilege

Understanding and Acknowledging My Own White Privilege in the Context of a Racially Imbalanced United States

Few would disagree that American history has been marked by periods and events that demonstrate severe intolerance towards others for a variety of reasons. Sexual orientation is a common cause for divisiveness and even the loss of certain rights and privileges enjoyed by other citizens of this country, most notably marriage and rights of kinship. Women have also been denied some of the basic rights of citizenship; it has been less than a century that the women of this country have been allowed to vote, and there are still measurable discrepancies in the rates women are paid and in the positions they hold in business and politics. There are also, of course, other major factors that were cause at one time or another for a designation as a second class citizen or even sub-human entity both in general cultural practice and official law here in the United States.

Immigrants have generally been the recipients of much of this ill will, at various times Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants -- and the native-born generations that followed -- were all among the most hated aspects of American society. But these groups all had something in common that in general has enabled them to assimilate, and has allowed their descendants in the modern era to "choose" their ethnicity. Though the Irish, Jews, and Italians that immigrated here might have considered themselves very different from each other, they were all white. As languages and modes of dress and behavior evened out, it became less possible to distinguish between these groups and "true Americans," and so prejudices against these groups gradually diminished (Waters). This has been true generally only of white ethnicities in this country, and has been a major contributing factor in their continuing status as a privileged class.

African-Americans and other people of color in this country do not have the advantage of being able to blend in merely by changing their ways of behaving over time. Their skin color automatically marks them as different than the dominant class, and this forces them into a racially identity that whites do not have to contend with. Though a white person might choose to identify as Irish, or German, or Jewish, or quite possibly all three, any or all of these identifications would arise out of choice. When an individual doesn't have a choice of how to identify or be identified, they are put into the position of being forced to identify in a certain way based on the expectations and perspective of those they are dealing with. this puts them at an automatic personal disadvantage, which certainly helps to perpetuate their practical disadvantages as well.

This is not an issue that can necessarily be solved simply by everyone learning how to get along, tolerate, or accept other ethnicities. These solutions can deal with overt and conscious racism, and though it is almost certainly impossible to truly eradicate this type of racism such efforts can make a good deal of progress. But the type of racism being discussed here is inherent to the pattern of development that occurred in this country, as white privilege was consolidated by increasing influxes of white immigrants who, though initially mistrusted, were eventually accepted into the symbolically free and open category of "white Americans." As this occurs, the outer "outside" and "other" group delineations became more pronounced, to the point that even efforts at inclusion necessarily denote the supposed difference between races.

There is no small amount of irony in the fact that efforts on the part of the privileged class to assist, engage with, or develop an understanding of underprivileged minorities necessarily demonstrates the inherent racism and privilege of the American system. One of Peggy McIntosh's most profound observations is that the white privileged class, though it can choose to engage with, learn from, and attempt to understand developments in minority writing, music, arts, and culture, it is essentially insulated from any of the possible negative reflections of these developments (McIntosh). That is, though I might personally enjoy listening to rap music, I do not need to worry about what the music says regarding my culture's views on women or violence, whereas an African-American who might detest rap purely on the basis of its sound as well as its messages will nevertheless be identified with the more negative connotations of misogyny and violent tempers that have become inherent to most rap music. McIntosh's logic can be taken to even more insidious and harmful conclusions, as well.

I attended a private Catholic school in New Jersey that was very expensive -- as pricey as many colleges -- and had very few minority students. Five to be exact. These students were bussed to the private school from the inner city in order to provide them with educational opportunities that matched their abilities, and that they would not have been able to have access to in their own schools and living situations. My attendance at the school was not merely evidence of my white privilege, but also my economic privilege (or more correctly, my parents' economic privilege). By the same token, the presence of the minority students was not actually an indicator of equality or of an evening-out of the privileges and biases that exist in this country, but ironically served as a reminder of the severe gap that existed between their level of privilege and that of the average -- i.e. white and rich -- student at the school.