Exploring White Privilege

A slightly different journey, but just as revealing

Some gifts from Netflix.

From a king to a Nazi sympathizer, King Edward VIII lost his crown when he insisted on marrying a twice-divorced woman. What does this have to do with white privilege?

Let me explain.

I’m currently living in the upper dorm room of the Eugene Whiteaker hostel in Oregon, hanging between trapezes as people tour my house in Denver and I pray that my sellers here in Eugene don’t give up on me. I have a bit of time each night as I wind down each day. I have several computers. One gets Netflix.

I am not much of a watcher, but quarantine changed some of that. I had several folks make suggestions on what to see. I’ve caved on a few, been disgusted with most, but there have been lessons from all of them. As someone deeply touched by the #MeToo movement, a lot of those programs were very revealing. Then, as the BLM movement took off in far greater earnest, some of what I watch has taken on a different set of meanings which has been both useful and important in the largest sense.

Stay with me here. I’m mostly Brit. Long boring story.

I am watching The Crown.

Last night the program centered on the attempted return of the much-shamed once-king, who couldn’t be bothered with protocol, married a very sexually active woman who clearly could be bought and sold across all manner of political persuasions, and abdicated.

The current Queen Elizabeth was his favorite niece.

The program (which while based on facts, does engage in some fiction) shows the antsy Duke (I NEED A JOB, he whines to Wallis) sneaking back to England and engaging his high-society friends in an attempt to get him work where his former status as king might be useful. More so, he’s bored, petulant and can no longer bear a life of extreme leisure as afforded to him. I struggle to find pity for the idle, uber rich.

For those not familiar with the story, the Duke was a Nazi sympathizer. Documents and photographs show the Duke and Wallis inspecting SS troops, meeting with Hitler. Messages indicate that the Duke was quite willing to support the thorough bombing of his fellow countrymen as along as Hitler would reinstate him as king, and Wallis as his queen consort. A wish he dearly wanted, enough so that he didn’t mind selling his country out and having his beloved countrymen murdered in order to get just that.

While adapted for the times, kindly, the words White Supremacist Entitled Prick do come to mind. And for Wallis, too.

The story of his collusion got published. When he visited his niece in Buckingham Palace, by that time Elizabeth II had been fully briefed. The ex-king wanted to be, among other choice jobs, made the French Ambassador. I am quite sure you might guess how welcome a diplomat he might have been to the French, who had paid a heavy price during WWII because of Hitler.

Elizabeth said no.

The Duke wasn’t just miffed. He was offended and accused his niece of being swayed by those who were against him. The aristocratic entitled do not understand the words “personal responsibility.”

Self-righteous, unrepentant piece of shit. Well, that’s just me. The way I see it the man was a traitor, happy to sell out his countrymen for a shot back at the throne, at any price. In Norway, a somewhat similar situation took care of the Nazi collaborator and Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling. He was put to death by firing squad, which to my mind, would have been a far more fitting end for the ex-king/traitor.

Instead, the shamed king was sent home to spend the rest of his days in idle luxury. Oh poor him. This is what privilege looks like. Any other war traitor? Don’t get me started. I guess they figured that glittering, golden isolation was punishment enough. Here, the privileged get away with bad behavior because their lawyers are better than ours.

PAH.

But that’s just me. What struck me, and continues to strike me, through The Crown, is the deep insight into the aristocracy. Elizabeth’s mother is shocked and offended when the hoi polloi are allowed into the castle to actually meet and touch the Royal family, and speaks with horror about how their privileges, given by Divine Right, are being stripped of them.

This program was on the heels of having watched The Tudors. This is my primary bloodline, this English way of being. If you can force yourself to look past the pure bodice-ripping entertainment and rolling of heads and Protestant burning that marked those times, you see privilege, extreme privilege. The same kind of privilege that sucks the life out of the world right now. The privilege that belongs solely to an increasingly small fraction of the upper 1%. As in, the rules don’t apply to us, privilege.

Privilege is intended to refer to rights and special considerations given to one, or a very few. In the way I read the definition, it still refers to a certain class, right at the very top. Lots of folks desperately want privileges, which are variously defined depending on who’s talking. But we don’t want to suffer like “those people,” usually one or more social strata beneath them.

Privilege doesn’t just damage folks of color. It damages all of us, white men included, and in doing so, makes each strata of society hate, abuse and manipulate the ones below them, out of the terrible fear that they themselves might fall a step and be like “those people.”

The modern day version of this is folks who used to donate to and volunteer at the food banks who are now desperately lining up with “those people.”

Before you howl at me for misunderstanding white privilege, that is not my discussion here. Better writers than I am have addressed those issues head-on. I am simply commenting on some things I’ve been learning, noticing, and considering as a result of watching a few historical programs. Those shows have been useful for me to put a few things into a different perspective, and I’m sharing those observations. I’m going somewhere larger with this.

A modern-day insight into this sick privilege was expressed beautifully by Medium writer Claire J. Harris in her piece about countryside aristocrats:

From her article:

“Imagine asking the people of England to elect their own Parliament,” she scoffed. “It’s like giving them the power to elect the national cricket team.” Lady S believed in The Empire and how it had helped the ‘jolly little natives’ around the world, including the ones she’d seen from the windows of e cruise liner they used to take down the Nile River. (author bolded)

I recommend you read this. It’s awful, in that way that some awful things are just fascinating. The real rot behind the rich is very evident in her clear prose.

I read Claire’s piece in the context of watching the Netflix programs. That framing was hugely revealing: the abuse of staff and servants, the self-righteousness, the anger about privilege while facing the rot of age. The flailing and failing of frail humans who happened to have been born into extreme wealth, and how their lack of character, decency and common humanity had twisted them into emotional miscreants. Inbred, spoiled, ill-behaved and believing their Divine right to go to heaven simply because of the accident of birth, not because they had earned it.

Earning anything is beyond the ken of the privileged. People like us don’t work.

Here’s another piece from a Vox writer which speaks to the same ludicrous notion that the rich have it so much easier than we do:

From her article:

The bigger the house, the more they worked to afford it, the more prescription bottles they had. I started to see the fact that I couldn’t afford to buy my daughter fancy electronics as a luxury. We went to the beach and looked for crabs under the rocks instead. We spent rainy Saturdays doing a 25-cent puzzle. I vowed never to have a house bigger than I could clean myself.

Yet people want that life. Or, the life they imagine that aristocrats have, the life of the uber rich. The desire for a life free of care (doesn’t happen) or free of…whatever it is that’s biting your ankles right now.

As Claire and Stephanie make very clear, simply having tons of money doesn’t do shit for a person. If anything, the theme that I saw was how extreme wealth, position and perceived power tended to radically increase the asshole factor. Kindly, Jeff Bezos as American example #1, all the Robber Barons of history.

American aristocrats, those who weren’t born into titles they didn’t earn (which could be bought, if you had enough cash) are looked down upon by true royalty, whose blood was thinned and damaged by centuries of inbreeding, ensuring hemophilia and other physical issues. The notion that royalty was ordained by God Himself was a neat trick; it allowed not very bright people to get away with plenty of murder.

Just like now.

If you spend enough time watching period dramas, and I am just about up to here with them, there is a magnificent education to be had about privilege. Where it comes from, the use of religion to justify anything under the sun no matter how grotesque, the use of title and power to keep people under control and grateful for what is brushed off the tables of the extreme rich after their gluttony.

Just like now.

True privilege is the purview solely of the extreme, extreme few who will do absolutely anything to protect it, expand it, and lock it into law.

Just like now.

I’m no scholar. Again, much better writers than I am have parced all this out in great detail. I am simply sharing a personal journey, one which has been expanded lately because of a casual viewing habit, forced by quarantine.

I have been reinforced by watching period dramas how women have been little more than fat little farm animals used, abused, traded and raped all throughout history, at least since the patriarchal religions. The dramas, while entertaining, do little more than underscore what patriarchy has done to damage far more than just people of color. It’s widespread, sick and in every corner of society and in every country. That includes men, not just women.

Case in point: the horrific caste system in India is also based on religious belief:

Religion by its very nature allows for abuse. As humans love to feel superior, any kind of formal acknowledgement by a recognized “authority” that allows you and me to get away with beating the holy shit out of some street sweeper because we didn’t get laid last night is one hell of a gift. It’s state-sanctioned abuse.

Just like now.

Same way that Christianity was used by plantation owners to subjugate and justify slavery, a belief system created by man and manipulated by man is a handy way to control, rip off, rape, abuse and enslave other folks. My god has a bigger dick than your god, so I own your ass.

Just like now.

The aristocracy, any ruling class, is going to use the god card to get away with murder. Always have. Religion is the single handiest way to manipulate folks to buy into their worthlessness, and someone elses’ right to rule them. Among other things.

These are simply private musings brought on by a combination of watching material I normally wouldn’t, and the lessons that are being teased out as a result. That material, whether it’s intended or not, is highly instructive about privilege.

Here’s my larger point: had I seen some of these programs prior to George Floyd’s death and the subsequent outpouring from my fellow Medium writers, I’m not sure I’d have seen these shows quite the same way.

One of the great gifts of the intense discussions around white privilege, white supremacy, racism and the like is that if you are listening, and if you are actually hearing, these discussions fundamentally change what you see and how you see it. I’ve never been out of the conversation, but by reading and listening even more, there are some seismic shifts in what I perceive. But you and I have to want to see and hear differently.

That is part of why attending these difficult conversations is so important. As my friend Rosennab said the other day, white men are also crushed by the patriarchy in ways they cannot see, desperately don’t wish to see. If they weren’t, ladies and gentlemen, the ludicrous competition, bullying, dick size, rape culture and wholesale mowing down of everything we hold dear wouldn’t be happening. We are all damaged by it.

And no, I did not just apologize for white privilege. I am pointing out that the patriarchal system which ONLY truly benefits the absolute top of the 1% is a cancer on us all. Each of us cascades our pain to the next level who can’t fight back until someone kicks the family cat.

Or tortures the dog. That pain has to go somewhere.

All you and I have to do is look at the rot at the top. Shit really does only flow one way. I might suggest that instead of flinging it at each other, we might want to shove it back uphill to the very, very top where it belongs.

The French did an excellent job of doing just that. It was called the French Revolution. Our own Revolution inspired theirs, which marked the end of monarchies as we knew them.

My Medium peep Sharon Hurley Hall commented that it will be interesting to see what happens with the current “revolution.” The French one lasted ten years. We can’t even stay in quarantine three weeks before bitching about a fucking haircut.

Which, kindly, is why the rich stay richer, and the rest of us, all of us, keep fighting over table scraps.