Faced with White Privilege, I Stayed Silent
I regret being unprepared to speak up when faced with problematic remarks.
People get pretty uncomfortable when faced with our own privilege. Over the past few years, with the help of many patient and socially conscious friends, I’ve become a lot more comfortable with acknowledging the benefits of my skin tone.
As a fat person and a woman, I face discrimination, bigotry, and oppression regularly. Being part of any marginalized group can provide insight into the struggles of other people. I think about the experiences I have on a daily basis, and am able to understand that these are experiences I’m having even with the benefit of my privilege. I can imagine what’s it’s like not to have that privilege, but I can’t understand how it feels.
In her brilliant article White People Are Broken, Katherine Fugate wrote:
But she was telling me that, no matter how “woke” or evolved I may think I am, I walk this world as a white woman, which means I’ll never truly understand what it is to walk this world as a black woman.
…
I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to hand her my bio of marches and rallies. I’ve had a black male lover. I’ve had female lovers. I know what discrimination feels like. I’ve been told I’m going to Hell from family members and from my own religion. Hell, I am a woman… That qualifies me, surely?
Nope. Still doesn’t make me black. No oppression, no misogyny, no religious persecution will ever make me a black woman. I can empathize but, as someone who is not black in America, I’ll never know.
It makes white people uncomfortable to be told that we can’t understand. When we are uncomfortable, our urge is often to fix it, and our instinct is to expend energy defending ourselves. It’s okay to be uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable can provide the impetus needed to listen, and to figure out what we can do to be an ally. Our energy is better expended learning how to move towards something better.
Recently, I overheard a conversation between two acquaintances. I listened as one described how a news item about free college tuition got under her of their skin.
I managed to stay seated five feet away through most of the conversation, biting my tongue. But when I heard my her talk about how she is “not privileged” because she’s white, and that it’s not fair that her kids don’t get free things like DACA kids do and that she got cut off for financial aid just because she makes $75,000 a year instead of $74,000 a year, I had to get up and walk away.
What I wish I could have explained to her in that moment is that her daughters were privileged just to be able to go to college in the first place. That in 2019, 65 years after the desegregation of schools in America, for every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district. This makes for a $23 billion disparity in the funding for education for minority kids.
That’s white privilege.
College is not a foregone conclusion for children who grow up in impoverished districts that are overcrowded and underfunded. It has never crossed my mind that my children would not finish high school, and I’m sure it never crossed hers either. In my school district, we don’t even have to buy our own school supplies, except for backpacks and lunch sacks. That is a privilege that hundreds of thousands of children in the US aren’t given.
I wish I’d had the numbers at my fingertips to point out that $75,000 is more than many families make in five or six years.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center released a report that revealed the median net worth of a white household was $141,900; for black and Hispanic households, that dropped to $11,000 and $13,700, respectively. source
Being able to complain about financial aid problems instead of how-to-feed-your-family problems?
That’s white privilege.
Privilege isn’t about our actions.
It’s about the way that the system, the entire country, is set up to work in our favor. It’s systemic, culturally ingrained racism and discrimination that by default gives us advantages that other people don’t have.
It’s also not about blame. I’m the first to admit that when I started to become friends with more socially conscious people and began to educate myself, there were times when I felt defensive about my whiteness. In threads on Facebook or conversations, my instinct was to point out that I’m not racist! I support my friends of color! I believe in equality!
Instead, I closed my mouth and sat in my discomfort and I learned that they were not accusing me of having things they didn’t on purpose. They were pointing out that regardless of my actions I have opportunities and privileges that other people don’t, just because my skin is lighter than theirs.
It’s not about being given more advantages. It’s about recognizing the advantages we already have. When we look at an 18-year-old DACA recipient and an 18-year-old white middle class student, we do not create equality by giving them the same thing. Doing so fails to recognize that the latter has lived their entire life with advantages that the former did not.
My best friend texted me on a recent afternoon that her son, who is 7, had brought a toy gun home from a friend’s house. When he got out of the car with it, her only thought was “If I was a black mom there is no way in hell I would let him have that outside.”
That’s white privilege.
My children were born in the US, and will never have to deal with someone telling them they don’t belong here. I will never have to explain to my children that I had to run with them to a country where I didn’t speak the language because I was afraid for my life or theirs. I will never have to explain that we might all be sent back to a home they never knew, that everything I did to protect them meant nothing. I will never face the agony of knowing my children, who were separated from me, are scared and alone in government custody.
My friend and I don’t have to worry that our child might be killed by police because they had a toy gun in their hand outdoors. When our sons take drivers ed, we will talk to them about how to act when a policeman pulls them over to hopefully get a warning and not about how to act so that they don’t get murdered by law enforcement.
That’s white privilege.
These are big examples, but there are thousands of micro-aggressions and small privileges white people enjoy every day in this country. Most of the time, we don’t notice them, but people of color don’t have that option. They’re faced every day with reminders that they are not ‘normal,’ that they are ‘other.’
In the grocery store shampoo aisle, they must seek out the ‘ethnic hair care’ section. The other section is not labeled ‘non-ethnic’ or ‘european-based.’ In the first aid section, there are no band-aids that match their skin tone. The ones labeled “flesh” are undeniably caucasian-matched.
On their child’s birthday, they struggle to find a doll that looks like her. Searching for children’s books featuring a child that looks like theirs takes exponentially more time and energy. Finding movies with strong main characters with non-white skin is a challenge.
During Black History Month, they have to read or hear people repeatedly ask why there is no White History Month. Somehow those people missed that what’s taught in our entire education system is the history of only 61% of our population and leaves out or erases the history of the other quarter.
Privilege is going about our lives considering things ‘normal,’ and never considering what it feels like when ‘normal’ doesn’t apply to you.
At Tolerance.org, there is a list of things you can do once you recognize your white privilege. One of those things is to educate yourself, another is to educate fellow white people.
“Share what you’ve learned. Push through discomfort and demand courageous conversations in your circles. Do not let peers get away with problematic remarks without making a serious effort to engage them.”
I process a lot by writing, and I do much better in written communications about serious subjects than spontaneous verbal ones. When I go into an important meeting or event, I often go in with a written list of things I want to say.
The last few times I’ve been faced with the opportunity to address problematic ideas, I felt unprepared. Not being ready to have a hard conversation isn’t an excuse for letting things go. Being unprepared was my fault, and next time, I won’t be.