Hello, I’m White Privilege

And I will use it to my advantage

I love to write about pro-race. I write with passion and hope, cringeworthy love, and I fire thought-provoking lines that probably get dismissed for wannabe poetry. I romanticise the idea of unity for all humanity. I paint a picture of rainbows and butterflies preaching for everyone to just be kind. Not too much to ask, right?

Frankly, I live in a bubble of optimism because I have to, to self-preserve. Or you could call it naivete, you choose.

Either way, I feel better about the future when I focus on the potential progress that we can make as time goes by, with a little hard work on our end now.

I also have a multi-racial son whom I would rather he grew up to never have to think about his skin colour any more than the colour of his eyes than be subject to any kind of hostility, of any level. I’m a mother first, so I’m doing the work I know how to to change my bit of the world.

I think my previous articles about pro-race are not popular for a number of reasons. I write for dramatic effect to attempt to wake people up, as well as out of sheer frustration, but people who tend to click on my articles already agree with me and don’t need a lesson. Equally, people whose minds are made up just won’t listen even if they did read. They have a counterargument for everything and won’t consider mine.

Maybe I just need to focus on the continuance of my writing.

Maybe I need to change my tone if I want to reach anyone outside of my comfort audience.

So that’s why the title for this article is what it is.

I Am Not a Victim

I am a walking definition of “white privilege” because the whole point here is that, my biggest “problem” is trying to gain an audience to portray the problem with racism.

I am not a victim of racial profiling, and being white has helped avoid becoming one. I have equally not experienced traumatic clickbait type events that would help to bring awareness, so I cannot guilt-trip anyone into feeling sorry for me.

I have the passion, the aim, the drive, but zero content. I am not interesting nor special, I am privileged.

In fact, I have lived a fruitful, straightforward life. I can sit safely, in my nice home, on my new mac, writing this very piece and complain about the fact that not many people are reading my articles about racism.

That’s not to say I was handed everything for free. I worked very hard and faced some obstacles of my own.

When I took a temporary agency job during the summer in between university years, an ex-con colleague saw a picture of my now-husband on my phone as the background photo and he told me to stay away from blacks. When I told him to stay away from my business, I got a phone call from the agency that hired me that evening to tell me I wasn’t needed at the warehouse anymore.

But it was a horrible place to work and I was glad to leave the place. I got another job the next day through another agency, because being a young white woman needing some pocket money, it was easy.

My obstacles are irrelevant. Just because I have struggled, it doesn’t mean that I win the unofficial but very present competition of who struggles more. (Or else the saying “all lives matter” would not be a thing. *Sigh*)

I’m Not Racist But…

I have always tried to be consciously accepting of everyone. I was taught not to discriminate because of someone’s ethnic background, religion, or anything else.

But it doesn’t mean I wasn’t conditioned to be biased or ignorant. I cannot help the environment that I grew up in or the people I was exposed to growing up. And I have had some awful but influential people in my life who tried to persuade me to avoid certain groups of people.

As a teenager, the only group of friends I had at one point were discriminatory of people from Turkey and Kosovo. At that moment, I felt pressured to condone their prejudice and harsh words, even if I didn’t actively participate. Me doing nothing probably caused more harm than good in the grand scheme of things, but at the time, my priority was keeping one set of friends because I had been an outcast myself, as the new girl in school, and I had suffered enough rejection already.

I didn’t stay friends with that group for very long. They were bullies, and just outright nasty people. Luckily it was easy to cut them off because they didn’t go to the same school as me and they didn’t live close enough to bump into them. But had they been living next to me, and had I not had any other option, things might have worked out differently.

That is how kids get into drugs, gangs and crime, and when you’re in that kind of environment, it is really hard to get out. To think that simply my location was my get-out-of-jail-free card is nuts. But, I was in a predominantly white area, in a middle-class setting where people look out for each other, and it was frowned upon to be seen with large groups of people. It was easy for me to hide out in my own home and find a nicer set of friends.

Because I am privileged.

I cannot deny that I had it easy in comparison to others because although I was the new foreign girl in school, I did not appear it. Spanish people are generally liked, and people did think it was cool. The most discrimination I faced were jokes about how I probably take siestas on weekends. Which is ironically true. People didn’t bully me because I was from Spain, but because my personality was of a self-conscious nature.

In any case, I was only half-foreign.

My brown hair and pale skin gave away that I am half-English and could use it to fit in if I wanted to.

But I didn’t want to. Not in that way, anyway.

I was proud of saying I am Spanish. I’m not racist, but I did use the fact that I am a friendly neighbour and represent sun and beaches to my advantage. I entertained others in conversation about why I had virtually no accent. I taught the other kids how to swear in Spanish. I liked being different in that way because it made me interesting. According to them, I was the “good” kind of foreign.

Because I am privileged.

I Use White Privilege

I had the choice to blend in or to highlight that I was different.

And then I was allowed to celebrate it.

Because I am privileged.

But I believe that with my low dose of “different” I could break down a couple of barriers and challenge them. If “they” accepted me, someone who appeared the same but upon inspection discover she was indeed different, they could at the very least consider that different didn’t equal bad, and accept those who look different too.

Conclusion

When you’re privileged, lead by example.

The most important thing is to acknowledge and accept that I, as a white European woman, am subject to bias and privilege. It does not mean I am racist, and it certainly does not mean I am a bad person. It means I accept that part of my identity was influenced by and formed with the help of my surroundings in a predominantly white society.

And acceptance is so easy once you realise there is no blame assigned to it.

But that doesn’t mean I should just stop there and swim in my own white privilege glory.

Admitting this only helps me become more willing to grow and improve my attitude and my use of language.

I should be willing to learn and subsequently teach.

And here I am, trying to teach anyone willing to listen that, we have to help even out the scores.

Because I am privileged.

Black Lives Matter.

Sylvia Emokpae, thinker and philosopher, is passionate about self-love, motherhood, and pro-race. See more work like this.