Honestly, There Are Three Things I Hate About the Term White Privilege

And no, I don’t hate it in the white avoidance kind of way

White privilege is a contentious issue and one that remains abstract for many white people. Though the continued violence and policing of Black bodies catapulted the pseudo-white racial awakening of 2020, white privilege seemingly remains too challenging to grasp.

Some argue that the issue is mainly foreign and hard to grasp among white conservatives. Others say that the liberal “I’m not racist” community doesn’t get it either. However, I believe white people of all ethnicities and political parties struggle with the concept of white skin advantage. We grapple, or better still, willfully ignore the very essence of white privilege and the core tenet on which it rests, white dominance.

What is white privilege?

According to Racial Equity Tools, white privilege “refers to the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits, and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally, white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.”

In other words, white privilege (and privilege in general) is typically an undeserved advantage in society that allows someone to move freely without the mental and emotional burden of experiencing disadvantage. For instance, though this may be an extreme example, men can typically roam the world freely without fear of being physically or sexually assaulted at night. A specific example of white privilege is white women’s ability to weaponize their tears. The potency of their tears helps them escape accountability from having perpetuated racism and be viewed as a victim in any race-related context — think Amy Cooper, Victoria Secret Karen, and Carolyn Bryant Donham.

Scholar Peggy McIntosh is a white woman who coined the term white privilege and has described it in her seminal essay as an invisible knapsack. According to McIntosh, this knapsack affords white people many advantages and resources. She includes the following: “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.”

Though McIntosh’s theory has been an influential tool for understanding whiteness, many Critical Whiteness Scholars believe it contains several loopholes. I think it may be time to reevaluate and, at the very least, evolve white privilege into a more operationalized term. That said, I honestly hate the term white privilege, and here are three reasons why:

Focus on white individual outcomes. White privilege pedagogy primarily focuses on white people’s advantages. It’s seemingly taught today in antiracist education as something naturally afforded to white people by being white. Though white people are advantaged in American society, white privilege does not occur in a vacuum. There’s not enough emphasis on its relational aspect to white dominance. For instance, it’s like focusing on our ability to breathe on Earth without explaining the dominant force that grants us that privilege in the first place, gravity.

It’s important to emphasize that white privilege comes at the expense of people of color and Black people in particular. For example, we often hear about discriminatory employment practices where Black people’s salary is significantly lower than their white counterparts. In our capitalistic society, where resources are privatized and squandered, white people can only earn more if Black people earn less.

Moreover, when it comes to housing, scholar Beverly Tatum explains, “If a person of color is the victim of housing discrimination, the apartment that would otherwise have been rented to that person of color is still available for a white person.” Therefore, white privilege may be the comfortable air we breathe, but white dominance over Black people is the gravitational force that secures that benefit. Again, we cannot separate white privilege from white dominance over Black people.

Fuels white confessionals. Because the white privilege metaphor heavily focuses on the placement of a knapsack on white bodies, white people often mistakenly correlate acknowledging the knapsack as challenging the system.

During the pseudo-white racial awakening of 2020, I saw countless numbers of liberal white people owning up to their privilege one Facebook post at a time. Many newly awakened whites perniciously poured their hearts out. They reiterated what Black people already know, including, “I’ve never feared being assaulted by the police” and “I’ve never been followed in a store.” These digital confessions amounted to nothing in 2020 and, as suggested by Michael Foucault, serve to let white people off the hook.

If only dismantling the oppressive system of white supremacy was that easy. Confessing privilege from the mountain top may feel cathartic, but it involves little to no action. There’s a difference between acknowledging a problem and addressing a problem. Ironically, acknowledging white privilege does neither. White privilege pedagogy has become a virtue-signaling outcry among white people and an antiracist self-improvement project. One where we feel morally good and tingly inside, but white dominance prevails because of our lack of action-oriented depth politically, personally, socially, and financially.

White privilege is not Intersectional and centers Anglo-whiteness. I believe the pedagogy surrounding white privilege centers Anglo-whiteness. Though McIntosh (an Anglo-white woman) briefly mentions class as a variable that influences the relative privilege of poor whites, her theory is nowhere near intersectional enough.

White people don’t experience white privilege in the same way because whiteness intersects with class, gender, ethnicity, culture, etc. In other words, Anglo-white women don’t experience whiteness in the same way Anglo-white men do because of their gender. Moreover, white-Latine people don’t experience whiteness identically as Anglo-whites because of Xenophobic “othering.” Lastly, white Jews don’t experience whiteness in the same way because of anti-Semitism.

This is important because we often try to absolve ourselves from our white privilege, especially when we’re unintentionally oppressive to BIPOC people. For example, I’ve noticed white-Latine claim POC status as a way to avoid acknowledging white privilege. Though more research needs to be done, I firmly believe we do this because we are “othered” in the U.S. and position white privilege as something only Anglo-white people have. However, we do experience white privilege and are very capable of perpetuating anti-Blackness through white dominance.

We need to stop making white privilege situational and like a newsletter subscription. We can’t decide when to opt-in and opt-out of white privilege because doing so inevitably perpetuates whiteness.

Bottom line, I dislike white privilege and am interested in developing a new, more active, and operational term. White privilege doesn’t occur in a vacuum, nor behind the backs of white people; it rests on the backs of Black people. To have white privilege is to reproduce white dominance. We cannot separate the perpetual racism Black people experience from white people’s required perpetual vigilance to disrupt white supremacy.

Joey Pierre is a race & class researcher, scholar, writer, and an amateur astronomer. You can also be in community with him on Instagram.