The issue of White Privelage

[Guest Frank Zappa Mask]

WHITE PRIVILEGE SHAPES THE U.S.

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelanc...teprivilege.htm

 

Robert Jensen

Department of Journalism

University of Texas

Austin, TX 78712

work: (512) 471-1990

[email protected]

copyright Robert William Jensen 1998

first appeared in the Baltimore Sun, July 19, 1998

 

by Robert Jensen

 

Here's what white privilege sounds like:

 

I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and

very conservative white student about affirmative action in college

admissions, which he opposes and I support.

 

The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages

for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being

white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever

benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he

concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white

privilege.

 

So, if we live in a world of white privilege--unearned white privilege--how

does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask. He paused for

a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."

 

That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white

privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have unearned privilege but

ignore what it means.

 

That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with

students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret

that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white

privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear

and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its

roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly

about white supremacy and white privilege.

 

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white

supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they

are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such

privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of

one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege).

 

Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their

lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

 

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European

heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the

country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both

personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I

didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant

non-white population, American Indians.

 

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my

culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I

routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and

the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself,

one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.

 

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a

university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look

threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look

like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a

racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I

am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack.

After all, I'm white.

 

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain

that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre

minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority

faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis

Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for

the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the

university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has

mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a

simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate

white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were

overlooked out of solidarity based on race,

as well as on gender, class and ideology.

 

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly

racist society and that the racism has real effects on real

people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know,

because I am one of them.

 

I am not a genius--as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the

drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've published a

reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one

churns out to get tenure, and some of it,

I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think

that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I

leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished

something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.

 

But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I

benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that

I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten

the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits

for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from

non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually

all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me

made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills,

including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.

 

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for

graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at

the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in

a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman

that at the time had one non-white tenured professor.

 

There certainly is individual variation in experience. Some white people

have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families

that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher

than me because they came from poorer families. White women face

discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have

drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives.

 

Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked

hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good

about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that

"merit," as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I

can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant

boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my

life from certain hardships.

 

At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I

needed to believe that my success in life was due

solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic

American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced

by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me

to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living

with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck

and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid

I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.

 

I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't

special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take

pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked

in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people

have complete control over their fate--that we can will

ourselves to be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes,

we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything

stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and

what the society in which we live lets us be.

 

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to

keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the

security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from

white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white

privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry

this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this

society.

 

Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the

scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to

believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly

and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid

to admit that we have benefited from white privilege.

It doesn't mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we

face a choice about what we do with our success.

 

Jensen is a professor in the Department of Journalism in the University of

Texas at Austin. He can be reached at [email protected].

[Guest EricMM]

I heartily disagree.

 

Just because I am the majority, I should give the minority special privilage?

 

It wouldn't be my fault if I had a racist boss and he picked me over a black person. This would be funny because I have a black boss, but regardless. That would not be my fault.

 

I will not be blamed for someone else's racism, when I am not a racist my self. Every time AA gets discussed, I get more and more irate.

 

If someone should feel that I am being favored over them because I am white, they should take it up with whoever is in charge. NOT ME. I don't want race to be a deciding factor in admissions, applications, or life. For for me, not against me. It's fucking stupid.

 

I can not actively remember any single occurance of being favored for being white. Nada. Never. I have been chosen for my grades, my words, me. Not my skin.

[Guest Mad Dog]

Yawn

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

I'm not going to start recognizing some ridiculous white self-loathing. I get followed around by security guards ALL THE TIME, and I'm about as white as white can get. Swedish and German descent, blond hair, blue eyes. In other words, Hitler would've dug me. If I walked into some store at the same time as your average black guy, I can guarantee the security would follow me. Not because of race, but because I've got a couple tattoos and long hair. There's a big gap in culture moreso than skin color. There's a MUCH bigger gap in terms of class than there is in race, and I totally believe that. It's rich and poor, not black and white.

[Guest Cancer Marney]

Absolutely. A co-worker of mine is just about as Middle Eastern as you can get - 1600+ year-old Arabian family, although he's an American citizen. He speaks perfect English with an Oxford accent, he has a military crew-cut, he's clean-shaven, and I've never seen him in anything other than a dark Armani suit. No one even thinks to question him at airports, government buildings, or military bases, and when he produces his CIA credentials so he can carry his gun past security checkpoints, they're never phoned in. I've had mine phoned in once or twice, and I'm unmistakably white.

[Guest Lord of The Curry]

This is another one of those touchy subjects where if you say the wrong thing you're percieved as racist.

 

Have I ever benefited from "white privledge" in my life? Probably. I can't really say what this actual privledge was, but i can say without a doubt that there have been times in my life where I was subjected to lesser punishment, excessive politeness etc. because I am white. I work in a video store that has had 22 people work for them in the past 3 years and only three have been visible minorities. One is still working with us and he happens to be my best friend.

 

One of the others, apparently, was fired because he was Muslim and couldn't properly fulfill his contractual obligations because he needed to take time out once or twice during the day to pray. He was also a total asshole, but the thing that got on everybodys nerve (including mine) was that he would do dick all for a couple hours, then say "I'm going home to pray" and leave, never coming back to finish the rest of his shift.

 

I agree fully with what EricMM said, in that I don't believe in giving minorities special privledge just because I am in the majority. I have seen co-workers been accused of racism by Pakistanis and Blacks alike, as in "Do you treat ALL you customers this way?". Now, if my best friend who is black was helping those customers, I'd be curious to see whether or not they'd pull out that line on him.

 

People all deal with struggles in life. Blacks went through slavery. The Jews were wiped out in Europe during WWII. Native's were destroyed by colonial settlers.

 

What have whites peoples burden been? The sins of the fathers and mothers of the past. We have to go through life with this inherent stigma that we caused this, we believe that. That's pretty rough if ya ask me.

[Guest Cancer Marney]

The prayer crap really gets on my nerves. I'm Catholic and I've missed Mass any number of times because I had to go out and do my job. Moslems seem to be the only ones who whine about this sort of thing, really. They want full-time pay with at least three half-hour prayer breaks every day, and they scream "Discrimination!" if they're told to stuff it. They refuse to cut off their beards, and if they aren't allowed to be firemen, cry "Discrimination!" They refuse to take off their stupid bourkas even for a goddamn photo ID and when they're then refused a driver's license, it's time for shrieks of "Discrimination!" all over again.

Christ, will you please cut the fucking bullshit?

[Guest NoCalMike]

I think the main point of the the original post was to say that the "level playing field" that most anti-AA advocates speak of is a false ideal to begin with. If hiring processes were 100% fair and equal, then Affirmitive action would not be needed, but the plain and simple fact is that there are still too many places where if a minority comes in looking for a job, he is automatically turned away because the color of his skin. I also would tend to agree about the class issue also. Money talks in this country....

[Guest kkktookmybabyaway]

Can somebody PLEASE tell me when the white-privilege meetings are? I'd really love to know what advantages I'm getting because I can't think of any.

 

And don't say "You don't have to go through racial profiling" because everytime I'm on the basketball court I'm the vicitm of it. And don't bring up the crap about getting pulled over because I drive five miles under the speed limit in the right hand lane.

 

I WISH I had some whitey privileges and could get a decent job. In fact, in the communications world, I'm in the minority, and I have been discriminated against in the past because of this. This is the reason now I tape-record all my job interviews in which I think I will be discriminated against.

 

This dipsh*t who wrote this article needs to get out of academia (hopefully out of 5 story window) and go out in the real world...

[Guest Samurai_Goat]

Well, whenever I think of things like this, I think of a video of a fireman training camp. They were taping this obstacle course, where you had to do things like climb a ladder, take and axe and chop down a door, carry a man-sized mannequin, etc. Now, some of course, were just tearing things up, being oh so blatantly fireman you could see the hats on their head. I mean, these were the guys you could trust to pull you out of a burning building. However, there were a few who were obviously not doing so well. The women. Many of these tasks required quite a bit of strength, and the women there simply could not measure up. Now, there was one woman who was doing just fine and dandy, who climbed a ladder, crashed through a door, and was out of the building with the mannequin right up there with the guys. However, when that one woman came charging out, the rest of the girls were fumbling around, trying to lift the axes. Eventually, a few minutes later, they got in, and had to drag the mannequins out, bumping their heads around the floor (the mannequins, not their own), while they were supposed to be acting as if there was a fire in progress. However, in that state, there had to be X% (I forgot what percentage it was) of females on the force, and so half of the women were guaranteed to pass, taking up the slots from men who could do the job. Like I said, there was one woman there who could carry her weight, and at least one mannequin’s weight, as well as the men there, but I can’t think of a good reason for the other women to be anywhere near the firehouse. I hope I made sense...

[Guest EL BRUJ0]

Can somebody PLEASE tell me when the white-privilege meetings are?

 

At 10am every Sunday morning held by the same people that took your baby. Oh, and don't forget the pointy hat.

[Guest kkktookmybabyaway]

"At 10am every Sunday morning held by the same people that took your baby. Oh, and don't forget the pointy hat."

 

I may have to go without it this week -- it's at the cleaners...