I have actually grown exhausted with such “self-congratulatory” declarations of “I have White Privilege.” While such a declaration requires some introspection, for many Black folks it is a “duh” moment–a reality Black folks and other marginalized people have asserted for decades if not centuries. Sometimes I feel as if the “courageous,” “I have White Privilege” declaration is supposed to be followed by high-fives or gold ribbons or an award ceremony hosted by Black folks who have been awaiting the day some White people begin to acknowledge in some part that life isn’t peachy for all of this. Or maybe, after such declarations of “I have White Privilege” we are supposed to hold hands and hold a joyful funeral for the death of racism.Declaring that you have white privilege does not make it disappear, nor does it make the lives of marginalized people any better.
That’s part of the response to The North Star: it ain’t privilege, it’s injustice, which includes this:
so the white Leftists who think they are down because they have got the courage to lamentably declare, “We’ve got White Privilege,” it would be more accurate and truthful to say instead, “We are beneficiaries of racism,” or “We participate in a racialized system of oppression.”
White liberals play the guilt/privilege game because it lets them stay white liberals. They realize that their lives are based on a bigger game that has few winners and many losers, and its current rules make it easier for some whites to win. They think that if they tweak the rules to eliminate the effect of racialization, the bigger game will become fair, even though it will still have few winners and many losers.
Black liberals encourage the guilt/privilege game for much the same reason. They want to be among the few winners of the bigger game.
But levellers, from communists to Christians who try to live as Jesus taught, want to throw out the bigger game and start a new one that everyone can win.
From a religious point of view, “white guilt” is wrong: you don’t inherit the sins of your parents. What you inherit is the world. And in that world, there are many reasons why many people are poor, but ultimately, what matters now is poverty.
So I’ll keep my focus on wealth privilege.
note: links to the quoted blogs are from The 16th Erase Racism Carnival!.
As I’ve said before, I don’t like the term “white privilege” because much of what people talk about under that term are not privileges, but rights, and the important issue, as I see it, is not that some people are privileged but that some people aren’t granted their rights. (And yes, I’m white, but I’m also female, and I don’t like the term “male privilege” for the same reasons.)
As for guilt: I feel neither guilt for nor pride in what others have done.
Hmm. Now I’m wondering if “human rights” fell out of fashion in the same way that people stopped talking about freedom and began negotiating their freedoms?
And excellent points!
Personally, I’ve always found ‘white privilege’ to be somewhat sterile and a bit too vague - I rather prefer to go at the question from the direction of “culturally appropriation” as culture. This one is particularly scabby as it appears quite contagious yet allows many people to maintain additional cultural emphasis. True American muttdom devolves into consumption as culture and sports as religion with conspicuous consumption, particularly that which is the most heinously oppressive (such as sucking at DeBeers tit by persons of African descent) wherein massive diamond oppressor trophies are displayed by those most likely to be verbalizing racial rhetoric with the most zeal.
Does race become merely convenience to leverage identical forms of oppression?
Those who can oppress others - do
Appropriated privilege neutralizes skin color as argument by seducing its victim into continuing disempowerment through propagation of consumptive culture as status and access. Success a cheap trick with its victims little more than bait.
The whole guilt thing seems to imply that White Privilege is something that I do. But it’s not. When you turn it around and talk about people not getting their rights, I think it makes a ton more sense. Am I participating in people being deprived of my rights? If so, then I should feel guilty. Actually, I should stop. If not, then I shouldn’t feel guilty.
This divorces the guilt issue from the action issue. If I’m not doing anything to take away peoples’ rights, but I’m not defending them either, then maybe I have an action item: to defend them whenever the opportunity presents itself. Or to seek out opportunities to defend them. But I don’t have a guilt item. There is much to do with life. Fighting for equal rights is a good thing to do with your life, if you do it right, but it’s not the only worthwhile thing that can be done with a life.
Thanks for the links. I generally agree with the arguments from both blogs — I’d actually been thinking of posting something along those lines, post-IBARW.
My one qualification is that I’ve seen the shifts in consciousness that the concept of “white privilege” can produce in white people, and to me those shifts do have some value and impact — even if it’s only a first step. In other words, if you get stuck there, your attachment to the concept becomes the problem. It can easily turn into a moral, intellectual, political, and spiritual cul-de-sac.
Also, “white privilege” and “white guilt” aren’t the only possible ways for white people to locate and position themselves against racism. They’re not even inevitable starting points in shifting consciousness and taking action. Some white people come to struggles against racism through personal histories, social bonds with people of color, religious beliefs, or other movements such as feminism and the fight against poverty and the class structure.
I don’t question your choice to keep your own focus on wealth privilege — personally, I try to be accountable to a range of political movements while putting most of my energies into a select few. And my own choices tend to reflect a personal mix of opportunity, passion, and my sense of where I can make the greatest contribution.
However, I would point out that these critiques of “white privilege” do not logically lead to abandoning racism or racial justice as sites of struggle in favor of solely prioritizing the economic domain. The blogs that you quote from certainly haven’t taken that route, nor do they appear to view race and class as mutually exclusive, either/or areas of focus and activism.
Oh, based on their “abouts,” the people at those blogs are not interested in class issues; I’m guessing they’re POC liberals who want to keep the US’s class structure in place, but they want it to be statistically fair to people of color. I thought about mentioning that in my post, then decided I’ve ranted about that enough lately.
I think that’s just re-arranging seats on the Titanic when people should get off the damn boat, but–
Sorry! Really enough rant now!
I do look forward to what you have to say. And I agree that it’s useful to wake up people who buy the American Myth that we all have equal opportunities, but I don’t think “white privilege” is a useful way to go, even as a first step. Privilege is about wealth, and even under slavery, there were blacks with wealth privilege.
Hmm. I should try to find out if anyone knows who the first black slaveowner in the U.S. was.
For me, the thing with capitalism and racism both is that you can almost always find exceptions — the rags-to-riches success story, the person who triumphed in the face of adversity and broke down barriers, etc. And defenders of both systems point to those examples as reasons to reject critique or change or fundamental challenges. And they feed into the collective dream of individualism, that we control our destinies and can achieve anything we want to, that we’re not shaped and constrained by our origins or group identities, by structural forces and systematic oppression. That the individual ‘I’ is exempt from history.
This may be a particularly seductive or prevalent dream for Americans — a poll a few years back found that over 30% of Americans thought they had a decent chance of becoming rich in their lifetimes; the figure was around 50%, if I recall, for young people.
I’d argue that capitalism and racism each thrive precisely by allowing these escape clauses and exceptions to flourish; if you’re not one of the lucky few, you — or society — only have yourself to blame. Some blacks have access to wealth, but black people overall have less access to wealth than white people. I’m not at all convinced that class is adequate to account for this, nor that a society which succeeded in leveling or abolishing class through transforming economic relationships would benefit blacks as much as whites in the absence of simultaneous struggles against racism.
Much of the reason I argue that racism is a subset of classism is because the exceptions to the race rule can rise in the class system, and that doesn’t threaten the class system a bit. On the other hand, if a lot of the lower class try to rise at once, peacefully or otherwise, white or black or a mixture of races, it’s called rebellion or agitation and suppressed.
The reasons for being lower class vary: descendants of slaves and indentured servants had fewer resources to build with, and those who had resources and lost them find it tough to rise again. But once you have education and opportunity for everyone, everyone benefits. Racism is weakest where there’s the least competition for resources–alas, I have nothing to cite to prove that, but Bush seems to get along very well with his multicultural cabinet.
Also, if anyone following this is interested, the quick googling suggests there were black slaveowners as early as 1790.
I am annoyed by your continued assertion that being anti-classist means one must focus on class, and only class, and disregard the existence or importance of other oppressions. Or the assertion that people who are anti-racist care about perpetuating the current class system.
My politics are hot pink. I don’t want the game to have winners and losers.
But I also don’t think that socialism by itself, in itself, would get us to a world without losers.
What’s tricky about the scattershot nature of discussion on the web is I agree with everything implied in your comment.
I focus on classism because I think competition for resources lies under every form of prejudice: get rid of that competition, and getting rid of the remaining isms will be so much easier.
And I don’t think every antiracist is a capitalist. But plenty of them are: how else do you explain antiracists who support Barack Obama, whose politics are more conservative than John Edward’s and will therefore do less to help or more to harm the poor of all races? I understand the desire to have a symbolic victory. But real victories are even nicer.
(Insert note that even though I’m not a liberal capitalist, I will almost certainly vote for whichever of the three right-of-center candidates the DFL gives us, but of the three, I’d prefer to vote for the one furthest to the left.)
And more power to the hot pink!
I’m curious how you expect to create a system to allocate resources without also therefore creating a system of competition for them.
In my experience, most people either want things to be fair, or they want to have more than others. If the system is open so everyone can see it’s fair, and no one is desperate for food or shelter or education or health care, most people will be content. I think the biggest problem in the USA today is that its middle class has no idea how incredibly rich the rich are and how incredibly poor the poor are. It may be an accident that we have a crummy school system compared to other nations, and our media is so incompetent that many people still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, but if it’s an accident, it’s an accident that the rich are not interested in fixing.
A system that’s designed to be open and fair is an entirely different set of design goals than a system that has no competition. The two things are completely unrelated. Or maybe I’m being too cynical.
In general, I merely want things to be better. But that’s because I’m an optomist.
And I’m not sure that a system in which most people are content is “better”, either. That’s because I’m paranoid, mind you.
Every system needs a dash of paranoia.
Hmm. I should try to find out if anyone knows who the first black slaveowner in the U.S. was.
Odds are the first American owner was a company or even the colonial government, sort of following the pattern begun by the Spaniards, who were bringing in African slaves as early 1505 to work government mines in Hispanola. Virginia recorded a purchase of slaves from the Dutch in 1619, and around 1635 they were being imported into Massachusettes.
The best article I’ve read on this topic is A Social History of The American Negro by Benjamin Brawley. If you locate a copy of John Smith’s General History, which is probably online somewhere (several editions are available at ABE Books), it’s most likely the only source for the name you want.
Interesting site! Come and take a look at my blog http://www.asianracism.blogspot.com as i’ve got a whole bunch of stuff on minority rights and racism in asia there.
I’m not from north America so can’t really comment directly on the state of race affairs there, but i loved the line about not inheriting the guilt but instead inheriting the world. We gotta change the world, starting with where we live!