White privilege

[sebastienne]

• I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.


• I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.


• 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.


• I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.


• If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.


• I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.


• Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.


• I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.


• I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.


• I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.


• I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.


• I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color, who constitute the worlds' majority, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.


• I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.


• I can be sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge" I will be facing a person of my race.


• If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.


• I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.


• I can go home from most meetings or organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.


• I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.


• I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me.


• I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color that more or less matches my skin.

Peggy McIntosh

Comments

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I'd seen this list before, but hadn't actually read the full article - I particularly like this:

Some privileges make me feel at home in the world. Others allow me to escape penalties or dangers that others suffer. Through some, I escape fear, anxiety, insult, injury, or a sense of not being welcome, not being real. Some keep me from having to hide, to be in disguise, to feel sick or crazy, to negotiate each transaction from the position of being an outsider or, within my group, a person who is suspected of having too close links with a dominant culture. Most keep me from having to be angry

That's a big part of it, isn't it? And I'd never thought of it before - the idea that the freedom of not having to be angry in order to defend yourself, your loved ones, your friends, your brothers and sisters, is a kind of enormous privilege in itself.

*loves*

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

Eta: And then, of course, there's the way in which this privilege feeds into the dominant culture's construction of the 'angry feminist' or 'scary lesbian' or 'angry Black person' or 'bossy PC police' - a reaction that's all too easy to produce when you belong to a group that has no cultural need, thus little understanding, for why such anger might exist...

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes, oh so very much yes.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for posting this. I often feel like I have no right to talk about race issues - Oxford-educated privilege, why hello there - but now I feel like I should, to make reality clear to myself, go through and decide which of these are true for me.

(Er, didn't mean to make it All About Me, there! It's just a very interesting starting point for my thinking.)

[sashagoblin.livejournal.com]

It makeds the situation is South Africa, for example, very interesting.

If terrifying.

For everybody...

[sashagoblin.livejournal.com]

again with the 'thanks for posting'...

[flannelcat.livejournal.com]

The word "race" is one that makes me instinctively uncomfortable - not least because, if I'm honest, a number of the above statements don't hold true for me.

* I feel uncomfortable because people see my skin colour and mentally prescribe me with a race.

But, I get what the piece is trying to say.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Yeah, many, many assumptions based on skin colour, not race (oh look, a Pikey and a Kyke complaining about racism, what do they know?)

[flannelcat.livejournal.com]

a Pikey and a Kyke complaining about racism, what do they know?

Oh, Joff, I love you.

*Laughing*

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

*loves*

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, the above is quite simplistic. But I think it simplifies the issues enough that someone who's never confronted their own privilege before can maybe start to understand.. which is the game I'm playing today.

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

They make interesting reading but I think that in the UK a number of them don't apply, and some are a little silly / inconsistant:

I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

Is it not the case that ghetto-i-sation is a major force in both the UK and US and most people of ethnic minorities live within a community where they *can* if they wish arrange to be within the company of their own race most of the time. Sure this may not apply to a lone family living somewhere rural like the Isle of Wight, but *if* this is important to you one always does have the chance to move.

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

From what I can recall when I was in the state sector whenever we were given questions involving people it would often contain ethnic names - indeed to an unrepresentative level (especially if one lived in a 98% white county).

I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.

In terms of music and food then I don't really see the point here - its a commercial decision on the part of the companies involved based upon what they think they can sell.

Also I can see two major problems with the whole idea of the list;

i) It postulates and promotes the idea of a seperate racial identity - i.e. music of 'my race'. Is there a reason why 'your music' is not 'my music' too?

ii) A lot of it could equal apply to any minority - consider an Eastern European white immigrant - they'll have a problem finding traditional foods, music, etc. i.e. these issues represent problems of an immigrant culture, not 'white priviledge'.

[NB My thoughts here an incomplete - will write more later...]

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Some of these issues are conflated with immigrant culture, simply because Britain (and America where this list was drawn up) are countries where people of colour have immigrant status.

If this list was written by somebody living on the Asian subcontinent, I'm sure there'd be a lot more about "my lighter-skinned sister being more valued than me" and skin-lightening creams and Western cultural hegemony and other issues that don't even register on my radar.

I understand what you're saying and agree that the list can be seen as a little simplistic.

But we are brought up not to see or question the things that are handed to us on a plate because we are of the dominant cultural paradigm in this country, and I think that a list like this is an important place to start questioning those assumptions and checking that privilege.

I alwys think on this:

[ex-leighwoos982.livejournal.com]

"Of course, human history could have worked out differently. Suppose that an archaic species of human beings such as Homo erectus had become firmly established in the Americas during a time of lower sea levels. As sea levels rose and the Bering land bridge became submerged, modern human beings might have ceded the hemisphere to their archaic predecessors and never left the Old World. In that case, when Columbus came ashore in the West Indies, he would not have encountered modern human beings separated from his own ancestors by just a few thousand generations. He would have met slope-browed, linguistically primitive people with a cranial capacity about two thirds of our own. Then we would have a race problem. Instead we have cultural differences masquerading as race problems."

From: http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:S8hmceYYcrYJ:www.theatlantic.com/doc/200104/

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

In terms of music and food then I don't really see the point here - its a commercial decision on the part of the companies involved based upon what they think they can sell.

But you have the privilege to not see the point because you are part of the dominent group, and the food and music you want to buy is automatically available. If it was your kind of food or music that it wasn't viable to sell, you might notice and mind that more... decisions as to what ethnic food will and won't get sold in mainstream supermarkets is based on what marketers think they can or can't sell to the dominent culture, and that is an unacknowledge privilege. It may look like one that you can't do anything about, because it's all about market forces and the like, but it's still a privilege.

There is also a problem on the list with conflating issues that happen because a group is literally a minority - like it not being economically viable to sell certain foods and music - and isses which happen because a group is a minority in the sense of not being part of the dominant paradigm. But all those things are things that you would have to deal with if you were part of the minority, and that you "do not see the point" of because you are part of the majority.

From what I can recall when I was in the state sector whenever we were given questions involving people it would often contain ethnic names - indeed to an unrepresentative level (especially if one lived in a 98% white county).

Ok, now that's really, really bugged me. Because you're conflating tokenism with content.

The history of people in England other than the dominant culture is never on the curriculum. The contributions they made to culture and progress are never mentioned. So occasionally, you get someone in a maths quesion called 'Fatima' or "Avram". It doesn't actually stop the English history of people of my race from being invisible. It just covers over that invisibility with another layer of invisibility, because everyone assumes that what they can see is all they ought to be able to see.

I don't know about the history of black people in the UK other than where it relates to the slave trade. But I know, because I researched it, because it's my history and I was interested, about the expulsion of the Jews, about the massacres and the economics of usuary and the way we've been part of the fabric of building english culture since at least the 13 hundreds but are still outsiders now. It was Oliver Cromwell who revoked the Expulsion and allowed Jews back into the country - when we learned about Oliver Cromwell in class, it was as the bad guy who beheaded the kind and cancelled christmas. No indication that according to history as someone of my race might percieve it, the story is different.

And I can't tell you the paralels with black history, because I don't know them, because it was excluded from the damn curriculum, or done as a specialist tokenist topic, "black history month" as if every other month of the year we can pretend that only white people have history that counts.

And you can't see these things, because you are part of the dominant cultural group. And that's the point.

[flannelcat.livejournal.com]

we are of the dominant cultural paradigm in this country,

We are?

I guess "we" are - which is rather the problem.

* Growing up, my father told me very little about my heritage, because (i quote) "It would have only brought trouble."

* My father is, technically, illiterate - he reads and writes English perfectly, but he has only managed to recently start learning the writing of his first language - Shelta.

* My children will be so far removed from the culture, lifestyle, language, music and food of my father's people, that they will likely never know. With every day that passes, I am too.

* We have, in short, been assimilated - so much so that if I stood next to somebody who, by a grandfather or grandmother, I was related to, I would be the "Dominant Paradigm". Within a few decades, I honestly believe that we will all have been bred out and subsumed.

So yeah. I am your tag, I guess.

[potatofiend.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Following on from what flannelcat was saying -

I'm a Jew; racially, I am a full-blooded Jew. But I look so 'white', so English, if you will, that all the above probably do hold for me on the assumption, generally made, that I am not what I actually am. I have all these 'white' privileges largely because people don't realise I'm Jewish.

And then the situation of the Jew in this country is very strange, anyway. Jews are largely 'white'; they also make up a huge proportion of the upper class, aristocracy and new money both; and they have been in this country since the 11th century. And yet, there's still a lot of anti-semitism, depending on your level of obvious Jewishness. If you're rich and white and Anglicised and act like everyone else, the fact that you're Jewish doesn't matter: people are willing to forget it and accord you your White Privileges. But you can't ever forget that if you came in one day 'dressed like a Jew', all that could disappear.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

huge propotion of the upper class, aristocracy

We do? This surprises me. I don't think I've ever come accross a titled Jew. Most of the Jews I've ever met have been middle class. Maybe this says more about me and the people I meet than about Jewish people.

I find the conflation of "race" and "colour" quite interesting in the original list. I was reading down thinking yes, yes, yes about all of those things, identifying as white. Then I got to the line about hair dressers, and laughed out loud. I made a really long rambly post the other week about hair as a racial marker, and the fact that mine clearly marks me out as not being part of the dominent culture. And then I went back over the list, and thought, no, I don't see people of my race on television. When characters on television are Jewish, it's often for a similar set of stereotypical reasons to when characters are black. "Our National Heritage" includes mass burnings of Jewish people which they don't ever even teach as part of the history curiculum. Until I started at uni, I spent almost no time in the company of other people of my race.

Basically, when these privilidges come down to literally skin colour and appearance, I have most of them. As soon as they start talking about culture, it gets more murky.

Of course I have white privilidge, when compared to a person who is less non-white than myself. I am very aware of that. But it's not always a comfortable place to be - like being given something under false pretences.

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

er that might be true in the US its not true in the Bahamas, nor is true in south Africa, or China, India, in fact most places in the world that isn't northern Europe/north America/Australasia.

I find the cultural imperialism of the USA very troubling, its assumptions that how it works in the US is true of every where else, and any proof that is not is ignored and told that we are racists for pointing it out.

yes I live in a society where people are often the same skin colour as me, but I know that they are not teh same sexuality as me, that I will be unfairly prosecuted if I am arrested and any time I am a victim of crime the case will be dropped

I could take every example of that list and point out how the reverse is actually true for me.

Yes being white has privilege, but being male is possibility more of a privilege - something that doesn't apply to me, being obviously cisgendered is massive privilege (why do transexual struggle so hard to become obviously cisgendered otherwise).

I am reminded of Audre Lord commenting about when gay men first came out in the 70's, how they suddenly faced the weight of societal oppression/discrimination. They expected everybody to rally around them, because suddenly it was their arse on the line, and were surprised when feminists and race rights activists didn't help. They didn't understand that lesbians abd race rights activists had already had their arse on the line.
well my arse has been on the line most of my life and I face discrimination every day from men and women of all sexualities regardless of their 'race' or ethnicity.

When I have equality, then i might start worrying about my white privilege but not until then.
sorry

[frank-snow.livejournal.com]

Everyone knows that it's a fundamental universal truth that it is completely impossible to care about more than one issue at any one time.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

When I have equality, then i might start worrying about my white privilege but not until then.
What stops ethnic minority (in the western context, obv in many countries they are ethnic majority, etc) straights saying the same about you?

And for that matter, what about queer non-whites? Talking as if the various bases privilege and oppression operate entirely separately does nobody any favours.

[liminereid.livejournal.com]

Also your last sentence is an oxymoron.
You can't have equality if you still have white privalege.
Equality takes away your privaleges as well as righting your wrongs. That's the whole point. Which is why you still need to address your privalege while seeking redress for the areas in which you are discrimanted against.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I am not white, and I live in a predominantly white society. This causes me some discomfort, because there isn't equality between non-white and white people in this society. Ergo, I don't have to care about you and your sexuality and/or gender issues. Unless it's all about me, I don't have to care.

That is the structure of your argument. How remarkably self-centred.

[darwinian-woman.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this, sebastienne - it's given me a lot to muse on. You know, I don't think I'd ever even clocked that there was an issue with the colour of bandages. It's scary how you just don't notice privilege if you're receiving it.

xmass - I'm sorry. It can be too much to cope with, I know - and from what I've learnt of your experiences on the receiving end of prejudice, it sounds like I've been amazingly lucky by comparison. But my impression of this article was that, if it's asking us to discount other forms of prejudice apart from race, we're only expected to do so as a thought experiment, to allow us to see this particular issue more clearly. I'd read it as: "When controlling for other factors...".

I believe that bigotry operates over such a wide range of criteria that in practice, every person will have their own individual experience of the effects of prejudice. But I don't feel that that negates the meaning of this kind of exercise, for me at least. For what parallels it offers, I also believe that we cannot accurately model the Earth's climate, *but* that models of climate can still inform our understanding of climate systems. Perhaps that's doublethink on my part, but... *meh*.

To be honest, I sometimes wonder whether the best way for *me* (a trans-person) to fight trans-discrimination might be for me to select a completely *different* human rights issue, to try to get to grips with it as much as possible, and to campaign on it with all my heart. And yes, that's disgustingly saccharine of me, I know, but I make no apologies for that :P

*hugs* all round :)

[steerpikelet.livejournal.com]

Coming late to the debate (as always), but: thank you for posting this, babes. You rock, and we must talk about this sometime.

Reading all the comments, and thinking about race and gender - I don't think that racisim is more, or less, of a problem than gender discrimination, but I think they work in very different ways. For example:

Whilst, as you rightly point out, people from 'ethnic minorities' (sic.) often turn on the television to find people of their race not represented or under-represented, women turning on the tv are assaulted by hundreds of images telling them how they SHOULD be, should look, etc. The problem is still one of visibility of gaze, even - of how the dominant group (the white patriarchy, which is no longer exclusively male nor even exclusively white but nonetheless seems to have exclusively pro-white, pro-male values) portray cultural subalterns. Of how *we are seen*.

I am passionate about this stuff; however, I feel that as a white person - a white second-generation Russian-Irish-Maltese immigrant, but white enough that I enjoy privilege - I cannot comment on race issues. And yet I get hugely angry when men say they feel they can't get involved in 'women's issues.' Where does that leave me? ('me, me, me.')

Love you miss. xx