3ski6guy0
Active member
Im taking a class about African-American history and I just read this article that really will open your eyes up a little bit to the world you live in. Its long but worth it. Especially with our new president being black, this is pretty damn relevant.
"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in
invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
Peggy McIntosh
Through
work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the
curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they
are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are
disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, in the
society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't
support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos
surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's
disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully
acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking
through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that,
since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most
likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society
are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege
that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized
I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a
disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary
aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I
think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as
males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an
untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have
come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets
that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant"
to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless
knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas,
clothes, tools , and blank checks.
Describing
white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies
work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their
power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having
described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"
After
I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged
privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was
unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color
that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to
understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don't see
ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned
skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its
existence.
My
schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an
unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I
was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on
her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my
colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think
of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also
ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work
that will allow "them" to be more like "us."
Return
to the top of the page
Daily effects of white privilege
I
decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the
daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those
conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color
privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic
location, though of course all these other factors are intricately
intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers,
friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent
contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on
most of these conditions.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned
to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area
which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to
me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed
or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my
race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people
of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence
of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member
of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in
which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12.
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 which fit
with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone
who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against
the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily
physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers will tolerate them if they
fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. 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.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute
the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior
without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing
a person of my race.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children's
magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in,
rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely
to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29.
I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of
another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to
cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues
disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my
race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31.
I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority
activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any
case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative
consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of
other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection
on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the
job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation
whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise
me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without
asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in
or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection
owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people
of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences
of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match
my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those
who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit
and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and
social.
Return
to the top of the page
Elusive and fugitive
I
repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote
it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and
fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I
must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is
not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many
doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In
unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed
conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I
think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think
that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for
some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a
just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious,
arrogant, and destructive.
I
see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter
of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was
one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among
those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any
move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as
belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything
outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I
could also criticize it fairly freely.
In
proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable,
and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident,
uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of
hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to
visit, in turn, upon people of color.
For
this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We
usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or
conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described
here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege
simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.
Return
to the top of the page
Earned strength, unearned power
I
want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power
conferred privilege can look like strength when it is in fact
permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on
my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that
neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count
against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others,
like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity
of the holders as well as the ignored groups.
We
might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages,
which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which
unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For
example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as
Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few.
Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few
have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from
a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say
as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in
unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I
have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned
male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and
others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get
truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and
conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any
case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect
our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the
United States think that racism doesn't affect them because they are
not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity.
In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at
work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age
advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage
related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties
and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since
racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages
associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is
hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on
social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity
that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking,
as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their
"Black Feminist Statement" of 1977.
One
factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take
both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a
member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and
place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to
recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my
group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance
on my group from birth.
Disapproving
of the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think
that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But
a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether
or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us.
Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.
To
redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal
unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are
the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete,
protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these
subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me
now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of
dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It
seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like
obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in
the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth
that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people
unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small
number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in
the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Although
systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me
and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily
consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we
do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open
question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether
we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct
power systems on a broader base.
"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in
invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"
Peggy McIntosh
Through
work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the
curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they
are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are
disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, in the
society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't
support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos
surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's
disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully
acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking
through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that,
since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most
likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society
are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege
that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized
I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a
disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary
aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I
think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as
males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an
untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have
come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets
that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant"
to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless
knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas,
clothes, tools , and blank checks.
Describing
white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies
work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their
power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having
described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"
After
I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged
privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was
unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color
that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to
understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don't see
ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned
skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its
existence.
My
schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an
unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I
was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on
her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my
colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think
of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also
ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work
that will allow "them" to be more like "us."
Return
to the top of the page
Daily effects of white privilege
I
decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the
daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those
conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color
privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic
location, though of course all these other factors are intricately
intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers,
friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent
contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on
most of these conditions.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned
to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area
which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to
me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed
or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my
race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people
of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence
of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member
of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in
which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12.
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 which fit
with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone
who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against
the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily
physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers will tolerate them if they
fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. 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.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute
the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior
without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing
a person of my race.
25. 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.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children's
magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in,
rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely
to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29.
I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of
another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to
cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues
disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my
race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31.
I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority
activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any
case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative
consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of
other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection
on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the
job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation
whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise
me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without
asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in
or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection
owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people
of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences
of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match
my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those
who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit
and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and
social.
Return
to the top of the page
Elusive and fugitive
I
repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote
it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and
fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I
must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is
not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many
doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In
unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed
conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I
think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think
that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for
some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a
just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious,
arrogant, and destructive.
I
see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter
of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was
one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among
those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any
move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as
belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything
outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I
could also criticize it fairly freely.
In
proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable,
and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident,
uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of
hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to
visit, in turn, upon people of color.
For
this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We
usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or
conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described
here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege
simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.
Return
to the top of the page
Earned strength, unearned power
I
want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power
conferred privilege can look like strength when it is in fact
permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on
my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that
neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count
against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others,
like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity
of the holders as well as the ignored groups.
We
might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages,
which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which
unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For
example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as
Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few.
Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few
have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from
a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say
as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in
unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I
have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned
male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and
others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get
truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and
conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any
case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect
our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the
United States think that racism doesn't affect them because they are
not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity.
In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at
work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age
advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage
related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties
and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since
racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages
associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is
hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on
social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity
that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking,
as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their
"Black Feminist Statement" of 1977.
One
factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take
both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a
member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and
place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to
recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my
group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance
on my group from birth.
Disapproving
of the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think
that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But
a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether
or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us.
Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.
To
redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal
unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are
the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete,
protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these
subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me
now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of
dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It
seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like
obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in
the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth
that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people
unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small
number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in
the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Although
systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me
and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily
consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we
do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open
question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether
we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct
power systems on a broader base.