Acknowledging Privilege and Bias Without Shame
"I've read your shit. I know you don't understand that looting and property destruction is a legit form of protest. What you don't get is that in a society with so few having so much, stealing from the rich is completely justified."
"OK. What's the definition of 'rich' then?"
"Oh, don't play. You know what rich is."
"I do but the thing is, if we sanction and justify you stealing from someone you determine is richer than you, aren't you also richer than someone else? Do you have a car?"
"Yes, I have a car but I'm certainly not rich."
"You're richer than someone who can't afford a car. So, by the logical argument you make, a homeless dude has a legit justification for stealing your car. From his perspective, you are far richer than he is so you're cool with that?"
"So you believe we should just shut up and take what we're given?"
"I didn't say that. I believe in the power of protest to elevate awareness of issues. Even believe in property destruction as a means to that end. Theft isn't protest. It's theft. Adding criminal activity to protest weakens the message and muddies the intent."
"That's your privilege speaking. Check your privilege, brah."
Perhaps it is my privilege speaking. The problem with his use of the charge is that, whether it is my privilege speaking or not, that fact has little to nothing to do with whether or not my statements are true or valuable.
The problem lies in the obvious lack of guilt I have for any privilege I may have. That's what really pisses some folks off. I'm not tribal by nature and thus accept no part of responsibility for things white people do or have done in the past.
This is not an endorsement of slavery nor a dismissal of its impact today. Not an endorsement of misogyny nor a dismissal of its presence today. It is, as they say, my lived experience.
My lack of guilt over my whiteness is not an absence of empathy. It is likewise not a refusal to acknowledge a certain amount of privilege I have had, unearned as they say, in my life. To the question "I Acknowledge My White Privilege, Now What?" I've found the answers to be fundamentally confusing, semi-religious, and amount to "You Should Feel Really Shitty About It."
It’s possible to recognize that in-your-face racism exists in the United States and to also believe that the “white privilege” framework is misleading and a counterproductive way to discuss it among intelligent humans. In fact, the harder the DiAngelo model of self flagellation is pushed, the less traction for actually finding meaningful solutions to racial disparities in both outcomes and equality of opportunity is gained.
Thomas Sowell summarizes the current situation this way: “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”
The whole “white privilege” polemic inevitably butts up against the fact that many white people cannot be described as privileged in any way: these are poor, uneducated, struggling Americans at the bottom of the society. And it really pisses them off to be told how privileged they are when they can't even afford to take their kids to a doctor or move to a better neighborhood.
Under tried-and-true, full-on white supremacy, being white provides benefits with no regard for class disadvantage. White trash in the Jim Crow South still had social capitol over a black professional. He could push blacks around with impunity and over whom he would almost always be favored by cops, courts, and public officials. To ignore that, in 2021, we have significantly progressed past that state of mind is to pretend we're still living in a Cool Hand Luke world.
How does white privilege deal with class impediment? As the resource page on “Whiteness” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture puts it: “Being white does not mean you haven’t experienced hardships or oppression. Being white does mean you have not faced hardships or oppression based on the color of your skin.”
I'd argue that no one should face hardships or oppression based on the color of their skin. Or for their gender identity. Or for their cultural background. Or for their religion. Pretty much, I'm against oppression in general and hardship is just the way of the fucking world regardless of how one identifies.
I'd also argue that as racism and the hatefulness of white supremacy decreases every year it is important for the racism industry to discover more and more strains of racism each year that were previously considered not racism or else the racism industry will go bankrupt. I mean, there's a lot of cash in writing books about racism, in the implicit bias business, in the constant drumbeating of racial animus.
Lose the white guilt over privilege and the sins of the past and the wellspring of money dries up. I'm 100% in favor of black-owned businesses but I wouldn't dine at a restaurant with a requirement that I lash myself with a tiny whip in order to get a table because of my lack of melanin.
Glenn Loury made an interesting point about this recently. Yes, at some point in the not-too-distant future, white people will cease to be the majority in America. But white people will still be by far the largest minority. If 49% of people are white and, say, 15% of people are black, how does anyone imagine this race war is going to work out?
But this ignores a much more important point; “white people” aren’t ganging together to maintain some mysterious power over black people. If that were really happening, white people would easily overwhelm everybody else by sheer weight of numbers.
There are white racists in the corridors of power. Agreed. Some of them are actively trying to keep black people down. Absolutely. None of them are exercising their "whiteness" by smiling at black people in Whole Foods but DiAngelo would have us believe differently:
"I have heard Black people talk about the awkwardness of white people 'over-smiling. A friend described going to Whole Foods and feeling exhausted by the pressure to validate all of the over-solicitous white people making a point of smiling at her when she just wanted to get her errands done and get home.
She understood that the act was meant to convey acceptance and approval, but what it actually conveyed to her was a way for white people to maintain moral integrity in the face of racial anxiety. Over-smiling allows white people to mask an anti-Blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white. Our fleeting benevolence has no relation to how Black people are actually undermined in white spaces.
Some Black friends have told me that they prefer open hostility to niceness. They understand open hostility and can protect themselves as needed. But the deception of niceness adds a confusing layer that makes it difficult to decipher trustworthy allyship from disingenuous white liberalism. Niceness masks controversy and suppresses difference."—Robin DiAngelo, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm (2021)
If smiling at black people is a mask for anti-black racism, well, there simply isn't a cure is there? What a game of race-baiting grift to define a heinous but completely normal trait in most humans (fear and distrust of the Other) as indelibly owned by one skin color and inked in their souls in the same mystical manner as original sin.
The question at the heart of my persistent inquiry is this: what does this paradigm created on the back end of legit Critical Race Theory by shysters like DiAngelo and Kendi do to repair the relationship between our cultural differences? From my vantage, it repairs nothing and divides us up even more, effectively turning the clock back to a much darker time.
As I say, I acknowledge my privilege and bias and have no shame for it as these things are beyond my control. I cannot and will not accept responsibility for any of my ancestors who owned slaves any more than I accept sentencing for the crimes of the Dalton Gang (which, I'm told, I am related).
I can, however, ignore the noise of public call out and simply do what I can in my daily grind to perpetuate a Universal Ethics that posits we are all exactly the same and until we start treating each other as such, we'll remain perpetually locked into these culture wars at the expense of forward momentum.
Everybody counts or nobody counts.
