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| LazFX |
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By Tim Wise
For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
White privilege is when you can call yourself a "in’ redneck," like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their in' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot " for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.
White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re "untested."
White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn’t added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.
White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.
White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.
White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."
White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.
White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.
White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.
White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it, a "light" burden.
And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.
White privilege is, in short, the problem.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull.
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http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1755
wow.......
Sounds like lil Huey Freeman from The BoonDocks ;) |
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| Capitalizt |
| where is the option for "too long to read"? |
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| Audigy7 |
| I voted yes, but I'd say only about half of the things listed are strong. |
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| Arbiter |
| No, but I will give it five bonus points for irony respecting the author's name. |
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| mndeg |
"White privilege is when you can call yourself a "in’ redneck," like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their in' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot " for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug."
hah
what a hick
nice article |
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| Dervish |
| I voted No. One presidential candidate takes a running mate who is entirely not qualified but plugs the gaps he has, but didn't totally vet, and suddenly this is a "white privilege" thing? |
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| DJ Shibby |
Racial inequality in America is not just black and white; this is the grand illusion.
It's socioeconomic. Completely based on distribution of wealth, and how the black markets we have created have formed themselves into event horizons for progress. |
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| LazFX |
Found this interesting...
| quote: | By Fatimah Ali
Philadelphia Daily News
AT LEAST 2 million readers visit DrudgeReport.com daily, and, for the last two weeks, it seemed like most of them were steamed at me.
Thousands of hostile messages flooded my e-mail after my Sept. 2 column that the Daily News called "We Need Obama, Not 4 More Years of George Bush."
Drudge cleverly headlined it: "Philadelphia columnist warns if McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race war."
I stand by the column - but after all of that backlash, I realize I was dead wrong. We don't have to wait until after the election for a race war. We're in one now.
I know that putting the words "race" and "war" together is like hurling an incendiary device. But I wasn't issuing a call to arms, it was a metaphorical prediction.
I hate violence, but I do see a growing wave of intolerance sweeping the nation. And most of the responses were hostile, like one from someone who identified himself as Dennis Van Pelt: "Obama runs like a porch monkey in Alabama during a KKK concert." But, not all white Southerners feel like Dennis. Russ Nelson wrote: "I am a white male who was proud to cast my vote for Barack Obama in the Alabama state primary. He inspires me!"
Nelson sounds more like the liberal whites I grew up with in West Mount Airy, a community that pioneered integration in Philadelphia and kept me wearing rose-colored glasses. I didn't personally experience racism until I was 40, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The recent onslaught of hate mail I received is a cruel reminder that racism is a like a simmering pot ready to boil over. But it's diametrically opposed to what democracy should represent.
I move in diverse circles and was raised in an upper-middle-class family with parents who exposed us to a wide range of experiences. My family includes several races and religions and a range of political views.
But from what I've been seeing lately, including the reaction to my column, the racial, economic, cultural and religious divides are getting wider. Most of the 2,000 negative responses used language so foul my ears curled.
These excerpts are some of the milder ones: Jerry Caruso threatened: "Pleeeeease bring it, we'll extinguish you." Michael Babich from Wichita, Kan., accused me of "calling for rampant crime and a plague of locusts."
From John Hassler: "I'd rather have an all out war than have [Obama] for president." John Hermanek: "There will be race wars either way. Why? Because he's black." Roland hated my column: "I don't like threats, so I will for sure, vote for John McCain." Jim McDowell was less polite: "I just realized after I saw your last name you're a damn rag head. You stupid S.O.B.'s want to take us back to the seventh century."
Do these quotes shock you? Is the vitriol not far from the kind of hatred that led to lynching?
Unfortunately, sentiments like this are not uncommon. Flip through right-wing talk radio, and you can hear this type of intolerance daily. Syndicated talker Jim Quinn wondered if I'm some "liberal black Muslim" and (according to MediaWatch.org) fumed, "Get an American name if you want to be an American."
You have to have a European name to be an American? Barack Obama's candidacy has simply been the latest stage on which some of this antagonism plays out. I wonder about people like Larry Coltslinger, who said: "Our unemployment rate is as good, or better than it was after all eight years of Bill Clinton."
Yet, like so many others, my family has to tough it out daily to get by. But we're hardly alone. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 592,000 Americans lost their jobs last month. Many share a similar plight - middle-class families who've lost financial footing because of corporate greed.
DECADES after Brown v. Board, after a long civil-rights struggle and the fact that we live in an increasingly multicultural society, our nation's sagging economic state is also causing great racial strife among those who are financially at the bottom.
In some neighborhoods in L.A., violence is rampant between blacks and Mexicans. Gang wars are frequent, and, the LAPD says, are based on race and competition for jobs. In Philadelphia, police believe several recent robberies and murders of shop owners were directly related to race.
No, we're not anywhere near "post-racial" times. If we were, the possibility that a black man may well become our next president wouldn't matter. And two words out of 775 in my original column would not have unleashed the kind of hatred that makes me want to retreat to a bunker. *
Fatimah Ali is a regular contributor. E-mail her at fameworksmedia@yahoo.com.
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinio...viewAll=Y&text= |
there is a problem in this country... |
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