White Privilege Cannot Be Real Because I Ignore Facts, Research, History, And Thine Own Eyes.
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White privilege is a hard topic for many people to accept, or fully understand. Republicans and others will see it as some kind of political correctness, liberal woke claptrap, or even treasonous. Yes, treasonous. That is because it denigrates many a Republicans’ pristine notions about the nation’s founders as well as White-privilege influenced societal structures still in place today. Such American Exceptionalism zealotry destroys our ability to achieve qualitative introspection and self analysis, that is a prerequisite for making effective changes.
Why do we White people get our undies in-a-bunch when someone says we have White privilege? The simple answer is fear. We fear it may be true, and that we cannot see it, which means we are ignorant and blind to something. Second, privilege is associated with income, wealth, and-or societal status. This implied association with significant wealth and power puts less well-off Whites on the defensive.
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If you are in the average grouping in any of those areas, or in a lower bracket, being called privileged may cause anger. If you are in the higher — income, wealth, or social-status — brackets, shame can take precedence, because you feel that you may not have done enough to make positive changes, or that you think you have done plenty, and should be the last one criticized. While all of these reactions may, or may not be appropriate if White privilege was not a thing, it is the Whitepart that is inherently problematic.
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Although White privilege is found in almost every country, where Whites are in power, in large minorities, or small wealthy minorities, there are different layers of it in the United States. Read Me and White Supremacy, by Layla F. Saad.
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Conservatives too quickly leap to the premise that there is nothing new remaining to discover about what society should be, our moral codes, or other change. More importantly today, Trump conservatives over-eagerly denounce every accusation that America is still racist in any way. White Privilege is seen by many White conservatives as a move to corner them into making decisions about reparations, or the government doing something else for Black Americans. Republicans cannot give up the advantage anywhere, let alone when it comes to the White power they wield. Trumplicans must protect their extremely white voting base from being seriously challenged. Furthermore, hearing the truth just hurts most Republicans and Trump followers too much.
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The ultra conservative franchise has no place to go but further onto the white supremacy fringe. Returning even slightly to the middle will split the party, losing them the power they have now, for a few presidential terms, or as long as a couple generations. Crashing and burning is better than facing the truth that they must change drastically in some fashion, at a minimum. That leaves out the potential for accepting White privilege as a thing any time soon.
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The non-wealthy and non-very high income White individual, whether conservative, liberal, or other, who still struggles with, or refutes, the concept of White privilege, is pushing back because they do not believe in, see, or understand the connection between their lives and White privilege. There is some percentage that will forever be recalcitrant racists, but most are in a defensive mode requiring various levels of scales over their eyes to be removed, or the fog in their mind to be dissolved.
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The pushback is a natural effect when changing someone’s worldview almost 180 degrees. However, there is another level that affects those who understand the pervasiveness of racism to some extent, and feel they are considerably woke, at least comparative to other Whites. (I put myself somewhere in that category spectrum, a.k.a. White liberal, still 60 to 120 degrees off base.) Since few people of every race is fond of being wrong, or misguided in some direction, especially for years or decades, many uncomfortable layers of White privilege will need to be peeled off. Each layer removed is an embarrassment, with guilt and shame piling up.
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The depth of White privilege in our culture is significant. With over four hundred years of time to layer it on in America, it should not be unexpected. Yet it is unexpected by most White Americans. Everyone has the feeling their birth created a completely new mind, no marionette strings attached. This belief, conjured up with little introspection, has not yet been dealt with effectively by society. Evolution is the source for understanding our innate human coding. Of course, many conservatives do not agree with the theory of evolution. Many other Americans have only a cursory knowledge of it, e.g. survival of the fittest, which is only part of the story.
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Evolutionary psychology and social science provide evidence of how our ideas and proclivities as humans have formed over the eons. Much of our brain is filled with a lot of simple preprogramming; the only way most humans could have survived any earlier than 10,000 years ago. Those preprogramming habits became insidious as we started using our frontal cortex for logical thinking and reasoning. Certain mental formatting habits became baked in that would not be very helpful as we developed more, and more complex societies with highly populated cities. The advances of the human species as to social-relationships has been glacial compared to our ability to build up societies and develop technology.
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Getting our brains to detach from our conjured up, preprogrammed ideas is almost like trying to force a 2 month-old to see a traditional eye chart 6 yards away. No matter what, you must wait until an infant is over 3 months-old before they will see further than 12 inches; they won’t have full visual acuity until age 4 or 5. People who refuse to see systemic racism will never graduate above the toddler stage of White privilege resistance, and suppression. Those who see that racism is more prevalent than merely a few bad apples, may get to White privilege awareness grade school. Americans who see clearer the tentacles of systemic racism have the potential to get to the university level in helping dismantle White privilege, though lifelong lessons will be required.
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People love feeling good about themselves. This basic formatting “glitch” thwarts our ability to look inside ourselves, and deeply into other areas where these secrets are hidden. Most christian doctrines explain that humans are born broken and sinful, and never fully heal, or ever completely eradicate sin in their lives. Yet American slavery, a major progenitor of our White privilege, was infused with a christian ethic that eliminated the slavery of Blacks as a sin, putting White supremacy adjacent, and the default. Therefore, many ancestors of these christians have additional levels of distorted cultural preprogramming. This corrupted code will prevent many from ever making introspection about race prejudice a priority.
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NOTE: Since slavery was initiated in all the 13 colonies, and the first state to abolish it, Vermont, did not until one year after the Declaration of Independence, this corrupted code is not geographically bound to the southern states alone. Although the distorted White Supremacist programming had longer to fester in the South, making a generally deeper impression on its southern descendants.
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The end of Jim Crow did not end white privilege. And White privilege persists today via… Compared to Whites, there is a mass incarceration disparity upwards of 500–1,000% depending on the county, a wealth disparity of 1,000%, segregation via housing discrimination, and education disparities due to local school funding policies, etc., as well as job discrimination, and many more types of race-based harm. Basically, any White American is likely better off than any Black American, everything intrinsic being equal:
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For example, if your two parent household with two children averaged $50K per year in today’s dollars, a White person would still have more wealth, is less likely to go to prison, more likely go to a better school, live in a better neighborhood in a nicer home, and more likely have good health insurance than the same two-parent Black household with the same number of children and income. Black wealth is not able to rise because of the needs of the Black community, especially close family members, that lower to middle-income Blacks subsidize.
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Now most White Americans do not sit down at the table as a family to determine how they will be White privileged. Few White Americans put their thumbs in their ears, wiggle their hands, and blow raspberries at Black Americans as they grab their White privilege stash, and run off with a selfish, hands-rubbing-together greedy, cackling laugh to the White privilege outlet mall. That is the White privilege, severe asshole, racist version, but there are many, many other levels, and layers of it. Parents pass it on to their children without knowing it.
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That is why the but-we-are-good-White-people phenomenon, and the but-we-are-color-blind happy crap are both a terrible, lying-to-yourself and others scourge. Once in this mode, the White privilege blinders drop down, and everything is White honky-dorky. Black Americans must suffer through our blissful yet happy crap ignorance as well as the privilege of the angry, and violent White supremacist. While the good and color blind White person may be a better neighbor, or friend, on an individual basis than their severely racist cousin, their corrupted White privilege code holds the racist line in place, changing almost nothing for their Black friend, coworker, or neighbor, or anyone or anywhere else.
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Insidiousness succinctly describes how the matrix of racism, and racist policy persists, and how White privilege protects it. The systemic part of racism is made possible not by railing demagogues, and its crazy minions. It lives on because the bystander, usually the largest cohort by far, does nothing. Returning to christian dogma, it would be called a sin of omission.
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From a White privilege perspective, the but-I-am-good and color-blind White American is the seemingly very pious person who walks around the helpless man in the ditch, astride the road to Damascus that is helped by a Samaritan.
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I may have not gotten everything right about the parable, but the example above does the job. White privilege is not something you can shake off merely because you have made a determination about yourself. Changing your skin color today from White to Black would still not eliminate the privilege you have inherited up to this point.
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I spent my teen years in a small town in Iowa 14 miles from the Missouri border. That meant I was about as southern as you could get without being in the South. Coming from northern Indiana, a few miles from Michigan, I still caught a bit of a southern twang. A few elements of my twang still stand out after almost forty years in Minnesota. “It” and “video” are my two, prominent, twanging word culprits. My wife, a native Minnesotan, likes to point my little bit of twanging out to me. Everything else slipped away, but I cannot shake it… or video. Though I have not seen a speech therapist. Yet you would think my seven years as a radio announcer would have worn it all away (or video).
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Shedding White privilege is similar in some general ways to shedding an accent. It takes a lot of effort, may be even a therapist, or something as proactive, and professional. Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy is one place to start shedding yours. Of course, you may never be able to shed all of it; however you can make sure your kids, the neighbor kids, your students, or etc. have the chance to do it. That said, we must shed as much of our White privilege as possible. The Kentucky relatives on my mom’s side will frown if they think I purposely tried to shed my nearly southern accent, which I did not. ;-)
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White Privilege Analogy: Imagine someone named Mike White being the weakest, smallest, least educated, poorest member by far, of a large, close-knit, well-known, well-connected family in a town of 5,000 who all make really good salaries, and are all very tall, strong, and popular. Does Mike get pushed around, beat up, not get enough to eat, not have a place to live, get thrown in jail for doing almost nothing? No, of course not.
But why? Is it because Mike has the ability to become invisible, stop time, levitate himself into trees, or…? No, Mike gets many privileges that most people with Mike’s intrinsic and personal cohort of attributes would not, merely because they are not in the White Family.
Without Mike White’s family, people like him would be thrown to the wolves in multiple ways, have more scrapes with police, and be susceptible to downfalls. It does not matter that he is poor, or lacks a good education; Mike is protected by the White family privilege. Being part of the White family is what Mike’s privileges are based on, and everything else he does, may or may not matter as to how well he does in life overall. That’s because his life begins, and continues, with a powerful White family infrastructure.
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Saying there is no such thing as White privilege denies reality. Sadly, I am not too hopeful that many White Americans will work very hard to remove the racism scourge, and clean out our systemically corrupted code. Getting upset is much easier. Making a snide remark can be done with almost no effort. Politicizing and polarizing are preprogrammed habits, and that automatic, slippery tongued shit is difficult to come to terms with. Harming people through willful ignorance is really not harming people. Denial of truths, and hate of others were perfected by our neanderthal cousins 100,000 years ago, why improve on that?
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