White Privilege is Real

Image from Orenthial Scott, Pinterest

 

(This post was originally inspired by an incident of racism last year at my alma mater, the Moody Bible Institute. I survey that incident here MBIprivilege, An Overview. I share it because this message has wider applicability and needs to be shouted from the rooftops.)

#MBIprivilege

White privilege and systemic racism are alive and well. We need more discussions on these and related matters not less. Why? Because the nature of the case is that to do nothing perpetuates a system of unfair privilege and inequality. To tell people to “not be divisive” for seeking to draw attention to such injustices is reprehensible.

I want to start by defining my terms. I think some disagreements over these things stem from misunderstanding and meaning different things. Then I want to sketch a little of the evidence that white privilege and systemic racism are real and that this is a huge problem we need to take seriously.

When people talk about “privilege” in this context, they simply mean the unearned benefits that come from being part of a particular social category. This isn’t always something one chooses, so this isn’t a matter of guilt, per se. It’s not something we have to feel bad for. But it is something we have to recognize and for which we have to take responsibility.

Love for our neighbors who are less privileged (relatively speaking) requires really listening to their sometimes very different experiences of the world. As others have pointed out, one of the hallmarks of privilege is not being aware of it. If our privileged status comes out of an ideology and system that is arbitrary and hateful; we have the responsibility to participate in overturning that. We may not have set up such an ideology or system; but, as initially counter-intuitive as it may sound, we can participate in it without being aware of it—without consciously hating anyone.

There are different types of privilege one can have and they interact and “intersect” with each other in different ways. There is white privilege, male privilege, class privilege, heterosexual privilege, and so on. Some of you said that as a white person you were not privileged and for others to assume you were was offensive. Well, you may not have been privileged in some other ways, but in the matter of your whiteness, you definitely are privileged relative to people of color.

Another clarification before moving on: privilege is a matter of probability. It doesn’t guarantee that you will always get benefits or that those who are less privileged in the matter in question will never get them. It means that you are more likely to be ahead or get ahead due to your privilege.

Let me use non-disabled privilege as an illustration of what I’ve said. I have a friend who is blind. I don’t think any of you would dispute that my ability to see is a privilege I have over my blind friend. I mean, sure there *might* be a few circumstances where his blindness benefits him more than my sight does me. But in general, in this world and this society, being able to see is a huge benefit.

I didn’t choose to be born with the ability to see. My bearing that privilege over my friend is not something I am “guilty” for or need to feel ashamed about. But if I am to love my friend I have to pay attention to his special circumstances. And honestly, there are a lot of issues he has to deal with that. I never would have thought about before. Because I’m privileged.

For example, if my cell-phone dies, so what. But for him, his ability to easily order a taxi and get help is in jeopardy. I never would have thought of that before I knew him.

What would happen if instead of paying attention to my friend’s special circumstances I pretended that he could see or that his blindness didn’t make him any different than me. We are all “the same.” Let’s just love each other. What if I shamed him for not being able to do some of the things I could?

In other words, what if I pretended that I wasn’t truly privileged and he was the same as me (as regards this specific issue)? That would be grossly unloving and unfair.

But in many (not all) ways this is analogous to being white as compared to being a person of color.

The first thing to say about race is that it is a social construct. It’s a bit arbitrary. For example, the Irish and Jews were not initially seen as “white.” They were seen as distinct, inferior races. Likewise, Brazil does not just have “white” and “black” categories; it has a more complicated racialized system.

This is where I think some people are misunderstanding our opposition to white privilege. We aren’t against white people. We are against a system that artificially categorizes “whiteness” as superior and which makes people prone to benefits based on being perceived in that category. If our history were different and black people had dominated and oppressed white people, we would just as readily oppose “black privilege.” It’s not about particular people or about particular “races,” it’s about an unfair system of inequality. We are trying to draw attention to the fact that we still live in such a system and society. To that I now turn.

I think we can all agree that slavery was a great evil. What we seem to forget is that for normal human beings (including many Christians) to participate in such a system; they had to come up with a racialized ideology to justify it. Early on in the colonies a racist ideology that saw “whiteness” as superior to color was established. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that our nation is one that is founded on white supremacy. I’m going to post some articles below that delve into this in more detail, but here are some highlights:

-In 1787 the Constitutional Convention reached an infamous compromise where African American slaves were defined as 3/5’s of a person. In total, American chattel slavery lasted for close to 250 years.

-The Naturalization Law of 1790 reserved citizenship for “whites” only.

-Over the years, Americans repeatedly broke treaties with Native Peoples, robbed them of their land, murdered them, and stole their children from them in an effort to make them more culturally “white” at brutal boarding schools.

-After the Treaty of Guadalupe ended the Mexican-American War, white settlers effectually stole land from the Mexicans already living in the newly acquired Southwest. Mexicans were susceptible to harassment, negative racialized stereotypes, hard labor with low pay, and violence.

-By law the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the entry of more Chinese immigrants. It remained in effect until 1943. The Chinese (and later Japanese) who were here were subject to violence, discrimination, and segregation. Someone mentioned Chinatowns above. There is a reason there are “Chinatowns;” and in the grand scale of things this did not benefit Chinese-Americans.

-Shortly after slavery ended, African Americans were effectually disenfranchised. Jim Crow era laws made it easy and common for blacks to be abused, killed, and robbed of their land and wealth.

-Things where no better in the North. There, racist views and competition for jobs and resources led to violence, discrimination, and forced segregation. Blacks were forced into terrible living conditions and low paying jobs. They were regularly taken advantage of by the only lenders and tenants who would cater to them. This happened legally and unashamedly into the late 1960s.

-Between 1882 and 1968 at least 4,700 “lynchings” where committed by white terrorists against African Americans. Such occasions were well attended and often involved torture such as skin and genitals being cut off or the victim being burned alive.

-African Americans where effectively denied access to the G.I. Bill and government loan assistance that was given to whites after World War II to assist them going to college and buying a house. Southern Democrats influenced Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to (for years) deny social security to most African Americans. These and other things directly contributed to a huge wealth gap between whites and blacks that continues to this day.

(For more on this history, see Ta-Nehisi Coates’ justly famous article “The Case for Reparations” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/)

All of these things were explicitly said to be based on white superiority. They said it. They believed it. They taught it to their children in ways both subtle and not.

Ok, you say. But that’s all in the past. But it’s not.

Before documenting how these things are still with us, let me pause for a moment to note something very perplexing. How is it that people who have as robust a notion of sin and human depravity as we do think that a system of racism and white superiority that lasted at least 350 years somehow just ended overnight in the 1960s? All due respect, but that strikes me as hugely naïve and inconsistent.

I’m going to quote from a series of Nicolas Kristof articles linked together here: http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/thoughts-on-ferguson/?_r=0. I highly encourage reading them. Please think about these statistics and why they might be the case:

“School administrators suspend black students at more than three times the rate of white students. Police arrest blacks at 3.7 times the rate of whites for marijuana possession, even though surveys find that both use marijuana at roughly similar rates.”

“One study in Seattle found that blacks made up 16 percent of observed drug dealers for the five most dangerous drugs and 64 percent of arrests for dealing those drugs.

…research suggests that blacks and whites violate traffic laws at similar rates, but blacks are far more likely to be stopped and arrested. The Sentencing Project, which pushes for fairer law enforcement, cites a New Jersey study that racial minorities account for 15 percent of drivers on the turnpike, but blacks account for 42 percent of stops.”

“Two scholars sent out nearly 5,000 résumés in response to help-wanted ads, randomly alternating between stereotypically white-sounding names and black-sounding names. They found that it took 50 percent more mailings to get a callback for a black name. A white name yielded as much benefit as eight years of experience, according to the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.” than a black person.”

“Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado at Boulder has used an online shooter video game to try to measure these unconscious attitudes (you can play the game yourself). The player takes on the role of a police officer who is confronted with a series of images of white or black men variously holding guns or innocent objects such as wallets or cell phones. The aim is to shoot anyone with a gun while holstering your weapon in other cases.

Ordinary players (often university undergraduates) routinely shoot more quickly at black men than at white men, and are more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.”

“The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)

“The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.”

“A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.”

“One study found that African-American children on welfare heard only 29 percent as many words in their first few years as children of professional parents. Those kids never catch up, partly because they’re more likely to attend broken schools. Sure, some make bad choices, but they’ve often been on a trajectory toward failure from the time they were babies.”

“One black friend tells me that he freaked out when his white fiancée purchased an item in a store and promptly threw the receipt away. “What are you doing?” he protested to her. He is a highly successful and well-educated professional but would never dream of tossing a receipt for fear of being accused of shoplifting.”

“The United States Sentencing Commission concluded that black men get sentences one-fifth longer than white men for committing the same crimes. In Louisiana, a study found that a person is 97 percent more likely to be sentenced to death for murdering a white person

I want to say three things here before closing:

1) This isn’t only or primarily based on “poor values.” That’s a genuine issue that deserves to be addressed. But even middle-class intact black families have to deal with stereotyping, prejudice, and inequality. Think, for example, about some of the stats where blacks are disproportionately targeted more than whites who do the same thing.

2) So much of this results from being trapped in a cycle of poverty directly related to segregation, theft of wealth, bad schools (because funding is largely based on property taxes), industries that have gone elsewhere, and other systemic things.

3)  We can unconsciously act racist without intending to. I don’t think any of us are completely immune from negative stereotypes that permeate our society. If we pretend we “don’t see color” when we live in a society that tends to do so, we set ourselves up for deception. To the extent we fail to address the unfair systemic issues that stack the deck in our favor, we perpetuate them. If we pretend that things are equal when they’re really not, that is unloving and unfair to our less privileged brothers and sisters. In this and in other areas of privilege as well.

One last thing about privilege, one that scares me and which I think I see in this thread: privileged people tend to think their privilege is normal and that things are actually equal when they’re not. For example, in surveys from the 1920s, 80% percent of whites thought that things were basically fair between whites and blacks and that black people had the same opportunities. In the 1920s!

Or to use an example from male privilege, “research shows that as long as men overwhelmingly dominate the conversation, the participation of men and women is perceived to be roughly equal. But if women’s talk rises to as little as a quarter or a third of the total interaction, men tend to perceive the women as taking over” (Johnson, Alan G. Privilege, Power, and Difference. 104).

This means as more progress is made toward actual equality, privileged people feel intensely threatened. If we see an unfair status quo as just, actual justice is likely to seem very “unfair” to us.