It was my intention to get caught up on current events this week, it really was. But I kept on finding myself sidetracked, drawn to articles that were weeks, months, even years old. I guess I am getting caught up, just not on current events.
A few of you may have gleaned by now that I tend to stay away from writing about gender and race issues. I thought this was because, to me, there were more important things to write about— American imperialism being top of the list. That is certainly very important, especially as the US under Obama shows no sign of parting ways with his predecessors on the mass murder of brown people front. But I am starting to see that my disregard for other more social issues is a direct result of my white male privilege. And cowardice. A blindness afforded to me because I don’t need to look. (And speaking as an experienced white guy, I know that I just lost the interest of about 90% of my white male readers by using the phrase “white male privilege”. Oh well.)
In terms of internal thought processes, it’s been a challenging week for me. I feel closed and shuttered, like a vampire living in a cave, preoccupied with shadows, comfortable, powerful, unfulfilled, and incapable of real empathy. That part isn’t actually new. What’s new is that I’m only just starting to understand that this may, in fact, be a problem. It would really be for the best if I could change this, even if only for the sake of my own personal wellbeing. But when I try to grapple the question of why I might feel this way, my thoughts recede from me, and I feel the strong urge to go play piano, or play a web game, or read just one more blog post, or masturbate. Or all four at the same time.
Apologies if this is getting too personal.
I don’t know how to talk about race. There’s no way I’d qualify to be Field Negro’s white friend– in all of my friendships with non-white people, if the subject at hand ever turns to race, I just sort of clam up. That way lies safety, you see. There’s no chance of exposing something about myself that might make me look bad, or, y’know, change me.
I certainly avoid talking about gender. The only time I’ve myself even brought up feminism before on this blog was a passive-aggressive screed in which I tried to tell feminists what they really should be thinking about. Strangely enough, that’s the only post I’ve ever written which received any kind of approving linkage from other bloggers. White male bloggers, I am nearly certain.
So, this is it. I’m coming out of the cave. Now we’ll see if I have the strength to actually open my eyes and see anything. To, you know, figure out if I can really approach other human beings with humility, respect and love, and not just the skilled appearance of humility, respect and love, which I’ve gotten all too good at. Who knows, maybe I can’t. The curse of privilege is that you never have to change. My existence may be just too comfortable. I do hope I can do one better than the vampire tourist of my little allegory, but really, only time will tell.
Welcome to the Light, friend.
It hurts, but you get used to it.
Hope so. Still opening my eyes, and I suppose I’ll actually have to do something for any of this to start to mean anything– kind of the point of guerilla mama medicine’s post.
I loved this, from one of Belledame222′s comments there:
I can apologize on my knees for the dirty fork, soulful tears streaming down my face, but who the eff cares unless I just go and put a clean one on the table already?
I think it’s very mind-bending sometimes to be privileged in any given way. Because when you’re privileged, you also tend to think of yourself as generally somehow superior, because otherwise you’d have to admit that your privilege was completely unearned and probably also hurting somebody else terribly. So you have these two concepts in your subconsciousness that can’t be reconciled: “I am a good person, more intelligent and aware than others, and I think only right thoughts” vs. “I can’t open my mouth around this black/female/gay person because I will say something really dumb.” That is, I have superior thoughts except I can’t voice them because they’d sound wrong. Does not compute. Abort, retry, fail. Privilege isn’t working right.
When I took my first African-American Studies class, the professor gave us a little speech he gave every class in an attempt to make the white kids start talking. He said, “Imagine racism as the water, and we’re all fish. We’re all swimming in the same pond.” What he meant was, we all grow up hearing the same prejudiced shit, and we all internalize and rationalize it. And so you, in your privilege, are not going to be able to say anything that is so vastly alien or different from what the non-privileged say or think, because they grew up hearing all the same messages you did, and, like you, had to take that scary first step to start voicing those thoughts, and criticizing them, and sounding “ignorant.” I think when you’re privileged it can feel like you’re living on an island, and in some ways you are. But you’re drinking the same water as the rest of us, and there’s nothing offensive you can say that the population you’re speaking of hasn’t thought of themselves as well, which just as much chagrin, shame, confusion, and fear. That ignorance, and the mistakes and fear it causes, and the difficulty you have in coming to terms with it, isn’t something that separates you from the non-privileged: it’s something you have resoundingly in common.
Harriet, I think that may be the best comment I’ve ever gotten on one of my posts. Thank you, that’s something I needed to hear. Hopefully joining the swim party will be a lot more rewarding than standing safely dry on the shore, bottled water in hand, announcing to no one in particular that I’m perfectly happy where I am.
By the by, solid win on the tags.
I find it odd that harriet and Quin are hesitant to say things around others that are different because of “sounding ignorant” or being wrong and somehow a straight line is drawn to “superior”.
Why cant people just think differently because of different life experiences and not have some crackpot sociology major put a label on it. ‘White guy thinks they are superior” non-white guy is “educating”
Nothing more annoying than being around white people who want so desperately for me to like them they never act normal. Dont think we dont pick that up. They are usually nutty white liberals who want to hang around a black guy to be cool. It aint cool at all. Act normal! People say wack things all the time, its usually cool.
Thanks, but the credit there goes to the (late?) great R Mildred.
Credit on the tags, I mean– hadn’t seen benny’s comment.
Benny, why can’t you and Harriet both be right?
The hesitancy you find odd in me is precisely because of my different life experiences. As you say, why can’t people just think differently because of different life experiences? Of course, they always will. I’m just trying to open myself to other people’s modes of thought, rather than just let it go with “Hey, everyone’s a little racist”, and never changing in the process.
Well, you did lose me with the white male privilege phrase – I find it too often thrown about to stifle conversation “you can’t see the privilege you have”-type stuff.
As someone who spends a majority of his time in non-US countries, many of them “brown” as you call it, I don’t see white privilege – I see most countries have built-in power structures to support their dominant religious, social, ethnic and/or racial populations. When I’m in China, I certainly can pay for things with an American Express card, but there ain’t no white privilege card in setting their affairs. China will do what it wants to to Tibet, Falun Gong, and Taiwan, regardless of what ths white, male, heterosexual thinks.
Harriet’s comment WAS awesome.
BUT I have a slightly dissenting opinion (not related to the babble just above me–either the incomprehension is willful, in which case I fail to see a reason to waste my valuable time dealing with it, or not, in which case the commenter will probably off himself soon by accidentally walking off a clearly marked cliff somewhere and I shouldn’t waste any time on someone who won’t be with us much longer anyway).
Quin says: “A few of you may have gleaned by now that I tend to stay away from writing about gender and race issues. I thought this was because, to me, there were more important things to write about— American imperialism being top of the list. That is certainly very important, especially as the US under Obama shows no sign of parting ways with his predecessors on the mass murder of brown people front. But I am starting to see that my disregard for other more social issues is a direct result of my white male privilege. And cowardice. A blindness afforded to me because I don’t need to look.”
This reminds me of an argument I had a while back with some fatophobes, which I will tell you right now, fatophobia just absolutely pushes aaallll my buttons. They were going off on their usual tangent of I’m so sick of having to hear from fat people about how they’re discriminated against and treated badly well then why don’t they just lose the weight all it takes is some self-discipline and effort blah blah blah—
I don’t even TRY to go the reasoned-talking-points route anymore–the one where I talk about the threshold for women, for instance, being considered “fat” is so much lower than it is for men, or the one where I talk about various health conditions and the effect of being overweight as a child and the permanent metabolic changes that can wreak upon an individual, speeches about how affordable healthy food is not to be found in far too many high-population areas nor are safe places to exercise or even about recent studies that show that your actual body mass index is a much worse predictor of your overall health than say how active and happy you are etc. etc. etc. What I do say is this:
Well, are you perfect? No, I’m serious–are you doing every single thing you could possibly do in your life, every waking minute, to strive for the perfect whole of a human? For instance, why aren’t you caring for abused foster children in desperate need of a home? I think we can all admit that it is not possible for anyone to do EVERY SINGLE BEST THING they could do in every aspect of their life–it’s a scientific fact that there is simply not enough time in anyone’s day, week, month, year and lifetime. You have to pick just some things. My best friend, for instance, teaches high-risk kids science during the day and tutors young adults at night and on weekends. She also put together fundraisers to pay for her sister’s cancer medication and was the one who cared for her sister in the last weeks of her life and held her in her arms as she died. Now, she was also about fifty pounds overweight this whole time–which of those great things should she have given up to institute a weight-loss program? Because they really. literally took up all her time. Did it make her a worse person to focus on those other things instead? And are you saying that since she didn’t, she deserved to be discriminated against and treated meanly based on her weight? So you personally would have been nicer to her and given her lots more societal approval if she dumped all the high-risk kids and young adults and her dying sister by the wayside and spent two hours a day in the gym and another three hours prepping and consuming healthy diet food..?
You can’t be all things to all, um,
oppressed people. There is absolutely nothing wrong with triaging what you focus on. Now, if you want to change your foci, more power to ya, Quin-man…but you needn’t apologize for having other foci in the first place, nor for thinking that they were more important–how else are we supposed to choose from the multitude of causes? Because really, nobody can focus on ‘em ALL.
White Male: “Well, you did lose me with the white male privilege phrase–”
…Told you so!
Lisa, thanks for doing your part to ensure I stay the same old spoiled white guy I always was!
But seriously: part of the reason I’ve had this change of heart– and I’ll post on this in more detail when I have time soon (got caught up in a little project)– is that I’ve come to believe that becoming more empathic to the plight of others, and acting on those feelings, might just actually be a far more effective way of fighting imperialism than screaming into the wind and trying to make people feel guilty. I agree with you about the need to triage. But in my mind, I’m not abandoning my previous focus at all– just changing tactics to something that feels more connected to reality.
By the way, Field Negro currently has us featured on his sidebar as the “Blog I Am Feeling”. I feel so proud!
Go to http://www.witnessingwhiteness.com/ It’s an informational website about a book designed to give white people, like you and myself, the steps towards “anti-racial practice and culture.”
It’s extremely interesting. As a sociology major, and as a “minority” among an ethnically diverse group of friends, I have had to confront my white privilege often. I haven’t purchased this book yet, but I definitely plan on it.
Hello,
I appreciate you holding yourself out like this. Indeed, there is a desperate need for people of Anglo-Saxon Caucasian (Irish, British, German, Scandinavian, etc.) background in the U.S. to be as emotionally and intellectually honest as possible about our history and present relationships with various peoples of color – most urgently our fellow African-American, Latin American, and Native American citizens.
(Side note: I am a white man, age 34, very happily married to a woman of color for nearly 14 years. We have three children.)
As a starting point for exploring white privilege (or any philosophical or sociological issue for that matter), it is good to ask: “What version of reality have I been taught to be accepted as true?”…and…”What is it that I take for granted?”
We can spend a lot of time dissecting social realities and systems of belief, but I will give you a few snippets from my own married life (if you do not mind):
1) The difference in treatment my wife may receive when she is out in public (alone) as opposed to when she is with me? (Both because of her racial background and the fact that she is woman.)
2) Much more weighty thought given to where we will buy a home? (If it is predominantly white, how will we be received? Any people of color or other mixed couples who can possibly clue us in?)
3) My wife wanted me to answer the phone as we were selling our house. She wanted the perspective buyer to hear a “white voice” as opposed to hers.
4) The racial make-up of my daughter’s recent 9th Birthday party slumber party – two girls who are half black/half white, one girl who is half Hispanic/half white, and three who are white.
5) Are there any members of my wife’s family ( hence, my family) who are affected differently by decisions (laws, policies, regulations, educational, health care, etc.) made by those in authority?
6) Celebrations with my side of the family – my wife and children are the only people of color. Celebrations with my wife’s side of the family – white people are about 40%.
Much more I could add, but enough for now.
Every Blessing to you,
Adam
I think it’s funny how people—generally, white men, and in this instance, White Male—read “white privilege,” as “white perfect attack.”
I’m glad you’re working, living, and changing. I think the journey isn’t so much about how many Issues! you can fit on your plate, but how you look at the world you’re engaging in.
Another thing about privilege is that it isn’t absolute. White men who go all whibbly over “white male privilege” tend to forget this.
As the oldest of four boys, I had certain privileges. And, my parents reminded me, certain responsibilities. That I was the senior brother really felt like more responsibilities than privileges, but the point is, I still wasn’t the boss and had to defer to my parents. The vizier can have you thrown into the dungeon, but he still does full prostration for the king.
White privilege means, for example, that you are less likely to be stopped for driving while white. It doesn’t mean you’ll never get into trouble. White privilege means that you’ll be put ahead of any non-whites in a job search, but of course there are still a lot of other whites competing with you. And so on. It is probably true that white privilege and a few yuan will get you a Big Mac in China, but as I said, privilege isn’t absolute. Male privilege still probably works there, though.