White Privilege

[mntleo2]

http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege

This is Your Nation on White Privilege By Tim Wise 9/13/08

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are 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 ...
(snip)

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...
(snip)

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she's disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you're black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called "terrorist fist bumps."

(snip)

White privilege is, in short, the problem. "

[emilyg]

1. Dupe. Dupe.

[mntleo2]

2. Soooo ....

I think this young man hits it on the head. I am raising a child of color who is a relative of mine. As an older white woman, I have been a social justice activist for decades. Yet I am already seeing and worried about this child's future as far as racism goes. Racism is now so underground and subtle that as a white person it passes by me without me recognizing it until too late sometimes. Thankfully I have long time friends of many culrtures and they help me see and understand it. I have asked them to be a mentor to this child for when the times come I do not understand or see what she is experiencing.