I realized something today. I don't have "White privilege." I have "normal." All White people have "normal."
Some have money; some are dirt poor. Some live in great places; some live in squalor. Some come from wonderful families; some come from broken homes.
What all White people have though, is not worrying that the color of their skin is going to hurt them.
Hurt them financially, when they apply for a loan; hurt them at school, or work, when people are selected for special recognition; hurt them socially, when a security guard stalks them around a store; hurt them physically, any time a racist police officer looks at them and thinks that dark skin = danger.
We don't have any of that. We have normal.
We get to live in a country where most things are mostly meritorious. We get to live in a country where driving a car doesn't carry a significant risk of death-for-no-reason.
Do we White people deal with bias? Sure. That school administrator who holds a dirt-poor family's history against the latest scion to come through the system. That religious person who won't hire an atheist; and that atheist who won't hire the devout. Bias against women; bias against gays. All that stupid, regular shit that people deal with every day.
And every non-White person deals with all that exact same shit, too.
And then on top of that, they deal with everything else that we White people don't have to deal with. All the hurt and the danger and the death.
I don't have White privilege. I have normal. Normal is what everyone deserves. Normal is every American's right. That's what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
You can't pursue happiness when your liberty is taken away at a disproportionate rate. You can't pursue happiness when your life is taken away from you at a young age. The survivors can't pursue happiness when the loss of life and liberty leaves shattered families in its wake.
I don't think progress will ever be made, by telling White people that their skin gives them "privilege," not when we're all of us dealing with all of the shit that comes with day-to-day life.
I think we might make progress in winning the hearts and minds of inattentive Whites if we point out that, no, they don't have it extra good because they're White. They just have it normal. And Blacks don't have it normal. They have it extra bad, because they're Black. Or rather, because of the way racists treat them because they're Black.
Better framing of the issue would make us more successful at recruiting White people to the specific cause of overhauling our government. The criminal justice system, policing standards, the prison system, and more all need to better serve the causes of fairness and justice. Those changes will never happen without a lot of White people throwing their support behind making them happen. Right now, the messaging – whatever its intent – comes off as trying to convince White people that they should feel vaguely guilty for being handed the world on a silver platter, when most of them know that they weren't. And even the few Whites who buy into the "privilege" argument haven't the first clue what they're supposed to do to help.
We all deserve normal. Whites have it; Blacks don't. I want to change America into a place where we all have normal. I don't want to fracture the races even further by telling Whites who support equality that they're all accidental supremacists. I want to unify as many people as possible behind the idea of guaranteeing liberty and justice for all; behind the idea of making the changes that need to be made, so we can elevate those who don't have normal, to the place that the rest of us are already at.
Telling our allies that they're all secretly our enemies doesn't strike me as a wise strategy. It's more effective to gather our allies all together, and set them against our common foe.
ellievsbear
izzy806
gracieabrams
areudirty
stormborns
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
pixelskylines