Democratic Diva

26 Mar 2010 12:08 am
Posted by: Donna

That’s the subtitle to a pivotal article by Peggy McIntosh, who in the late 80s while working as a researcher on women’s studies, sought to develop a better understanding of white privilege and male privilege. Her work led her to write White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, which you can read here, along with a companion piece on male privilege written later by B. Deutsch at the bottom of the page.

I read the White Privilege Checklist about five years ago and it certainly caused me to check myself. I always knew that my fair white skin and blue eyes conferred a buttload of unearned privilege and protection upon me but I was blind to the full extent of it.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”

Daily effects of white privilege

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on most of these conditions…

…13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider…

I canvassed for Barack Obama in Nevada and Texas in 2008. I heard the N word more than a few times. I’ve talked to sweet white haired grandmas in Sun City who thought Joe Arpaio was the bee’s knees, because he was protecting them from the menacing Mexicans. I recently had a conversation with a white woman who expressed her concern that the “wrong” kind of people were breeding too many children. When I ran for the State Senate in 2006 I heard from several people in my district who thought that immigrants from Mexico were bankrupting the state and should really learn English.

All of the aforementioned were registered Democrats.

The Health Reform Denounce-A-Thon is in full swing, with (mostly white) Democratic politicians demanding that (nearly all white) Republican politicians repudiate the racist epithets and death threats and tone down their own inciting rhetoric. The Republicans, naturally, are responding with the “both sides are guilty” dodge and victim-blaming.

Are the Republicans mostly to blame? To my Democratic Diva mind, yes, they are. But if I’m going to be honest, and cognizant of my life experience as a person who has enjoyed a buttload of privilege, I’m going to have to say, refer to White Privilege Checklist item #23: I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

And how.

Edit for clarity: I was trying to avoid my post being a long-winded tome and I really want everyone to read Peggy McIntosh’s article. However, my attempt at brevity may have caused me state my case awkwardly. My intention was not to draw an equivalence between Democrats and Republicans as Republican politicians and the MSM are doing with respect to threats of violence and general ugliness of tone over the health care bill. I fully believe that Republicans and conservative pundits like Limbaugh and Beck are willfully and maliciously inciting hatred and anger and no Democrat or prominent left-leaning media figure is doing anything like that.

My point was that those of us who are white can’t deny that the environment of white privilege in which we all operate is a big part of why the angry mob and the elite conservatives who orchestrate and/or egg them on have been able to get away with it this long. Angry groups of brown people would not be coddled like this. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

17 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website