"White People's Burden"

[jeffrey_X]

Great fucking article....

http://www.alternet.org/rights/24745/

The United States is a white country. By that I don't just mean that the majority of its citizens are white, though they are (for now but not forever). What makes the United States white is not the fact that most Americans are white but the assumption -- especially by people with power -- that American equals white. Those people don't say it outright. It comes out in subtle ways. Or, sometimes, in ways not so subtle.

Here's an example: I'm in line at a store, unavoidably eavesdropping on two white men in front of me, as one tells the other about a construction job he was on. He says: "There was this guy and three Mexicans standing next to the truck." From other things he said, it was clear that "this guy" was Anglo, white, American. It also was clear from the conversation that this man had not spoken to the "three Mexicans" and had no way of knowing whether they were Mexicans or U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage.

......

We can pretend that we have reached "the end of racism" and continue to ignore the question. But that's just plain stupid. We can acknowledge that racism still exists and celebrate diversity, but avoid the political, economic, and social consequences of white supremacy. But, frankly, that's just as stupid. The fact is that most of the white population of the United States has never really known what to do with those who aren't white. Let me suggest a different approach.

[mzteris]

1. White Privilege

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Daily effects of white privilege
Elusive and fugitive
Earned strength, unearned power

"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"

Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

-MORE-

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html

this is an excellent article about the unearned and unconscious privilege that "whites" have.........

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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[mzteris]

3. one must have power

to effectively wield prejudice as a weapon, though.

[jeffrey_X]

4. Please tell me more...

Is the black man keeping you down?

[noiretextatique]

5. "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness,.."

and excerpt from a post in another thread.
sure...evryone can be racist or prejudiced, but power + prejudice = america.

[Brewman_Jax]

6. More enlightenment from Tim Wise

in his article White Whine and the Brain Rotting Properties of Privilege

From the article:
While there are plenty of whites unable to afford college, the fault for this unhappy reality lies not with minority scholarships, but rather with the decisions of almost exclusively white University elites who have raised the price of higher education into the stratosphere, to the detriment of most everyone. But to place blame where it really belongs, on rich white people, would be illogical. After all, we take it for granted that one day we too might be wealthy, and we wouldn't want others to question our decisions and prerogatives come that day either.

Better to blame the dark-skinned for our hardship, since we can take it for granted that they're powerless to do a damned thing about it.

Whites, as it turns out, take most everything for granted in this country; which makes perfect sense, because dominant groups usually have that privilege. We take for granted that we won't be racially profiled even when members of our group engage in criminality at a disproportionate rate, whether the crime is corporate fraud, serial killing, child molestation, abortion clinic bombings or drunk driving. And indeed we won't be.

This is a side effect of a society when duties and responsibilities along with rights and privileges are unevenly distributed.