Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Peggy McIntosh's much seen essay on white privilege is a good companion for this piece. Here are some more signs of white privilege-

1)Any little gripe you have is afforded importance, while real problems of other races are ridiculed. For example, the fact that there is a NAACP is 'racist', yet the calls that many blacks make to have people not call them names like the n word is just 'silly'.

2)Your culture's past is remembered, but every other culture is supposed to be forgotten about. For example, people may be all for teaching 'American Values' with George Washington and the gang, but oh, they'll gripe about 'multiculturalism'- because we know you have to have pale skin and a penis to do anything important.

3)You think that(real) racism is only a problem for the other races out there. By real racism, I mean actual racism, not "I can't say the n word or people will look funny at me!". For example, you think that black men getting beaten in the streets doesn't affect you.

4)You think one episode of the Cosby show watched when you were five qualifies you as an expert on racial relations.

5)You think the abridgment of much white privilege is racism against whites, and that you somehow deserved the privilege. Yes, there are now laws to protect people from being terrorized. If you hadn't been #4, you'd realized that the attacks on minorities were not just an attack on that one person- it was to scare all the others, too. Not to mention, just having pale skin shouldn't give you so much power, anyway. You didn't do anything to get it.

6)Your race isn't pathologized. I was looking up information for my sociology of law paper, and I ran across a paper* about how black crime is thought of in terms of blackness- for example, thinking of crime as somehow a thing that was caused by blackness, rather than just being a criminal asshat, or studying black crime using a white 'baseline', but not white crime using say a asian 'baseline.

There is much more, but I'll leave you with a link to Orinicus, which is covering white hate in schools, and young people.

*for those interested in this paper, the author is Jeanette Covington and it was published in the Sociological Forum, Volume 10 Number 4, dated December 1995. I trust this is enough information to help you search for it.

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