When we travel, Richard Stupart writes, we force ourselves to go outside of the rules of our home society.
Tom Matlack at the Good Men Project recently reflected on the experience of being white during a journey he took to Kenya.
Being white, and from South Africa, some of the questions Tom asked feel fundamental to the world I live in. Mine is a country where racial divisions remain, and are as embedded in daily life as they are repressed in the interests of national reconciliation.
After years of economic inequality, white privilege in South Africa is entrenched, problematic, and largely invisible. It’s not even a matter of consenting to privilege—history just meant that as a white person, I was part of an ideological universe that cut me more slack, offered me more opportunities for education and advancement. How wide and pervasive that world is, is often invisible to participants.
Confronting it is like trying to ask fish to confront water. Or an entrepreneur to confront the damage and inequality that is a necessary consequence of unfettered capitalism. Too often, the response is a personal one. We rationalise a defense on the basis of personal experience. Say something like “I worked really hard to be where I am.”
Which may be factually correct, but also besides the point. The system supports you. The system lets you never have to think about being white and the benefits it accords. Until you find yourself stripped of them. Find yourself in a society where whiteness doesn’t confer the same respect or opportunities.
The process is explained well in a reply by Tom’s friend Steve Locke when he points out:
When you went to Africa, you said “you were the minority for the first time in your life.” That’s not true. You have been the only adult in a room full of children, the only man in room full of women, the only non-incarcerated person in a jail. In America if you were a minority at a hip-hop concert in Compton, you would still have the privilege that accrues unbidden to persons designated as white, with all of the political, social, and economic access that comes with it.
What you experienced in Africa, Tom, was that the apparatus that supports the dominance of white skin was absent. It has nothing to do with being a minority someplace, you were free of the prison that is whiteness
Travel can have that effect, in that you find yourself in a place where the rules of your home society no longer exist. Where expectations are different. That jarring feeling of strangeness can be the thin end of a very large wedge, leading to an uncomfortable but necessary rethinking of much of what you think you know about yourself.
And it’s often not just whiteness. It’s gender, it’s religion. Sometimes it’s even values or ideas that are so fundamental as to be beyond question—like consumerism. Capitalism. Globalization.
But confronting these issues is tough. In Uganda, an English friend delighted in teasing white South Africans about the difficult questions of privilege that we face. Until I eventually snapped and pointed out that Britain sat upon a mountain of historical racial privilege on a continental scale. One that South Africa paled into insignificance next to.
My own questions trouble me. And will continue to do so the more I see the water I swim in. The tiny victory is that I am at least free to ask them.
This post originally appeared at Matador Network.
—Photo wwarby/Flickr
About Richard Stupart
There are significant problems with the theory of privilege.
There is a huge gulf between “privilege exists” and “privilege is primarily responsible for observed differences in outcomes between groups.”
The first is easy to demonstrate, but is not proof of the second. Proponents of the theory of privilege then never really bother to prove the second, and just charge ahead assuming that they have proved it.
As an (admittedly over simplistic) example of the gulf between those two statements: the majority of people are not addicted to alcohol. Thus, being a non-addict is assumed to be “normal” and people with an addiction are told they have an “alcohol problem.”
However, the theory of privilege argues that this should be turned around, and that non-addicts, as the dominant group, should instead “confront” their “alcohol privilege.”
But this is clearly silly. Society primarily benefits when those with addictions learn to curb their self-destructive tendencies. While there may be benefits from “the confrontation of alcohol privilege” the major benefit comes from individuals breaking their addictions, and not from society becoming more accepting of the experience of addicts. Someone killed by a drunk driver is just as dead whether or not society accepts alcoholism as a disease.
Yet, privilege theory supposes, without proof, that the actions of individual members of a non-dominant group have less impact on their outcomes than the system of privilege (i.e. argues that acceptance of alcoholism is more important than individual alcoholics getting to treatment, in the above example). This is obviously misguided in the case of alcoholism, and in the absence of proof, there’s no reason to think it isn’t misguided in other cases as well.
Sorry Mike, but I think your example is disanalogous. Saying that it it is entirely relative whether alchohol is a privilege or a problem is similar to – if I really press the tortured analogy – saying that being born into a good education, stable home environment and a network of opportunity is not really a blessing, but is a problem. Or something. I’m really trying here.
The point is that by circumstances of birth, some people are born into circumstances that provide (much) better education, opportunities and a huge safety net. This makes it considerably easier for them to prosper than those without any such structural advantages. This, and you do not disagree here, is the statement “white privilege exists”.
What you seem to be questioning is whether advanced education, social and economic networks, easier access to capital and softer consequences for your choices actually constitute an advantage (your statement ‘privilege is primarily responsible for observed differences in outcomes between groups’).
I find it really difficult to imagine that the aforementioned (there are others, but let’s stick to those) advantages would not significantly influence your ‘outcome’ as compared to individuals without such access.
Is white privilege all-determining of success? No. Obviously not. But I think you could argue convincingly that it is a significant differentiator. Some privileged white kids will still make all the wrong choices and flounder. The point is that it remains harder, across the board, for nonwhite kids in a white-dominated culture (SA, UK, USA as examples here) to access anything close to the opportunities for advancement that a white kid can start with and then squander as they like.
Richard,
You have still not proven anything.
Being born a non-alcoholic is a “privilege”. It means you have had to stuggle with addiction.
So is finding $10 on the sidewalk one day. It means you have access to $10 that many people do not.
You are arguing that being white in certain countries is the “deciding factor” between observed success and observed failure, and yet you cannot actually measure, or prove, the advantage of being white.
Furthermore, many of the problems faced by non-white communities have literally nothing to do with whites.
In the United States, non-white children are significantly more likely to grow up without a father in the home. This is partially captured by complaints about “socio-economic networks” (if you don’t have a father, you don’t have his income or his contacts). Yet this clearly has nothing to do with the white community: white people do not force fathers to leave their children.
The same could be said for crime (again in the United States). According to crime victim surveys, non-whites are both more likely to commit crime and have be the victims on crime. In the extreme case of murder-among-black-men, black men are twice as likely to be murdered as white men, and the killer is a black man in 90+% of all cases.
Yet despite the fact that these two obviously enormous problems (lack of stable families, extreme levels of crime victimization) having nothing to do with white privilege (again, your skin color doesn’t make you leave your kids, nor does it make you shoot your neighbor), you are claiming that white privilege carries the major share of determining outcomes in certain communities.
And if white privilege DOES cover these problems, then the alcoholism analogy is entirely accurate, because we are making pretend that individual fathers and murderers are somehow not responsible for their own actions.
At the end of the day, there is no reason to believe that typical “white privilege” problems (access to comercial loans, employment discrimination, etc.) have more to do with observed outcomes than crime victimization and the lack of stable families.
Mike you’re annoying. Please stop asking us non-whites to PROVE how you white men (and those you accept) live better lives than us. You all have proven this fact yourselves through research and books (as per the article above). If you want proof of the bubble you live in then go do your own research unless of course you are somehow still stuck in the notion that us non-white people are supposed to do all of your work for you for free. Why are you arguing with people on the internet about the inferiority complex of white men which has brought us to the very brink of extinction (and yet you all don’t want to accept this fact) instead of doing what you white men do best and going out and working hard and finding these answers from REPUTABLE (like the white male author above) sources and learning something for YOURSELF WITHOUT the help of anyone else. Black people and women are literally dog tired literally from constantly explaining and explaining and explaining and explaining the respective advantages and disadvantages that oppressors versus oppressed people experience.
as per this article you’ll see the exasperation
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/why-i-dont-want-to-talk-about-race/
Richard please just stop trying to explain it to him. He needs to take off the training wheels and stand on his own two feet and do his own homework for once.
Btw Mike ever heard of cause and effect etc..etc.. apparently no white person has. Let me explain. Black people had their kids taken from them aka black men and women were bred like animals and then their kids were sold as slaves so maybe just maybe that is the reason why black men find it hard to be fathers what do you think. Also we were abused from the day we were born and as your own scientists (usually white men) pointed out in research and interviews with white (and non-white) violent male criminals abuse makes “people” (yes black people are exactly that …people) into abusers and criminals alot of the times, as a result, do you suppose that that could maybe explain why black people “appear” to be more violent (because of the 300+ years of past and continuing abuse we face/ed at the hands of whites), also do not forget that your people have made us hate ourselves (quite efficiently) by telling us
(quite vehemently and certainly even now) that we’re stupid, ugly, etc..etc.. and now that your years of verbal abuse have worked and we hate each other and as a result kill each other, make fun of those in our community who have darker skin, bigger noses, and try to look like whites now you sit on you white privilege pedestal and tell us that we’re being dumb for hating ourselves….wow and here we were thinking that you all had gotten just exactly what you requested (non-white people hating and killing their own kind). Black people were tortured and/or killed if they were found to know how to read so hey maybe that would explain why we have a fear of education and even with that fear a whooooole lot of us have gone and do go to college and get degrees and good jobs etc..etc..You know that slang and accent that you all make fun of us for …funny because I’m pretty sure that (hillbillies (who last I checked are mostly white) speak it too….also we were forced to work without pay and were never taught about money and therefore do not understand investing and spending etc.. so if you want to make fun of us for buying cars and big chains aka jewelry well you all buy those things too but please understand that it’s like giving a starving man food, he will eat until he gets sick usually and it’s the same with people who descend from former slaves who are then suddenly given money and can all of sudden buy stuff (which they were denied of before) with that money….also if you want to talk about how badly we eat well you all eat badly too but let’s remember that to make the journey with barely any food from Africa to America was very difficult so they picked the bigger and fatter slaves who also therefore more than likely had a genetic predisposition to be fat (there are stick thin tribes of black people in Africa who are not starving) and as a result AAs may seem to be bigger/curvier than white people but that is an illusion, also back to the starvation thing do you really think that slaves were given banquets everyday and nice clothes, no my dear Mike they were starved and when they were fed they were given only enough food for half or less of the slaves and the white men would watch them fight over the scraps they were thrown and it’s the same with clothing, idk what else needs to be explained, maybe the reason why we have affirmative action. Okay so the reason we have affirmative action is because white people don’t like black people and saw us as animals who should be slaves and as a result they did not want to VOLUNTARILY hire us to work and (actually pay us) (they owned most of the businesses because they had the money to buy land and start businesses etc..etc.. (more white privilege (that according to you doesn’t exist))
Imagine being in a country dominated in every way by people who HATE you and you descended from people who were forced to work for free and went through even a half of the things slaves went through and then you were released with no money, not many proper humans ties (remember families were split apart) so therefore no support system, no one wants to hire you (remember everyone hates you), the cops want to arrest you for any reason and there are hate groups (kkk, Aryans etc.etc.)trying to kill you, and you’re bone tired form working like ..well like a slave from sun up to sun down for your whole life since childhood, and pretty much you have a broken spirit (seeing and experiencing lifelong verbal and physical abuse), you’re afraid of the people all around you etc..etc..and now imaging that the entire world (that you grew up knowing) is like this with some places worse than others so there is not much escape ….how well do you think you would do Mike?
Black people in America (unlike the Australian aboriginal people) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7241965.stm excerpt Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament to all Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss”
have not even gotten a formal apology as of yet. Our ancestors went through unspeakable evils and were forced to work without pay for hundreds ….yes hundreds of years and yet white people (in the USA) are soooooo against the idea of a formal apology for that pain much less (omg don’t even say it) reparations for those hundreds of years of labor that was FORCED upon our ancestors. We built this country the absolute least we could get is a thank you for our hard work. Instead we are constantly under a microscope and getting constant never-ending criticism for every single tiny thing we do that doesn’t fit into “you people’s” perfect idea of what we should’ve done once being released from slavery (can you say control issues). We do weed, and crack cocaine (not me personally and btw so do white kids) and you all do weed, heroin, cocaine and every other drug under the sun but guess who gets thrown in jail the most …..oh right that’ld be the non-white people (racial profiling at it’s finest)
So at this point it’s your turn to go and do your own research (honestly idk why we have to even explain this stuff to you all) after all it is Black History Month so you have the perfect excuse.
And no I’m not going to tell you what books to read or what documentaries to watch but ok I’ll mention one look up CNN Black in America (don’t worry there are white people in it too
).
In fairness, this argument applies to anything, not just “Being White.”
if you are rich (have money), your privilege exists as a result of the monetary system; take away that system, your privilege goes away.
I just want to point that out since being “white” is often ascribed as a mystical and singular force, but it’s a situation like any other in that it is part of a system. It’s not magical or mysterious or unique.
I think it’s certainly true that there are other enabling structures that you can belong to (being a man, for example), without being white. I hesitate to agree that being born to money and whiteness are wholly disconnected though.
I am sure there are lots of places where your wealth may not be as directly tied to your race, but if you take a historical perspective, race definitely has a complicated and difficult-to-pin relationship with wealth. South Africa is an unfair example to use here, since until recently wealth and race were explicitly engineered to be a certain way.
That said, in many other places, there is a correlation of varying degrees of strength between wealth and race. Relating this back to your point, yes,you are wealthy because of the ‘money system’, but it also just so happens in many places that it is difficult for someone who isn’t white to enter the ‘money system’. Not impossible, but a world harder than it is for white folk.
That said, even capitalism has its own dynamic when taken to extremes. If you are wealthy already, it is easier to build additional wealth than if you are not wealthy to start with. The top end can, by virtue of its wealth, keep everyone not similarly blessed out of the comfy penthouse it has made for itself. But that’s a whole different, and fr more Marx-inflected post
That’s exactly my point, the systems and their inherent barriers are subjective and, indeed, those barriers are largely relative.
If “white skin” == “wealthy” then all “white people” would be “rich” and no “black people” would be. (I promise to stop with the gratuitous quotes from now on.)
I’ll beg my own argument there because the first thing people would say is that the majority of european-descendent people have a much higher standard of living, per capita, than your average sub-saharan-african. That’s completely true.
But that’s only one part of the puzzle though — The have-vs-have-not divide in the world is largely divided by “The West” vs the rest of the world. And those in “The West” are largely european-descendent. So transitively this argument may appear to be true:
White -> Weath
.. that is an oversimplification. What it really is is:
White -> Europe -> Recently Industrialized -> Recent Military and Cultural Hegemony -> Global Dispersal of Europeans -> More money than everyone else.
Again, though, back to my original point.. if I had one. Western Culture is currently in the Ascendency/Peak, but it has everything to do with the culmination of history and little to do with skin pigmentation. Remember that Sumer was one the most prosperous nation/state in the world and most of those dudes would have been Persian. Same story with the Aztecs, the ancient Chinese, Egypt, Constantinople, et al.
This got complicated and rant and I’m getting out of my depth, so I’m stopping now.
I recommend Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel for a decent explanation of all this.
thank you fro suggesting this they definitely need to do some reading.
Matt N This is circular logic. The fact that WHITE CIVILIZATIONS found it necessary to leave their own countries and go all around the globe and “DISCOVER” new places and they also had weapons and disease and steel to use as superior weapons and then took all the wealth the people of these “NEW WORLDS” already had plus their own wealth and completely screwed these cultures up by forcing Christianity (which vilifies women and non-whites) other languages and customs and also slavery on these cultures all comes back to the exact same thing in a circular way …that thing being that white = acceptance and wealth… aka white privilege.
I think what I don’t like about the privilege idea is that it provides an infinite regress of social problem (of whatever sort) for moral entrepreneurs. In spite of the fact that women and minorities who apply themselves do better and better here (with many advantages now in hiring, etc.) “privilege” is used to imply that the problem hasn’t gotten any better. A black woman and I were each denied reappointment at previous colleges to the one at which I teach now. My case was actually much better than hers, but only she could sue, because I wasn’t in a “protected class.”
As for South Africa, I don’t think issues can be solved there until the vast problems of internal security are dealt with.
I’m curious to know what you mean by ‘internal security’?
I mean huge problems with people being assaulted by criminals. Not all of the victims are white, of course, probably a minority. Not all the criminals are poor either. The scenario is actually Fanon-like, however. My fear is that South Africa will drift toward a Zimbabwean type situtaion. This is a situation that demands strong governmental action.
Very true!!!
No one says it hasn’t gotten better we’re saying that there’s alot more that needs to be fixed/done. I’m a black/actress model and I know a bit about white privilege
http://racismdaily.com/2011/06/17/brazilian-fashion-event-faces-protest-for-blocking-out-non-white-models/
excerpt She said: “According to the latest census we blacks represent 50.8% of the Brazilian population. This means an event which presents a majority of people with typically European characteristics does not represent the beauty and wealth of Brazilian ethnicity.
You ever wonder how it is that blonds make up only about 2% or less of the world’s population and yet they make up about 80% or more of the models and actresses in Hollywood and worldwide. Pretty much we are glorifying Aryan ideals and in effect Adlof Hitler with this image.
If you don’t believe turn on the tv and watch any commercial or movie. Have you seen The Hobbit, The Golden Compass, I Am Number Four (almost a fully blond cast), The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, etc..etc..the list goes on… tell me if you don’t notice a trend…..fully white casts in these movies. But I’m pretty sure that’s not that big of a deal…except for an entertainer like me and this woman http://jezebel.com/5701291/are-the-hobbits-casting-agents-racist it actually is a problem as per http://everydayfeminism.com/2012/11/beauty-whitewashed/ . here’s and excerpt :
Images of white women dominate all media – especially roles or depictions featuring “beautiful” or desirable women, not funny sidekicks, the chunky best friend, the hired help or other stereotypes.
To think this doesn’t have a negative effect on females who rarely see images of their own races depicted in a positive manner is insane. :end excerpt
Please do read these articles and tell me again how white privilege doesn’t exist. I know black male models who show up for a casting and are the only black person there (this happens to me as well) and assume automatically that they/we won’t get cast. When anything good happens to a black person at the hands of a white person especially in reference to the law and media we are always shocked as per (racial profiling and the white-washing of “beauty”)
“…being yourself is not a privilege, since I cannot control how other people treat me because of some immutable characteristic, just as I am not responsible if somebody discriminates against me for that same immutable characteristic. I have no more obligation to ‘check my privilege’ than I do to apologize for myself – which is none at all…”
People can control how they treat others. I’ve had white “friends” of mine actually say to me quote “I don’t usually date African Americans” etc..etc.. I had another guy I was involved with say to me quote “you’re the first black girl I’ve been with. So yes white privilege is real and it is perpetuated by those who continue to separate themselves from other people they see as being less than them because of what they’ve been taught. Let’s check out the rate of interracial marriages between black women and white men….trust me racism and white privilege is alive and well.
I find it hilarious (in a twisted way) that an Englishman could so easily forget the role Britain played in creating and perpetuating racist societies based on birthright privileges. Modern South Africa is, after all, a product of British (and Dutch) settlement and colonialism. Amazing how people can level accusations and be so IGNORANT!
South Africa (and Africa in general) today is plagued by so much violence; rape, HIV and felony assaults seem to have become the defining problems of post-apartheid South Africa. While “white privilege” still plays a role in South Africa’s social problem landscape, black majority rule has not brought about much social justice. Perhaps the lesson is that, black or white, human beings have an unbelievable capacity to be corrupt, violent, greedy and just plain irrational.
You just have to face the ugly truth: quite often what we get is a result of our actions, as well as actions of our community. People in prison are not there because they lack a privilege, but because at one point they commited a crime. People in some countries in Africa are poor because the government is corrupt and weak and there are many rebels, freedom fighters-whatever- that terrorise peaceful population and make lives miserable.