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Imagine if white privilege was treated like the national health crisis it is…similar to how smoking awareness has evolved over the years. National campaigns funded to educate the general public of its harmful effects, surgeon general warnings, research grants to study how it harms individuals and communities.
As with lighting up that cigarette, you can make the decision to still engage in the harmful activity, but there are laws preventing you from spreading your carcinogens when you blow it out into the world. Laws and taxes that make it more difficult every day…until you stop.
In only a few generations we’ve seen how the overall population went from complete indifference and denial of the harmful effects of tobacco to now having a general consensus that it is an unhealthy practice. Can we do the same to raise awareness of white privilege and implicit bias?
If we viewed advertisements featuring people speaking through the race-based trauma induced stomas of their souls, would the nation listen and change its attitude?
Would billboards highlighting statistics, listing the numbers of our babies lost, mothers suffocated by the secondhand smoke of badge protected guns…“I can’t breathe”…would it make you think twice before shouting ‘race card’ or ‘stop playing the victim’?
I wonder, if there was a surgeon general’s warning: “Black lives matter in this nation and purchase of this material promotes white supremacy and may result in your presence inciting fear and post-traumatic stress among persons of color in your community”…would purchasing that confederate flag and waving it under the pretext of pride be as easily thoughtless?
If we cannot collectively agree that white privilege is a destructive reality and not just some liberal populist rhetoric, we will continue to fail in addressing systemic inequities and the bias-related tragedies happening repeatedly in our communities. Instead, these realities will be relegated to scholarly fodder that, like politics and religion, have become taboo at our dinner tables, in our classrooms, and work meetings.
Let’s lobby for THAT national awareness campaign, offering white privilege cessation programs and insurance incentives for coming clean and staying aware. It’s a national crisis; we must stop inhaling our privileges and exhaling our biases. It would be far from easy and would take therapy and personal responsibility….but I have to believe it would make holding this national conversation (and conversion) more feasible.
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This article originally published on Medium
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Photo credit: Getty Images
Here, here! Bravo for the courage to put this very clearly out in the open. God knows, they won’t listen to us when we say we’re tired of their nonsense. Heaven forbid they experience even 1/100th of the discomfort they’ve caused us for centuries!
Thank you, Ray.
I believe BLM is just as valid as the Maidan movement that created the coup in Ukraine, especially as they are both funded from the same source and driven by the same agenda.
“Privilege ” is not the ‘health’ crisis America is facing, it is IGNORANCE.
Willful ignorance is in fact, a privilege. It is, in essence, a first sign of privilege.
Privilege, ignorance, arrogance, denial, fragility, supremacist, neglect, blindness, racism, etc. You would be highly mistaken that there are any similarities whatsoever between that bullshit and the BLM! That’s like saying the civil rights movement was the same as the protests white people were doing about the Vietnam War. NO SIMILARITIES! We’re screaming at you to wake TF up, while you sit in crap that we can never sit in. What a “white privilege” thing to say. This right here is why it’s a mental-health issue, because you don’t see the shit you’re shoveling. We don’t care what you believe …… Read more »
I love the comparison Emily. That comparison makes a person think! It will take time for those who pretend to be deaf and blind to “white privilege” to acknowledge it existence. It favors a controlling mass so it will be difficult to demolish completely but it will be torn down in time to just a small crumb.