One thing that is always difficult to do is to explain white privilege to a white person who is broke. I had a student who grew up poor, was raised by a single father who beat her, and who spent six years homeless. She wasn't popular in high school and saw a lot of the black kids as the "cool" kids. So when she took my class and had to watch a video about white privilege, I could understand why she was angry. She couldn't see any "privilege" in her life and all that she could hear is people trying to make her feel guilty about being white.
The ability to understand white privilege really requires the ability to see things from a larger perspective; however, that is difficult to do when one's lived experience is such that everything else is stacked against them. If people don't hold class privilege or educational privilege, it's extremely difficult to see the privileges they hold by virtue of their skin color when they see people of color who are in a higher socioeconomic class or who are better educated living more productive, more comfortable lives than them.
Intersectionality is the overlapping advantages and disadvantages that people have in their lives. People may be advantaged in several areas but disadvantaged in others. For example, a man may be white, a college-educated lawyer, blind, and gay. Although he is advantaged in terms of gender, skin color, education and class, he is disadvantaged in terms of ability and sexual orientation. A woman of color who is also a college-educated lawyer but able-bodied and heterosexual doesn't have the same advantages of gender and race, but is definitely advantaged by her sight and her sexual orientation.
So it's important that we talk about the many privileges that do exist. Class privilege is definitely one that does exist, and often times it trumps white privilege. A person of color from the upper class more than likely has the connections and the access to better job opportunities than a low income white person. One need only look at the O.J. Simpson case to see how money was able to buy the best defense lawyers in the business and get an acquittal. A white man who killed two people who couldn't afford Johnnie Cochran would probably be languishing in prison for the rest of his life.
There is able-bodied privilege. People without a disability don't have to think twice about access to buildings. They can move freely everywhere without having to plan in advance. They can travel anywhere without having to make arrangements. There are so many things that people with disabilities have to think about just to attend a public event that able-bodied people are completely oblivious to. That's privilege.
Then there is heterosexual privilege. Straight people don't have to worry about whether their sexual orientation will open them up for discrimination in the workplace. Even though it is illegal to discriminate against LGBT people, many LGBT people still do not feel safe coming out of the closet for fear of being passed up for promotion or choice job opportunities.
And then there is male privilege. Many women have experienced disparate treatment in their workplace because of their gender. I still see all the time in the media how men interrupt women and talk over them as if somehow their voices are more important.
But getting back to white privilege. Yes, there is such a thing in this country. But we need to compare like with like. For example, there was a recent case in which a white Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, was convicted of three counts of rape. The judge only sentenced him to six months in a county jail even though the prosecutors asked for six years in prison. Yet this same judge sentenced a Salvadorean immigrant charged with rape to three years in a plea deal. Brian Banks, an African-American football player, spent five years in prison for a rape he did not commit.
Statistics have shown that although blacks and whites use marijuana at the same rate, blacks are much more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. In fact, marijuana possession makes up nearly half of total drug arrests:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/
I challenge you to look around. Look around a grocery store. Look at magazine covers. Look at greeting cards. Look at billboards. Watch TV. What images do you see? Are they predominantly white faces? How many Asian faces do you see? How many Black faces do you see? How many Latino faces do you see? How many Native American faces do you see? Try to imagine yourself one of the above races. Do you see yourself represented on a daily basis anywhere?
Privilege is often times being oblivious to the privilege you have. Acknowledging white privilege is not about feeling guilty. It's about addressing a system which has advantaged a group of people over another group of people for hundreds of years and continues to do so. I know for a fact that there are people who acknowledge that heterosexual privilege exists, and that they even speak out on it, yet still struggle with the notion of white privilege. Why is that? Why can they see that straight people benefit from advantages that LGBT people don't, yet can't acknowledge that white people benefit from advantages that people of color don't? There are studies that support this, yet somehow the knee-jerk reaction is to simply become defensive or silent. I don't think there is anyone that would argue that being in the upper-class doesn't provide privileges that low-income people don't have. Yet when it comes to skin color privilege, people seem to have blinders on despite the preponderance of evidence that proves otherwise.
Talking about race and racism is something that is so difficult to talk about, and people tend to either NOT want to talk about it, get defensive about it, or get angry about it. I am fortunate enough this quarter to have a cohort of students who, although admittedly are new to these types of conversations, are very open to learning about the issues and how they impact their future careers as teachers of diverse classrooms.
