Teodrose Fikre, Ghion Journal - I will admit, I was a part of the same crowd I’m now picking up a pen
to speak against. I, too, once went around foolishly talking about
“white privilege” this or “white people are evil” that. This was not too
long ago; a time when I used to see justice through colored binoculars.
I was part and parcel of the very divisive culture I thought I was
speaking against. It took two years of hardship to finally shed my blinders and see injustice as it is without putting an adjective in front of it.
This is the wisdom I earned through hardship. Using rhetoric like
“white supremacy” and “white privilege” is a way of stereotyping the
whole of “white” people and lumping everyone into one group. This is the
surest way to turn potential allies in the struggle for justice into
adversaries; by doing so we end up perpetuating the very divides that
the “system” depends on to splinter people apart. Moreover, it is a
blatant lie that being “white” automatically confers some type of
privilege. Just because some or even most might have it easier being a
certain complexion does not mean all enjoy that privilege. True enough
we have it hard being “black” and institutional racism
is no joke; but there are tens of millions of “white” people who suffer
generational poverty in the Appalachians and beyond that matches the
poverty faced by “African-Americans” and “minorities” in the inner
cities.
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2 comments:
He's wrong. "White privilege" actually exists, and even the poorest White people enjoy at least a little of it.
It manifests, if in no other way, in not getting the cops called on you because you're "out of place".
The people having a cookout at the lake, the grad student asleep in the lounge, the 12yo shot dead in seconds while playing with a toy gun...all those and many more are negative reflections of White privilege: had the victims been White, what happened wouldn't have happened.
Sam, neither he nor you understand what "white privilege" means. It doesn't mean that all white people are better off than all white people, or that all white people are well off. It simply means that being white, as such, confers benefits over and above not being white, or that when a white person and POC share an otherwise identical set of problems the POC experiences the disabilities of their race in addition to the other problems shared by the white person. This is not hard.
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