André Cramblit

[Note: This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun newspaper and was written
by a Caucasian professor of journalism at the U of Texas.

Here's what white privilege sounds like: I'm sitting in my University of
Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student
about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I
support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned
advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has
advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited
from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes,
there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege ? unearned white privilege -
how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I asked. He
paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter." That statement,
I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: The privilege to
acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means.
That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with
students. It drove home the importance of confronting the dirty secret that
we white people carry around with us every day: in a world of white
privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear
and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its
roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk open and honestly
about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white
supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they
are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such
privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of
one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege).
Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their
lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European
heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the
country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism,
both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation,
I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant
nonwhite population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the racism of my
culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over
the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional
racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never
changes - I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a
university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look
threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me they are
white. They see in me a reflection of themselves - and in a racist world,
that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not
dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After
all, I'm white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain
that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre
minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are
mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once
pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next
hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university
could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white
professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but it's a simple
observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white
professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked
out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a
bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real
people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know,
because I am one of them. I am not a genius - as I like to say, I'm not the
sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full time for six years
and I've published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the
unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would
argue, is worth reading. I worked hard, and I like to think that I'm a
fairly decent teacher. Every once in a while, I leave my office at the end
of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my pay
check, I don't feel guilty. But, all that said, I know I did not get where
I am by merit alone. I benefited from among other things, white privilege.
That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I
would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life,
I have soaked up benefits for being white.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for
graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position by
the predominantly white University of Texas, headed by a white president,
in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white
chairman that at the time had one nonwhite tenured professor. I have worked
hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good
about myself, and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit" as defined
by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge
that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from
white privilege. At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say
that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to
my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the
rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology
that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths.

Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't
really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do
with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged,
that I wasn't special. I let go of some of that fear when I realized that,
indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still
can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in
are stacked to my benefit. Until we let go of the fiction that people have
complete control over their fate - that we can will ourselves to be
anything we choose - then we will live with that fear.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether I want to keep.
Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the
security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting
from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which
white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will
carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from
this society.


[Note: A version of this essay ran in the Perspective section of the
Baltimore Sun on July 4, 1999. It is a follow-up to an essay on the same
subject that ran in July 1998.

By writing about the politics of white privilege--and listening to the
folks who responded to that writing--I have had to face one more way that
privilege runs deep in my life, and it makes me uncomfortable.

The discomfort tells me I might be on the right track.

Last year I published an article about white privilege in the Baltimore Sun
that then went out over a wire service to other newspapers. Electronic
copies proliferated and were picked up on Internet discussion lists, and
the article took on a life of its own.

As a result, every week over the past year I have received at least a dozen
letters from people who want to talk about race. I learned not only more
about my own privilege, but more about why many white folks can't come to
terms with the truism I offered in that article: White people, whether
overtly racist or not, benefit from living in a world mostly run by white
people that has been built on the land and the backs of non-white people.

The reactions varied from racist rantings, to deeply felt expressions of
pain and anger, to declarations of solidarity. But probably the most
important response I got was from non-white folks, predominantly
African-Americans, who said something like this: "Of course there is white
privilege. I've been pointing it out to my white friends and co-workers for
years. Isn't funny that almost no one listens to me, but everyone takes
notice when a white guy says it."

Those comments forced me again to ponder the privilege I live with. Who
really does knows more about white privilege, me or the people on the other
side of that privilege? Me, or a black inner-city teenager who is
automatically labeled a gang member and feared by many white folks? Me, or
an American Indian on the streets of a U.S. city who is invisible to many
white folks? Whose voices should we be paying attention to?

My voice gets heard in large part because I am a white man with a Ph.D. who
holds a professional job with status. In most settings, I speak with the
assumption that people not only will listen, but will take me seriously. I
speak with the assumption that my motives will not be challenged; I can
rely on the perception of me as a neutral authority, someone whose
observations can be trusted.

Every time I open my mouth, I draw on, and in some ways reinforce, my
privilege, which is in large part tied to race.

Right now, I want to use that privilege to acknowledge the many non-white
people who took the time to tell me about the enduring realities of racism
in the United States. And, I want to talk to the white people who I think
misread my essay and misunderstand what's at stake.

The responses of my white critics broke down into a few basic categories,
around the following claims:

1. White privilege doesn't exist because affirmative action has made being
white a disadvantage. The simple response: Extremely limited attempts to
combat racism, such as affirmative action, do virtually nothing to erase
the white privilege built over 500 years that pervades our society. As a
friend of mine says, the only real disadvantage to being white is that it
so often prevents people from understanding racial issues.

2. White privilege exists, but it can't be changed because it is natural
for any group to favor its own, and besides, the worst manifestations of
racism are over. Response: This approach makes human choices appear outside
of human control, which is a dodge to avoid moral and political
responsibility for the injustice we continue to live with.

3. White privilege exists, and that's generally been a good thing because
white Europeans have civilized the world. Along the way some bad things may
have happened, and we should take care to be nice to non-whites to make up
for that. Response: These folks often argued the curiously contradictory
position that (1) non-whites and their cultures are not inferior, but (2)
white/European culture is superior. As for the civilizing effect of Europe,
we might consider five centuries of inhuman, brutal colonialism and World
Wars I and II, and then ask what "civilized" means.

4. White privilege exists because whites are inherently superior, and I am
a weakling and a traitor for suggesting otherwise. Response: The Klan isn't
dead.

There is much to say beyond those short responses, but for now I am more
interested in one common assumption that all these correspondents made,
that my comments on race and affirmative action were motivated by "white
liberal guilt." The problem is, they got two out of the three terms wrong.
I am white, but I'm not a liberal. In political terms, I'm a radical; I
don't think liberalism offers real solutions because it doesn't attack the
systems of power and structures of illegitimate authority that are the root
cause of oppression, be it based on race, gender, sexuality, or class.
These systems of oppression, which are enmeshed and interlocking, require
radical solutions.

And I don't feel guilty. Guilt is appropriate when one has wronged another,
when one has something to feel guilty about. In my life I have felt guilty
for racist or sexist things I have said or done, even when they were done
unconsciously. But that is guilt I felt because of specific acts, not for
the color of my skin. Also, focusing on individual guilt feelings is
counterproductive when it leads us to ponder the issue from a psychological
point of view instead of a moral and political one.

So, I cannot, and indeed should not, feel either guilty or proud about
being white, because it is a state of being I have no control over.
However, as a member of a society--and especially as a privileged member of
society--I have an obligation not simply to enjoy that privilege that comes
with being white but to study and understand it, and work toward a more
just world in which such unearned privilege is eliminated.

Some of my critics said that such a goal is ridiculous; after all, people
have unearned privileges of all kinds. Several people pointed out that, for
example, tall people have unearned privilege in basketball, and we don't
ask tall people to stop playing basketball nor do we eliminate their
advantage.

The obvious difference is that racial categories are invented; they carry
privilege or disadvantage only because people with power create and
maintain the privilege for themselves at the expense of others. The
privilege is rooted in violence and is maintained through that violence as
well as more subtle means.

I can't change the world so that everyone is the same height, so that
everyone has the same shot at being a pro basketball player. In fact, I
wouldn't want to; it would be a drab and boring world if we could erase
individual differences like that. But I can work with others to change the
world to erase the effects of differences that have been created by one
group to keep others down.

Not everyone who wrote to me understood this. In fact, the most creative
piece of mail I received in response to the essay also was the most
confused. In a padded envelope from Clement, Minn., came a brand-new can of
Kiwi Shoe Polish, black. Because there was no note or letter, I have to
guess at my correspondent's message, but I assume the person was suggesting
that if I felt so bad about being white, I might want to make myself black.

But, of course, I don't feel bad about being white. The only motivation I
might have to want to be black -- to be something I am not -- would be
pathological guilt over my privilege. In these matters, guilt is a coward's
way out, an attempt to avoid the moral and political questions. As I made
clear in the original essay, there is no way to give up the privilege; the
society we live in confers it upon us, no matter what we want.

So, I don't feel guilty about being white in a white supremacist society,
but I feel an especially strong moral obligation to engage in collective
political activity to try to change the society because I benefit from the
injustice. I try to be reflective and accountable, though I am human and I
make mistakes. I think a lot about how I may be expressing racism
unconsciously, but I don't lay awake at night feeling guilty. Guilt is not
a particularly productive emotion, and I don't wallow in it.

What matters is what we decide to do with the privilege. For me, that means
speaking, knowing that I speak with a certain unearned privilege that gives
me advantages I cannot justify. It also means learning to listen before I
speak, and realizing that I am probably not as smart as I sometimes like to
think I am.

It means listening when an elderly black man who sees the original article
tacked up on the bulletin board outside my office while on a campus tour
stops to chat. This man, who has lived with more kinds of racism than I can
imagine through more decades than I have been alive, says to me, "White
privilege, yes, good to keep an eye on that, son. Keep yourself honest. But
don't forget to pay attention to the folks who live without the privilege."

It doesn't take black shoe polish to pay attention. It takes only a bit of
empathy to listen, and a bit of courage to act.

by Robert Jensen Department of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin, TX
78712, work: (512) 471-1990,

--

André Cramblit, Operations Director-Northern California Indian Development
Council

NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development
needs of American Indians and operates an art gallery featuring the art of
California tribes (http://www.americanindianonline.com)
[If you got here from frontpage Native News Online, click here to return:
http://216.97.43.231/ ]

Reprinted under the Fair Use http://nativenewsonline.org/fairuse.htm
<<<<<>>>>>
Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
http://nativenewsonline.org/
Native News Online
a Service of Barefoot Connection

FREE LEONARD PELTIER!! "YOU ~ARE~ THE MESSAGE"