Privilege, in a nutshell, from a liberal, non-Christian, ostensibly White guy.
This is not a sermon, nor is it a definitive proclamation. I am not an expert on race relations, ethnic bias, or anything even remotely academic that might even come close to qualifying me as the “go-to” on the subject of privilege.
I’m just a guy who writes commentary, mostly about the nonprofit arts sector and how to fix it. A lot of this discussion is useful for that industry, mostly because there are still an overabundance of overpaid, old-timey White guys running things. And some of them aren’t even old-timey White guys; they’re just old-timey White guy wannabes.
To explain:
At least as far as I’ve seen, privilege is not something that privileged White men think about (except in a limited number of perverse cases). In today’s America, it appears not to be an intended weapon of subjugation, literally or figuratively, in the sense that there seems to be little premeditation involved by the offending party.
There were many times that it was intended. The mass killing of buffalo in America in the 1800s was intended to destroy the Indigenous tribes that depended on buffalo to survive. The premeditated extinction of a species could be summed up by US Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who in 1867 implored the army to “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone!” It was not as though the White buffalo hunters used the animal for food, clothing, or other provisions. Buffalo parties would shoot out the windows of a train and kill 100,000 animals per year, leaving them dead where they were to rot.
That doesn’t seem to be what’s happening now, at least in the prevalent now. Are there White men are sitting around plotting what evils they can do to, in their minds, “lesser” people? Of course there are. But it’s a mistake to believe that they comprise the majority of White men.
Most are not actively planning triangulation endeavors in which they can get Black people, Latinx people, and the Asian communities to fight amongst each other so that they won’t attack them (and don’t forget Jews or Arabs in that classic triangulation). They don’t even think about it, which, of course, is a big (if different) problem when it happens.
Some actively triangulate. There are plenty of those guys. We call them “elected Republicans.”
But again, in my experience, most are not. In the arts, White leaders have bumbled around for a couple of decades now to incorporate the stories of melanin-enhanced people because they’re bought into the faulty assumption that diversifying the art diversifies the audience. Do that August Wilson play and Black people will love your organization and come to see Molière and Shakespeare, right?
Untrue, as it turns out. Or should I say, “Untrue [obviously], as it [of course] turns out. [Duh.]”
The truth about White privilege in this weird Handmaid’s Tale era is that while for the most part it is not active, it is dominant. There are more do-gooder Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark types who either don’t consider that the reason they can defeat evil White (Green? Blue?) criminals is because they have access to things unavailable to regular people on the streets.
If 17th century America had not been dominated by religious cretins like the incoming migrants of White Puritanism, how would that have changed society? What if “Manifest Destiny,” instead of becoming a creed for White European domination, had instead referred to a time when Whites were defeated at every turn, securing the country for the native tribes that already thrived here? And finally, what if instead of rampant, disgusting, deadly slave tactics stealing multiple generations of Africans from their homes and forcing them to live a hell on earth in the service of White overlords, the Indigenous peoples invited Black people to come to America and take advantage of the agrarian opportunities here and share their cultures?
None of that happened, of course. But the idea that White privilege never would have existed in the first place causing, ironically, the odd uprising by those underserved Whites who had never had a seat at the adult table in society, is worth considering. Worth considering, that is, by people of all skin tones and backgrounds.
Think of it this way. Close your eyes.
Have someone say, out loud, “A guy walks into a room.”
Wait a moment.
Is it a White man? More importantly, is it his fault that you assumed he was a White man?
Many White men are willing to cede tolerance toward the greater good, already on the side of tolerance and centering non-White ambitions. When women and non-White men engage in “White men are evil racists who block my advancement in society” tactics, it only takes the worst of the active horror and places it squarely on the new affronters. The days of “All men are scum” have to end as well.
Rather than looking at the US electorate, for example, and deciding that because most White men voted for the republican, look deeper. You’ll discover that 80% of his voters were White and 66% of Harris’s voters were White, which was almost exactly the case in 2020. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, the same percentage of White men and White women voted for each party’s candidate in 2024 as in 2020. White people in America account for a higher percentage of vote totals than population demographics.
That’s for another day. This day, I’m writing to offer that that blaming White men as a collective evil only deepens the divide and pushes away those who might be helpful. Yes, White men have unfairly held the microphone and bully pulpit for too long. That doesn’t mean that all are to be castigated for something they did not do, even when they benefited. It’s not an active choice for a lot of White men; it’s just something that happened. As such, don’t assume characteristics not necessarily in evidence — that’s just the sort of thing exclusionists do.
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