EXPLAINING WHITE PRIVILEGE TO THE DENIERS AND THE HATERS
September 18, 2008, 7:52 am
by Tim Wise
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The point is, privilege is as much a psychological matter as a material one. Whites have the luxury of not having to worry that our race is going to mark us negatively when looking for work, going to school, shopping, looking for a place to live, or driving for that matter: things that folks of color can’t take for granted…
So, for instance, studies have found that job applicants with white sounding names are 50% more likely to receive a call-back for a job interview than applicants with black-sounding names, even when all job-related qualifications and credentials are the same.
Other studies have found that white men with a criminal record are more likely to get a call-back for an interview than black male job applicants who don’t have one, even when all requisite qualifications, demeanor and communication styles are the same.
Others have found that white women are far more likely than black women to be hired for work through temporary agencies, even when the black women have more experience and are more qualified.
Evidence from housing markets has found that there are about two million cases of race-based discrimination against people of color every year in the United States. That’s not just bad for folks of color; the flipside is that there are, as a result, millions more places I can live as a white person.
Or consider criminal justice. Although data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration indicates that whites are equally or more likely than blacks or Latinos to use drugs, it is people of color (blacks and Latinos mostly) who comprise about 90 percent of the persons incarcerated for a drug possession offense. Despite the fact that white men are more likely to be caught with drugs in our car (on those occasions when we are searched), black men remain about four times more likely than white men to be searched in the first place, according to Justice Department findings. That’s privilege for the dominant group.
That’s the point: privilege is the flipside of discrimination. If people of color face discrimination, in housing, employment and elsewhere, then the rest of us are receiving a de facto subsidy, a privilege, an advantage in those realms of daily life. There can be no down without an up, in other words.
None of this means that white folks don’t face challenges. Of course we do, and some of them (based on class, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, or other factors) are systemic and institutionalized. But on balance, we can take for granted that we will receive a leg-up on those persons of color with whom we share a nation. And no, affirmative action doesn’t change any of this.
I used to believe that white privilege was a myth. I came from a rural area with high rates of poverty and said to myself, “But not every white person is privileged!” And then I took a step back from that and realized that white privilege is one of only many kinds of privilege, but being one among many doesn’t make it any less real or its effects any less serious. Just because I knew white people who had been victims of another kind of privilege (class), that didn’t meant they couldn’t benefit from another kind of privilege (race).
I don’t want to force this on anybody, but I would like it if detractors would try, for a few days or a few weeks or even a few hours, being open to this argument. I know that I didn’t arrive at this realization simply because someone said it one day, but rather because over time I began to realize that many of these arguments are a dead on description of what I encountered every day in ways big and small.
For me, the most effective line from “This is your nation on white privilege” was that if Barack Obama were a gun enthusiast, as Sarah Palin is, people would immediately think he was a thug or terrorist. This was the most obvious to me because it is the easiest to see. In America, white people with guns are stereotyped as hunters and rednecks, and the gun is fairly non-threatening to anything that isn’t wild game. Black people with guns, though, are more associated with gang violence where guns are used specifically on people, which is very threatening. Then you consider how many Americans would even have a hard time just imagining a black man using a gun for hunting, rather than for violence, and it becomes even more obvious. However inaccurate those stereotypes might be, they are very real, and they influence how we think about people even before we know anything about them other than immediate appearances. It’s something to think about.
