Bubbadog says it best
Read and contemplate
"This is starting to sound like a semantic argument. What does privilege mean? A special benefit or opportunity? Much of what we're talking about when we discuss the disparate treatments of white Americans and black Americans involves what we would consider not much more than equal treatment under the law or equal recognition of basic human dignity. As a white man, I can generally take for granted that I won't be followed around a department store while I'm shopping and made to feel like I'm a suspicious person. I can take for granted that the police won't start following me around if I'm driving through an affluent neighborhood of have a nice car. I can take for granted that the police won't stop and frisk me while I'm walking or that someone who doesn't know me will call the cops if they see me unlocking the door to my house. And on and on. That doesn't feel like a privilege, and yet these are things that black men simply cannot take for granted.
Should we take away from white males these things we have been able to take for granted? No. One injustice should not beget another, although this solution would at least create demand for rapid change.
The more obvious and just solution is simply, duh, to treat black men with the same courtesy and presumption of innocence that we treat white men. And yet we can't get there because there is (a) so much denial that black people are actually treated differently (b) or there is a rationalization for the disparate treatment (e.g., we should profile black people because they're more likely to commit a crime).
But what gets called privilege also of course goes way beyond discriminatory practices in law enforcement.
The practices of "red-lining" neighborhoods, discriminatory and deceptive loan practices and residential segregation have already been mentioned. The effect of these practices was that black Americans were less able to accumulate wealth that they could use to build a stable middle-class life and pass on to their children, even if they started out with the same assets as a white family that didn't face such discrimination in housing and lending. Should we make up for this by discriminating against white people? Of course not.
But in all of these areas a big part of the problem is that this legacy of discrimination has never been publicly acknowledged and still isn't widely known. It probably isn't possible to remediate all of the past wrongs. And yet part of the remedy is to acknowledge that those wrongs occurred -- and in some cases are still occurring.
Time and again I hear the argument that acknowledging these old wrongs is just re-opening old wounds and keeps black and white people from being reconciled. I hear white people arguing that we had achieved a post-racial society, as evidenced by the election of a black president, and that, therefore, Obama and black people set race relations back by talking about race. I even hear the suggestion that black people are race haters by talking about racism.
The claim that we had ever achieved a post-racial society is simply bull*****
The idea that there can be reconciliation without truth-telling is equally bull*****
Telling the truth about our history and its effects is a form of reparations. And the best part is that this type of reparation is paid to all Americans, not just African Americans.
Germany has come to grips with the horrors of its 20th century history.
South Africa has acknowledged what happened under apartheid.
One of the reasons why Rwanda has one of highest economic growth rates in Africa is that it went through with truth and reconciliation.
And yet the US still doesn't want to come to grips with our nation's racial history since 1865. So we have whole generations of white Americans who are able to deny this history because they honestly don't know it. No one taught them.
In Waco, they don't teach kids about the notorious lynching in 1915 where a man was burned alive in front of thousands of people. Did you know that McLennan County had more lynchings (15) than all but one other county in Texas? I didn't know that until last week, when I visited the website for Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. How many white people in McLennan County do you think know that? Hardly a one, I suspect. And yet black people in Waco, as I discovered, can tell you about lynchings there because the knowledge was passed down in the community. The historical memory was strong enough that some black people believed that the 1953 tornado, which killed over 100 white people and brought its full wrath downtown where the lynching occurred four decades earlier, was divine retribution for what Waco did. So we wind up with two different historical narratives instead of a common narrative because we as a society don't want to face up to the aspects of the story that don't reveal us as we would wish. And old wounds and resentments fester because the majority of the community want to sweep them under the rug and go on as if nothing happened.
So I say that, if we want to do something about white privilege, start with honestly telling our common story."
Waco1947 ,la
