- Mar 11, 2015
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How Racism Hurts White People Too
Racism coddles Whites by not requiring us to learn what all people of color must do to survive.
Susana Rinderle, MA, ACC, Contributor
Imagine you work hard your whole life: at school, work and home. You win some and you lose some, and at times it feels like there’s more losing than winning. Life’s not easy, but you hang in there and follow most of the rules. Some people are less kind than others, and your interactions with teachers, coworkers, bosses, store clerks and bureaucrats can be challenging. Like most people you know, you do all right, but sometimes struggle to pay bills, find a decent place to live, put your kids in a decent school, and get your basic needs met. You see less deserving folks get rewards or perks you don’t. You worry about the future.
And then someone says you have “white privilege.”
I get it. I’m White. Growing up with three darker-skinned family members and mostly “minority” classmates, I hated racism. I thought it meant meanness and abuse directed towards people of color, particularly Blacks, and as a teen I vowed to do my part to stop it. I bristled at the suggestion that I contributed to racism or benefitted from so-called “privilege” just because I was White. What a load of crap! I was a conscientious, empathetic person with multicolored friends. I went out of my way to treat everyone with respect and dignity, even advocate for equality. I worked my butt off in challenging social and financial circumstances to achieve a great deal. To suggest I hadn’t earned it fairly was deeply insulting. To say I got unearned advantages sounded like a copout from lazy complainers.
Eventually, I learned that my well-intended understanding of racism was woefully superficial and incomplete. I learned that I was blind to much of what was going on around me, because I’m White. I also learned a dirty secret about racism: It hurts White people too.
Racism coddles Whites by not requiring us to learn what all people of color must do to survive – how to live in multiple worlds, speak multiple languages and quickly navigate complex realities. It coddles us by making us too fragile to fully hear, understand and receive what people of color are saying, much less take responsibility for our part. It makes us too fragile to talk with people or color in any way that doesn’t meet our standards of comfort and familiarity, much less tolerate being in groups where we are the racial minority.
How Racism Hurts White People Too
Racism coddles Whites by not requiring us to learn what all people of color must do to survive.
Susan Rinderle is right.. I've seen some of this and what she says and she is absolutely correct.
This, especially American white culture does them more harm than anything they imagine coming from whatever perceived threats some whites have concocted.
Sadly there are black people help perpetuate this lifestyle of denial.
We do things like tell them nothing is their fault and that white racism is not a problem. That all the deficits we were born into were self inflicted..
“Racism skews our sense of reality. It damages our humanity. It makes us weak.”-Susan Rinderle
