Taz
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You're reduced to memes. Time to give up, brah.white privilege mindset
Wednesday January 19th 2011 by abagond
This post is based partly on “The Privilege Mindset” at Will Capers’s blog Blaque Ink:
The white privilege mindset is the way of thinking that grows out of having white privilege, from the advantages of being white in America.
Which of these statements are true:
Count up the number of true statements and multiply by ten. That is the chance out of 100 that you have a white privilege mindset.
- There is no such thing as white privilege.
- Blacks like to complain.
- Blacks are their own worst enemy, not white people or their supposed racism.
- Blacks need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps just like everyone else.
- I made it on my own, I did not get any special favours. Why should blacks?
- If anything, blacks have it easier than whites, what with affirmative action and all.
- Affirmative action is unfair to whites.
- Whites are a better judge of whether something is racist than blacks are. Blacks are oversensitive.
- It is unfair to have a Black History Month when there is no White History Month.
- Blacks are just as racist as whites.
Not all the statements are necessarily untrue. And it is not just white people who say them. But they all fit a white privilege mindset, so whites are the ones most likely to make them and defend them strongly.
That is no accident: the statements make the most sense to someone who has never experienced racism, to someone who can take white privilege for granted.
White History Month is the clearest example. From Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” to “manifest destiny” to America as “the great melting pot”, American history is not merely taught from a white point of view, it is taught as if blacks, Mexicans and Native Americans do not truly count as people. White History Month is the month that never ends.
That is pretty easy to see if you are black. But whites are so used to having everything told from their point of view – from history to news to Hollywood films – that many fail to see it as a point of view at all.
Affirmative action is the same way: whites are so used to being favoured in the labour market that they fail to see it as white affirmative action.
How to have a white privilege mindset:
You can replace “black” with “Latino”, “Native American”, “Muslim” and so on.
- Notice any small advantage blacks have while overlooking the even greater advantages of whites.
- Blame all disadvantages blacks suffer from on them.
- Use the Anything But Racism argument as needed.
- Discount anything black people say. Only take what white people say seriously.
- Never try to see anything from a black point of view.
In fact, you can pretty much replace “white” and “black” with any privileged/marginalized pair: rich and poor, male and female, straight and gay, Christian and Jew, etc. Because it is not so much about race but power and how power affects thinking.
white privilege mindset