I don’t need to relate the content and context of every single article from every single website or blog and deconstruct it for you. On a different, tangentially related subject, on Huffpost they have a graph of falling oil prices in their business section. The next line following the graphic says “Cheaper gas is a boon to Americans who live from paycheck to paycheck (most Americans, in other words),”. That’s the most important thing they have to say about the matter. I’ll let you deconstruct the sociopolitical views of Huffpost Business from that one line, and you’ll not be far wrong.
While using Salon as an example is a bit like shooting ducks in a barrel, with wonderfully non-clickbaity titles such as Why acknowledging white privilege is not surrendering to “white guilt”, or White privilege: An insidious virus that’s eating America from within you get some wonderful articles from Andrew O’Hehir with such gems as “Recognizing the historic burden of whiteness is not self-abasement or lame apology. It’s the pathway to freedom” and then in the same article, several paragraphs down “Discussions of white privilege, this person went on, never pointed toward practical solutions and only served “to make white people feel weird.” You get an A for effort, my friend, but I have some news for you: White people already feel weird. There could be no better word for the bitter, angry and divisive internal politics of America’s white majority.” After theorizing that “Much of the weirdness, self-hatred and general know-nothing misanthropy of white America, in my view, boils down to a deep-seated desire to be free of the burden of history, a desire not to have to be white anymore.” he concludes that the people most obsessed with White Guilt are those who feel the most guilty. In the virus article, he goes around Ferguson as the headline act of a countless series of historical injustices to conclude “the virus of white privilege survives by convincing its host organism that it does not exist.”
Of course there’s something to be gained from these the Salon articles. For one, White Privilege means in the liberal technosphere, a very specific thing; White Privilege vs. Black Underprivileged. Although there are exceptions, by and large this is seen as a white v black framework of discussion. There aren’t many articles about privilege vs Hispanics, Native American, or other ethnic groups, although they do exist on smaller more frontline progressive blogs. But the other is that White Privilege is more a matter of identity politics; what is important is to accept this as axiomatic because that’s the how the conversation is framed. As Joan Walsh, former Editor-in-Chief for Salon, says in her article about the O’Reilly vs Stewart “debate” that the real problem with O’Reilly was that he failed to show empathy. “We’re not going to convince O’Reilly and his demographic. We have to out-organize, out-vote and out-live them” is her advice. Do you really want to be a shitbag Republican racist like Hannity and O’Reilly? Of course you don’t. You accept White Privilege the way that they frame it because it is the right thing to do.
Of course once the framework changes the conversation stops. That’s why the articles pinning the death of Eric Garner on this sort of white privilege thing, like Ferguson, immediately dried up and vanished when the two police officers murdered afterwords were non-white and De Blassio’s comments created a firestorm of controversy among the entire undivided NYPD leading to they more or less twice turning their backs on him symbolically, as well as the slow spread of information that the NYPD is a much more ethnically diverse force. When things can’t be squeezed into the predetermined framework there’s nothing left to say. In modern day political conversation the conclusions look for evidence but are not dependent upon them, a problem liberal and conservative media alike fall into.
Because nuance is thus impossible if you are a white person on this matter I must rely on others to do the nuance for me. In a response to Ta-Nahesi Coates’s memoir at Atlantic.com, he wrote about his feeling he had ‘privileged’ (in the greater context of black underprivileged) childhood thanks to his family, teachers, siblings and friends that pushed and encouraged him to excel. In the New York Times interview with Naomi Zack, a philosopher in the area of race, she points out the well understood problem of black attainment vs. white attainment. “Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.” “What’s happening now in Ferguson is the crystallization of our grief. Don’t Shoot!”. But she also agrees with me (and others in this thread) about the nature of the way “privilege” is being used: “The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right.” She also drops a Frantz Fanon quote, which brings to mind my recent (internal) musings about possible sideways relationships between progressivism today and post-colonial academia (often socialist or postmodern) from the 60s. Arguing that a spectrum of privilege exists is possible for certain people.
You seem to think that me arguing about the context of White Privilege in these increasingly politically polarized times is my being offended about being ‘called out’ on my privilege. I think the problem with modern African Americans began when the Radical Reconstructionist Republicans abandoned the South and allowed the Redeemers to take over, before even Jim Crow. You think White Privilege is a self evident truth that only a racist would deny. I think that actually White Privilege is an almost-misused (not entirely!) term to reflect specific white/black socioeconomic relationships and outcomes at best, and political blackjack to beat over someone else’s head who disagrees with you at worst.
Black stereotyping is terrible, especially when done by the police. Black men commit half the murders in the country. Black men are incarcerated at higher rates for similar crimes than whites. Black persons are arrested for about 28% of all violent crimes, including over 50% for robbery. The wealth gap is increasing between white and blacks in America. More than half of all black children live in one-parent households, when studies purport to show the single most important factor in social mobility is having a two parent household.
The question of how best to address black disenfranchisement is a complex one. Maybe bashing people over the head with concepts like White Privilege is useful. Lord knows the Millennial generation seems astonished to a find a world beyond the end of their nose.
