Exploring White Privilege

Robert Amico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315402284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring white privilege is an enterprise few of us who identify as white have attempted. White privilege is a foreign territory to us, although an unpleasantly familiar territory to people of color. At first the exploration can seem threatening, frightening and uncomfortable because, like any exploration, it can shatter the way we look at the world and how we understand ourselves. This book is, in part, a personal exploration of the author's white privilege and how he sought to transcend it. It is also a sociological analysis of white privilege, drawing upon key social science literature. The book is an invaluable tool for personal and group explorations of racial privilege as well as other forms of privilege, including gender.

Exploring White Privilege offers an analysis of white privilege as well as numerous examples of systemic white privilege in the U.S. Amico explains the cognitive and emotive factors that play a role in making it difficult for most white Americans to understand, learn and accept the sociological facts about systemic racism. While white privilege is generally understood as a system that benefits white people, Amico investigates the psychological, social and spiritual costs of white privilege to white people. And with a deeper understanding of how white privilege affects us all, questions of moral responsibility and accountability are investigated through personal anecdotes. The author offers a moral argument that is a call to action within our individual spheres of influence. The benefits of such a commitment to action are then explored and compared to the costs of inaction. Exploring white privilege can lead to social change. Amico offers a variety of tools for the reader interested in such explorations of their white privilege.

1
What is White Privilege?

What if the world were not as you thought?

Lee Mun Wah, The Color of Fear

The Color of Fear is an award-winning documentary about eight North American men engaged in an interracial dialogue. One white participant, David, is having a particularly difficult time accepting the testimony of many of the men of color who have bared their souls in front of him, recounting their harsh experiences living in American culture. The facilitator and director of the film, Lee Mun Wah, asks David:

What’s keeping you from believing that that’s happening to Victor [an African American participant]? Just believing. Not to know why that’s happening to him? What would it mean, David, if his life was that harsh? What would it mean in your life? What if the world were not as you thought? That it actually is happening to lots of human beings on this earth? What if it actually were and you didn’t know it? What would that mean to you?

I am like David. I am a white male. And I too have discovered that the world is not as I once thought it was. Exploring white privilege is a journey into a world I didn’t know, even though it was right in front of me.¹

White privilege is a form of domination; hence it is a relational concept.² It positions one person or group over another person or group. It is a concept of racial domination that enables us to see this relationship from the perspective of those who benefit from such domination. Traditionally in the United States, racial domination has been portrayed as discrimination against people of color—that is, from the perspective of those who are disadvantaged by such domination. But you can’t have one without the other—you can’t have racial domination and disadvantage without racial dominators who are advantaged. This is the insight of Peggy McIntosh’s seminal paper “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies”:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.³

As a white male, I know what McIntosh is talking about. What we are taught to see and not see shapes our view of the world—of what is real. My education through high school, college, and graduate school never included any discussion of white privilege and only discussed racism as a historical phenomenon, something that happened to people of color centuries ago.

Personal Anecdote

I remember watching television with my family in September 1957. I was ten years old and in the fifth grade. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the integration of Central High School and protect the nine black students enrolled that fall. My parents, like many whites at that time, thought that these black students were “troublemakers” who were trying to force themselves on people who didn’t want to associate with them. They saw these black students as encroachers on “regular” people’s freedom of association. I remember seeing the faces of all the angry white parents standing behind the line of troops and shouting racial epithets at these nine black children. I remember my parents making derogatory comments about African Americans that day and for many years after, and telling me that people should “stick to their own kind.” They made it clear to me that they did not approve of integration and wanted me to keep my distance from blacks. Three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, “separate but equal” was the prevailing norm in the world I inhabited. I believed my parents and parroted their views throughout my childhood—their view was my view. And white privilege was not even on my radar.

The natural question that arises from the introduction of the concept of white privilege is, What exactly are the advantages that white people enjoy at the expense and to the detriment of people of color? Since we whites have not been taught to see such advantages, we generally do not. McIntosh came to see some of her advantages as a white person through first understanding some of her disadvantages as a woman and observing men’s inability or unwillingness to recognize their advantages as men:

I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged in the curriculum, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. Denials, which amount to taboos, surround the subject of advantages, which men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended.⁴

Again, as a male I know what McIntosh is talking about. For much of my life, I believed that “it’s a man’s world” because we men deserve to be on top. We are simply better at certain things than women. The idea that we men are privileged was, in my view, “sour grapes” from women who couldn’t make the grade. This unwillingness to acknowledge any male privilege is deeply connected to the American myth of meritocracy, which maintains that all advantage in society is based on merit. Some have more than others because they have earned it through hard work, perseverance, and right living. And conversely, those who have less have only themselves to blame. The idea that even some of my advantages are unearned and undeserved and are a function of my status as a male was in my mind, for many years, preposterous and unfounded. But the idea that we live in a meritocracy in the United States is a myth because it has proven to be inconsistent with sociological fact. Structured inequality would be impossible in a meritocracy. Those of every “race,” ethnicity, and gender who worked hard, persevered, and lived right would excel in a meritocracy. Yet we have serious structured inequalities along racial, ethnic, and gender lines.⁵

White privilege and male privilege have the common feature that, in both cases, those who are advantaged cannot see their own advantage, although they can see that others are disadvantaged, and those who are privileged tend to fault those who are disadvantaged for their disadvantage. Conversely, those who are disadvantaged can see that they are disadvantaged and that some are advantaged, and they can see that both their disadvantage and the advantages of those who are privileged are unearned and undeserved. Ironically, then, those who enjoy privileges are epistemically disadvantaged, while those who are disadvantaged are epistemically advantaged. Hence, listening to someone who is epistemically advantaged due to her social disadvantage makes sense. The following anecdote illustrates my point.

Personal Anecdote

Many years ago I was settling down with my partner to enjoy a TV movie at home. It was an action-adventure film, and I was excited to watch it. As we began to watch, my partner started to get agitated and said to me, “I am so sick and tired of watching television! Every time I turn it on, all I see is women being victimized, women being brutalized, women being assaulted sexually, women portrayed as stupid, helpless bimbos, as sexual objects! I can’t watch another minute!” With that, she left the room. A lot of thoughts went through my mind all at once, and they were all dismissive and condescending: What’s the matter with her? Is she having her period? Did she have a bad day? Something must have happened because this is a really good movie. I am embarrassed to reveal those thoughts even now. But even though at the time I discounted everything she said, I started to click the remote control (of course, I was always the one to hold the remote, to control the television) to see what was on other channels. To my surprise, I found quite a few programs portraying women in just the way my partner had described! At that point I could not have admitted this to her, but I did let it sink in. I wondered why I had never noticed it before. I consider myself an educated, observant person; yet I was oblivious to what was obvious to her. That is how I understand epistemic disadvantage and advantage now.

Through comparative analysis with male privilege, McIntosh reached the following explanation of white privilege:

I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets, which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.⁶

After months of reflection, McIntosh was able to list forty-six such advantages she enjoys as a white person. They include items like the following:

#13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

#15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

#21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

#25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.⁷

For those of us who enjoy one form of privilege or another (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, ability, age, religion), why don’t we feel privileged? As sociologist Allan Johnson explains, privilege attaches itself to social categories, not individuals.⁸ So society values whiteness, not a particular person who is white; it values maleness, not a particular person who is male; it values heterosexuality, not any particular person who is heterosexual; and so forth. Hence, the perception that someone is white or male or heterosexual may be sufficient for that person to receive the privilege attached to that social category. And conversely, the perception that someone belongs to a social category that is disvalued in society may cause that person to endure the disadvantages attached to that category. So paradoxically, perception is more important than truth when it comes to who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged in society. How others perceive me may determine whether I am stopped by the police while driving my car, whether I am hired for a job, or whether I am followed in a department store by security. Because privilege does not attach itself to individuals for who they are, I may be privileged without feeling privileged. If I were a king, I would be privileged and feel privileged for who I was. But the kind of privilege we are talking about here is not like that. And the same holds true for disadvantage. Society disvalues certain social categories, and disadvantage attaches to them. Hence, it is possible to be disadvantaged without feeling disadvantaged.

Perception and Truth

Earlier I indicated that perception is more important than truth, and that may have given the impression that there is a truth to the matter of whether social categories actually apply to particular individuals. For example, is a particular individual actually white? Well, the question itself presupposes that there is such a thing as actual whiteness, and there is not. We have learned from biology and history that “race” is a social construction; it is not a biologically real category. There is as much or more genetic variation between any two individuals of the same so-called race as there is between two individuals of two different so-called races.⁹ In the late seventeenth century, wealthy, land-owning, Christian men who invaded this land created the category of “race” based on superficial differences in skin tone and hair texture for the purpose of exploitation and permanent domination.¹⁰ These men created social systems and institutions (e.g., laws, rules, practices, value systems) to reify “racial” difference and continually empower some and disempower others on the basis of this constructed “difference.” Hence “race” is a social rather than a biological reality. Many of the social categories surrounding privilege and oppression—gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, ability, and disability—are largely social constructions.

To be sure, there are real differences between people, but we define the social categories, and we assign meaning to those differences. For example, on the face of it, it would seem that nothing is more clear-cut than whether a person is male or female, whether a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 What Is White Privilege?
• Chapter 2 Why Is It So Difficult for Us Whites to Understand/Accept Our White Privilege?
• Chapter 3 The Costs of White Privilege to Whites
• Chapter 4 Responsibility, Action, Accountability, and Benefits
• Chapter 5 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index