>
> This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun newspaper
> and was written by a white professor at the U of
> Texas.
>
> "White people need to acknowledge benefits of
> unearned privilege" By Robert Jensen
>
> BALTIMORE: Here's what white privilege sounds like:
> I'm sitting in my University of Texas office, talking
> to a very bright and very conservative white student
> about affirmative action in college admissions, which
> he opposes and I support. The student says he wants
> a level playing field with no unearned advantages for
> anyone.
> I ask him whether he thinks that being white has
> advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I
> ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run
> mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is
> something real and tangible we could call white
> privilege.
>
> So, if we live in a world of white privilege -
> unearned white privilege - how does that affect your
> notion of a level playing field? I asked. He paused
> for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."
> That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the
> ultimate white privilege: the privilege to
> acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to
> ignore what it means.
>
> That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about
> race and racism with students. It drove home the
> importance of confronting the dirty secret that we
> white people carry around with us every day: in a
> world of white privilege, some of what we have is
> unearned.
>
> I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up
> around discussions of affirmative action has its
> roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to
> talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and
> white privilege. White privilege, like any social
> phenomenon, is complex.
>
> In a white supremacist culture, all white people have
> privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist
> themselves. There are general patterns, but such
> privilege plays out differently depending on context
> and other aspects of one's identity (in my case,
> being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather
> than try to tell others how white privilege has
> played out in their lives, I talk about how it has
> affected me.
>
> I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of
> northern European heritage and I was raised in North
> Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I
> grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by
> racism, both personal and institutional. Because I
> didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have
> exposure to the state's only numerically
> significant nonwhite population, American Indians. I
> have struggled to resist that racist training and the
> racism of my culture.
>
> I like to think I have changed, even though I
> routinely trip over the lingering effects of that
> internalized racism and the institutional racism
> around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one
> thing never changes - I walk through the world with
> white privilege.
>
> What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I
> seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or
> hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening.
> Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me
> -they are white. They see in me a reflection of
> themselves - and in a racist world, that is an
> advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I
> am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical
> opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.
> My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am
> white.
>
> Some complain that affirmative action has meant the
> university is saddled with mediocre minority
> professors. I have no doubt there are minority
> faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very
> many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if
> affirmative action policies were in place for the
> next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of
> that time the university could have as many mediocre
> minority professors as it has mediocre white
> professors.
>
> That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but it's a
> simple observation that white privilege has meant that
> scores of second-rate white professors have slid
> through the system because their flaws were
> overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well
> as on gender, class and ideology.
>
> Some people resist the assertions that the United
> States is still a bitterly racist society and that
> the racism has real effects on real people. But white
> folks have long cut other white folks a break. I
> know, because I am one of them.
>
> I am not a genius - as I like to say, I'm not the
> sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching
> full time for six years and I've published a
> reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the
> unexceptional stuff one churns out to get
> tenure, and some of it, I would argue, is worth
> reading. I worked hard, and I like to think that I'm
> a fairly decent teacher. Every once in a while, I
> leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I
> really accomplished
> something. When I cash my paycheque, I don't feel
> guilty. But, all that said, I know I did not get
> where I am by merit alone. I benefited from among
> other things, white privilege.
>
> That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or
> that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the
> job. It means simply that all through my life, I have
> soaked up benefits for being white. All my life I
> have been hired for jobs by white people. I was
> accepted for
> graduate school by white people. And I was hired for
> a teaching position by the predominantly white
> University of Texas, headed by a white president, in
> a college
> headed by a white dean and in a department with a
> white chairman that at the time had one nonwhite
> tenured professor. I have worked hard to get where I
> am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good
> about myself and my work, I do not have to believe
> that "merit" as defined by white people in a white
> country, alone got me here.
>
> I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard
> work, I got a significant boost from white privilege.
> At one time in my life, I would not have been able to
> say that, because I needed to believe that my success
> in life was due solely to my individual talent and
> effort.
>
> I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged
> individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the
> culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that
> was binding me to those myths. Like all white
> Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I
> didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and
> privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard
> work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I
> wasn't special. I let go of some of that fear when I
> realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I
> was still me.
>
> What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when
> I know that the rules under which I work in are
> stacked to my benefit. Until we let go of the fiction
> that people have complete control over their fate -
> that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose -
> then we will live with that fear.
>
> White privilege is not something I get to decide
> whether I want to keep. Every time I walk into a
> store at the same time as a black man and the
> security guard
> follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am
> benefiting from white privilege.
>
> There is not space here to list all the ways in which
> white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but
> it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me
> until the day white supremacy is erased from this
> society.
>
> Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Baltimore Sun.
>
> The writer is a professor of journalism.
>
>
>
> ===
> Eric Wilcoxson
> Boeing Commercial Airplane Co.
> Structural Design Engineer
> Project Engineering
> Ph:316-523-3279
> fax:316-523-1298
>
>
>
>
>
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