WHITE PRIVILEGE: THE FIGHT GOES ON
January 11, 2009
Deane Oliva

White privilege: The Fight Goes On

Have you ever seen a wall or a building spray painted with the word “nigger” or the letters “KKK?”

Have you ever looked for an ethnic doll in Evansville?

For many years, clerks working service counters would ignore the black person in line, pointedly looking beyond the colored patron and addressing the next white person in line.  The clerk would appropriately serve the Negro, but only after the white customers had been assisted.  This behavior was typical and regarded as normal, good business functioning. 

Even today, how often have you noticed an Hispanic or a black person in a wait line, hanging back, allowing the white person to go in front. That’s white privilege at work.

Do you recognize white privilege?  White privilege is the sum of advantages, preferential treatment and institutional benefits granted to some solely on the basis of the color of their skin.  Unfortunately, it is not something that many of us “feel.” It is under the radar of our consciousness.  We take it for granted.  In fact, in the United States it is so ingrained in our culture, that white privilege is almost invisible, - invisible specifically to white people and many times invisible to minority groups as well.  Yet, white privilege perpetuates our racist society. As a part of our culture it is a set of habits and assumptions that is overlooked every day. It is like “black ice,” just about invisible, but definitely very dangerous. More than overt racial hostility, more than explicit discrimination,  Yes, more than overt racial hostility, more than explicit discrimination, white privilege is the invisible glue that keeps racism and oppression alive.  It is that undercurrent of injustice that feeds a sick system. We must recognize white privilege, identify it and work toward social change. We must assert our theological beliefs in the everyday world. We must honor each person and our mutual interdependence. 

How do you handle white privilege?  My good friend Ted, a committed social justice activist, confided in me recently that he really did not think that he had experienced white privilege.  He came from a town where the black families were well integrated into the community.  In fact, he noted, many made a lot more money than his family did.  He never felt special because of his white maleness in any way that he could remember.  Since he did not feel special, he did not realize his white privilege.  But it is there, operating in the actions of ordinary people every day.

An African American woman recently noted that when she and her Caucsian husband were married, he had to recognize and give up his white privilege of being able to live anywhere that he could afford.  They had to search out both a home and a neighborhood that met both their desires and offered low risk to their safety.

When my beautiful and talented African American daughter came home in tears, I had to comfort her from the horrible words thrown at her that no black person would ever get a lead in the play at her school. It did not matter how much talent she had. She had to accept a bit part.

Even in the last few years football and basketball teams in Evansville have played away games in neighboring towns “earlier in the day than usual” because it was commonly understood that for the safety of the student athletes of color and their parents, the team needed to be out of town before dark.[1] 

Recently, at a bus stop a black man sat by a white woman on the waiting bench.  A bus driver walked by. The black man asked “Excuse me sir. Can you tell me when the next #28 bus stops here?”  The bus driver turned, looked through the man and continued walking, pointedly ignoring him.  When the driver next got the question from a white patron, he answered him.  Then the situation  was clear. 

Buses have long had a special relationship to white privilege.  Consider the case of Montgomery, Alabama.  I’ll bet everyone here has heard of Rosa Parks, the woman that refused to give up her seat on a bus in December, 1955.  But did you know that her act of righteous fatigue was not an impulsive stand?  Did you know that it had happened before?

Twelve years before that incident, - in 1943, - Rosa Parks had been thrown off the bus by that very same driver for refusing to give up her seat.  Earlier that year, 1955, three other women had already been arrested for refusing to get up for a white person.

What then, made this particular incident different?  Earlier that year Mrs. Parks had received a scholarship to attend a school integration workshop for community leaders at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee.  She, in the company of several rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., spent several weeks at this retreat.  As Mrs. Parks later told Eleanor Roosevelt, at that time she never thought that she would become an activist.

But it just so happened that in1955 the NAACP was looking for a good test case.  The segregated seating policies on public buses had long been a source of resentment within the black community in Montgomery and in other cities throughout the Deep South. Negroes were required to pay their fares at the front of the bus and then get off the bus and re-board through the back door. The white bus drivers, who were invested with police powers, frequently harassed the black passengers, sometimes driving away before the Negroes were able to re-board the bus. During peak hours, the drivers pushed back the boundary markers that segregated the bus, crowding those in the “colored section” to provide more white passengers with seats.

Do you feel the white privilege at work?  If you are white and secure in the unconscious knowledge that the bus driver would never do that to you, that is white privilege. Think of a frigid cold winter day. The bus stops, hallelujah.  You get in, put your money in the coin box and then have to get out, go to the back door and reenter, all the time knowing that the bus driver just might decide to leave before you got on the bus. 

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks took her seat in front of the “colored section” of a Montgomery bus. The driver asked four Negro riders to give their seats to white customers. The others complied, but Rosa Parks refused.  The driver called the police, and Mrs. Parks was arrested. Within 24 hours, The Women's Political Council distributed more than 52,000 fliers announcing a one-day bus boycott. On December 5, the buses went through their routes almost empty.  Rosa Parks was convicted by the local court but refused to pay the fine of $14.  She appealed her case. 

Even though Rosa Parks is now widely known as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, at that time Mrs. Parks lost her job.  She and her husband found it difficult to find other work in Montgomery. Two years later they moved to Detroit, Michigan, where they continued to struggle financially until Mrs. Parks became an administrative assistant for U.S. congressional representative John F. Conyers Jr., a position she held until 1987.

A bittersweet story.  But we are used to equating black with poor and the plight of Rosa Parks does not evoke outrage.  That’s white privilege at work. 

My good friend Jane adopted four interracial youngsters. She hated shopping with her children in the small town grocery.  If you are a person of color or have children who are, you probably immediately understand.  The clerks were instructed to keep an eye on every black youngster inside the store.  That’s white privilege at work. White privilege is not living through the shame of having your children thought to be shoplifting just because of the color of their skin, the slant of their eyes or the language that they speak.

My own interracial family took a trip down south.  Some waiters sabotaged our meals by waiting a very long time to serve us.  They disapproved.  Others were quite friendly, openly trying to show their acceptance of us. If you are black or Asian or Hispanic – you never know which kind of reception you will get.  That’s white privilege.  White privilege is never having to be on guard less someone hurt you in an otherwise ordinary encounter. 

When you go into a store are you fairly sure that most of the people in that store will look like you? Do you worry about how you will be perceived?  Will you be welcomed or ignored?  If not, that is white privilege at work.  For white people, there is no need to constantly have your guard up so that your, more tender than you would like, heart will not be hurt.  If you are white middle class, you do not have to constantly worry about being the representative of your race. In this town, you do not have to be the example, the one who made it. If you are white, you do not have to worry about on what characteristics you are being judged.

White privilege is never being put next to the kitchen in an empty restaurant: never seeing someone cross over to the other side of the street because you might be the “wrong” kind of person.  White privilege is not having to worry that you will be told “You don’t belong here.”  And, heaven forbid, white privilege is never being told that your child cannot join a club or get the lead in a play or have a dance partner because he or she is the wrong shade of color.

White privilege is not, then, something you feel. If you are white, it is something you have.  In this culture it is an assumed white birthright. Even when you don’t want it, when you would like to say “No, I don’t want any arbitrary privilege that I have not earned” it is there for you.  It is not about what you have.  It is what others do not have.  White privilege is what others do not have.  They do not have the assurance of respect and inclusion.  They lack the affirmation that they are valuable. 

President elect Barack Obama, in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance[2]  relates his experience trying to figure out his worth and identity during his high school years.  He writes that as a teenager:

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications.  We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules.  If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his.  Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.  In fact you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you.  At best, these things were a refuge, at worst, a trap. 

Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.  And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good.  Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger. 

I can feel his frustration. It pulsates.  Who am I?  I am only in relation to you, white person. That is white privilege.

This relational sense of self is corroborated for Obama a little later.  As he contemplates college, he considers his friend Frank’s advice.

“What had Frank called college?  An advanced degree in compromise. …. “Leaving your race at the door,” [Frank] said.  “Leaving your people behind.  Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated.  You’re going there to get trained.  They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.  They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race.  Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”

Hard language.  Brutally honest language.  It is the language of white privilege. The language that pinpoints real life injustices in this world, in this time. 

You know when I moved to this area I wondered why the black population was so small.  I learned that before 1860 there were few African Americans here. After the Civil War era the black population grew rapidly as freed slaves came north.  However, the races were always separated, in schools, restaurants and churches.  Even in business, such as Chrysler Corporation, there was an agreement that blacks would work only in certain departments “in order to avoid trouble with Kentucky born white workers.[3]  And then, of course, we had Sundown covenants.  That was then you might say.  Perhaps.  Four days ago one of the Courier comments regarding a shooting stated, “Hope he’s caught by sundown.”  I wonder to what the writer was alluding?[4]

Eleanor Roosevelt is a personal hero.  She fought tirelessly in the civil rights movement, often with views that were at odds with her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Even when he was afraid to offend the southern senators, she pressed on, often using her position and media sense to place her fight for civil rights in the forefront of the general public.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was so offended by her actions that he became convinced that she had black blood. Other Americans did as well and wrote to ask if this was true, only to receive a reply in which Mrs. Roosevelt said that her family had lived so long in the nation that she could not answer the question with certainty.  What a wonderful response!  Tell me, how would you feel if you suddenly learned that your family had black blood? That sinking feeling that some of you might own is another example of white privilege at work.

Eleanor Roosevelt understood white privilege. She fought it with her words, her pen and her presence. She understood the concept of respect and dignity for every person.

Today we are peeling away the layers of social injustice.  Have we succeeded?  Yes, of course we have moved in a positive direction.  Have we reached our goal of a just society?  No, of course not. At each new level, we must look around and ask ourselves, “What more must I do?”  What can I do to take us to a deeper level? Let us identify those areas of ingrained white privilege and let us throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the fray, hoping that one day we can shout from the rooftop:  “Free at last.” 

Now at this point, you might ask: What good does it do to stand up here and preach to the choir, to Unitarian Universalists who have chosen to respect the worth and dignity of every person, every person regardless of their racial or ethnic heritage?  I believe that it is just those people, the choir so to speak, the well meaning, liberals of all colors who want to open themselves more fully to love and justice, who want to see beyond the superficial levels of race accommodation, - it is just those people who will fight for new levels of affirmation of all human beings, not just a privileged few.  It is this group, our group, who will go into a store filled only with white baby dolls and request that the store get a more representative group of dolls.  It is this group, our group, who will walk into a hospital whose walls are covered with pictures of white people and point out to the persons in charge, that those pictures are racist, that they do not reflect the community.  It is this group, it is our group, that will point out the reporting inequities in the media, calling them to task when they underreport hate crimes. It is this group, it is our group, it is this congregation, it is our congregations, that will say “Never again.”  It is this group, it is our group, that will delve into their hearts and lives and ferret out acculturated privilege.  It is this group that will lead the way in changing our world on a soulful basis.  For if not us, then who?