What is "White Privilege?" A White Man Continues to Learn

"White Privilege" is More that I Thought It Was

In a recent post on this blog, I explained what I understood white privilege to mean. I focused on the very practical side of white privilege, which is the ability of white people to avoid without effort the dangers, barriers and inconveniences of black life in America. I still think that what I said was true, but it did not tell the whole story.  As a result of helpful responses to my post and as a result of things that I have read over the last couple of days, I have come to see that white privilege is much more than I originally said. 

The Standard by Which Everything is Judged

White privilege is also the privilege of being the standard by which everything is judged and the center of the story of modern civilization. We are so used to being the standard and the center that we don’t even notice that we are. The standards of feminine beauty in our society provide an obvious example. They include long, straight or gently curling hair and fair skin or a golden suntan. The goddesses of movies and magazine covers fit this standard. They may be thin like Jessica Chastain or curvy like Jennifer Lawrence, but they are definitely white.

We don’t see these women as beautiful, white women; we see them simply as beautiful women, the standard by which all women are to be judged. This places a heavy burden on all women because the standard is unrealistic (After all, even Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Lawrence don’t really look like the photographed versions of themselves. They don’t get up in the morning with their hair and makeup perfectly arranged.  They are not always perfectly posed and perfectly lighted), but for Black women, the burden is outrageously heavy. They have the wrong skin and the wrong hair. They cannot aspire even to approximate the appearance of these goddesses. They are devalued. They are put down. They are made to feel inferior, by the way that we think about beauty.

The Center of the History and the Bearers of Civilization

The way we tell the history of our country  provides another example. The heroes are all White. We tell of Christopher Columbus, of George Washington, of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.  We tell of the brave Pilgrims who settled Plymouth Colony and the valiant families who crossed the prairies to settle the West: all White. We ignore the fact that much of our country was settled by the work of Black slaves and that at least ¼ of all the cowboys in the nineteenth century were Black.

We did not set out to create a distorted picture of our history, but history is always written by the winners, and in the last 200 years, White people have been the main winners. So, we told our story, the White story, and like every writer of history, we ignored or were unaware of the distortions that we introduced. And there were distortions. The United States has never been an all-white country, and Black people have had a large role in building it, but that is not the way that we tell the story.

The (mostly) unintended effect of the way that we recount our history has been to make White people appear to be the human ideal and the bearers of civilization, while other races appear to be inferior. That appearance of inferiority places a heavy burden on Black people.  What can their ideals be? What can they be proud of in their past?  How can they see their ancestors as heroes? How can they not be humiliated?

The Privilege of Not Being Humiliated or Denigrated

In short, White privilege includes the privilege of not being humiliated or denigrated by the standards of our society, and we must find a way to eliminate the burdens that white privilege imposes on Black people. We White people must find a way to understand that we cannot build a society of freedom and brotherhood by humiliating and denigrating a large share of its people. We do not have to give up our heroes or our standards of beauty, but we must recognize that they are not the only heroes or the only standards. They are our standards, but other standards may also be valid.

Many of us have already made this leap in religion. We continue to follow our separate faiths, but we see each of them as a partial view of a truth that we cannot really grasp. We recognize that other faiths also have validity, and we find ways to pray together.

We must reach that point with regard to racial differences, as well. We must learn that beauty takes many forms. We must understand that we share our country and our history with people who are different from us, and we must learn to see our shared history in a way that highlights their contributions as well as ours.