Want to start a fight? Put an honest white person and an honest person of color in a room together and tell them to discuss white privilege. “White privilege” is one of those phrases that means two totally different things to most white people and most people of color. Outside of colleges and and multi-cultural training seminars it is a complete conversation stopper that does nothing to illuminate anything and everything to sow seeds of enmity between races. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s a phrase that should be abandoned altogether.
“Now, wait a minute, Rebecca,” I can hear some of you saying, “you’re a white person married to an African American. You’ve even written a book which is enormously sympathetic to the perspectives and experiences of African Americans and quite critical of whites inability/unwillingness to deal with those perspectives and experiences. How can you speak so negatively of ‘white privilege’? Isn’t it just a reality?”
And that’s just it. If I as an extraordinarily sympathetic white person who can offer hundreds of examples of the ways that racism has affected my husband – who is just one man! – hear the phrase “white privilege” and get my hackles raised, then clearly there’s a problem. And frankly, I really don’t think that the problem is with me. The problem is with the language involved.
When the phrase “white privilege” is spoken, most minorities hear, “a pattern of treating white people better than non-white people.” However, I and, based on every conversation I’ve ever witnessed, most white people hear, “white people have it too easy. They have no problems. The world gets handed to them on a silver platter.” And the conversation stops right there. A lot of times the response by white people is to tell their own stories of being poor, overcoming enormous obstacles, being mistreated etc. Privilege belongs to the rich, the powerful, celebrities, politicians, royalty. Not white share croppers or immigrants or a white kids with an alcoholic father.
At which point, people of color say, “but you don’t have to deal with racism! You don’t have to deal with people following you through stores or refusing to hire you or housing discrimination. The cops don’t pull you over for ‘driving while white’! You don’t get stopped and frisked walking down the street in New York city! Don’t you see how privileged you are?”
And here is the problem; a privilege is something that you don’t have a right to. It’s something that is suspect. As Americans in particular, we don’t approve of the wealthy or powerful having privileges that others don’t. When the mayor gets pulled over while drunk, we expect him to be treated just like anyone else who drives drunk. We want him to be treated just like us. When we say that someone has privileges, we are saying that they get treated better than they should be. And very few white people think that they are treated better than they ought to be treated. It is one thing to say that minorities are not treated as well as they ought to be and something else entirely to say that white people are treated too well. And that, I believe, is why the phrase “white privilege” is such a conversation stopper.
Not only is the phrase a conversation stopper, but I believe it has an insidious tendency to create norms which are based not on how white people have always assumed they have the right to be treated, but based on the inferior treatment of minorities. When the town mayor gets pulled over driving drunk and is given preferential treatment, we don’t argue, “we should all be able to drive drunk and get away with it!” We say, “he needs to be treated like everyone else.” If the way white people are treated gets defined as an undeserved privilege, then we are – perhaps unintentionally – defining the way that minorities get treated as the norm that we can all expect. And frankly, I don’t think it should be a privilege to move about my world freely and without being treated as a probable criminal of inferior intelligence. I think that’s something that I and others should be able to enjoy regardless of skin tone.
In fact, I think that we have seen just that sort of downgrading of how we can expect to be treated. Our police are increasingly militarized and oppositional. We are electronically strip searched before boarding planes. Debtors prisons are making a real comeback. Especially since the economic downturn, Americans are finding that regardless of skin color, we’re all being treated more shabbily, have lowered prospects for prosperity and have less control over our government than ever before. In fact, my husband has been saying for a while now that he’s going to write a book called “We’re All Nigga’s Now”.
The question I would raise is whether that’s really what we want – that we all be treated equally badly? How about instead of “white privilege” we talk about American standards vs minority treatment? Being white shouldn’t be a privilege. I think that we can all agree on that. And I think that we should all agree that being a minority shouldn’t be a disadvantage – especially a disadvantage in terms of how one is treated. However, when the phrase “white privilege” gets pulled out, more often than not the whole discussion gets shut down and turns against all of our best interests. It’s a phrase that needs to be allowed to die.
UPDATE: Thanks to Pat for directing my attention to this in the comments below - Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi. I would just like to say – what he said. It’s a very good explanation of what people are trying to communicate when they talk about “white privilege”. I’m more sympathetic to the umbrage people take at the phrase than he is though. 
You make an interesting point, but I’m not sure it would matter in practice. For instance, isn’t affirmative action an attempt to do what you suggest – raise the treatment of minorities to ‘American standard?’ And it is just as vigorously resented as ‘white privilege.’
People are smart enough to know when a concept’s consequences will be to take something — deserved or undeserved — away from them and give it to someone else. Changing the terminology won’t work, because it is not really the issue. It’s only the part of the issue that it is respectable to complain about.
By the way, have you seen John Scalzi’s take on this? http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
I really like Scalzi’s take on it. My point is really that there are discussions that need to be had and stories that need to be shared, but the word privilege is just too loaded to be useful. Even for me it’s loaded and clearly I’m a very sympathetic audience. But I do think it’s a bit unfair to insist that resistance to the term is simply a matter of not being willing to deal with racial inequalities. It may be an accurate term if we use the strictest definition of the word, but our understanding of privilege in real life is such it’s not useful at all.
Another bit of bad terminoloy was hijacking “racism” to mean ~ ‘racially-based excuses for exploiting/mistreating racial minorities.’ Which made it hard to talk about the reactive racism of black people. Not that this was such a big deal, compared with white racism– or that a lot of it wasn’t well-deserved, confirmed every day by government decisions, media framing, interactions with clueless whites.
So why do people end up trying to talk delicate issues in clunky terminology– much of it booby-trapped at that?
So far as I’ve noticed people borrowing mass-market catch phrases– and using them straight, with straight faces, not attempting to customize, no “”s, not even checking “Do I really look as good in this opinion as I thought I did?”– these seem to impede understanding.
Maybe because words make powerful weapons, but that’s not what they were meant for?
I think that there’s just a lot of very simplistic thinking that goes on when it comes to difficult subjects. I struggle to communicate enough nuance without going overboard, but I’m always surprised at how a lot of people have subject where their thinking is just very shallow and simplistic. Also, I have noticed that people of different races use the same language differently. For example, the issue of power seems to be much more important to a lot of minorities than it is to white people. Thus the argument that black race-based hostility isn’t racism because racism requires power to back it up. It’s one of the reasons that I generally think that it’s more helpful to share stories than it is to come up with labels and such. Stories communicate truths that are too easy to shove aside or try to manipulate in other forms of discussion.
Power looks a lot more important when you’re aware of being deprived of it… I had an uncle with a rat farm near Stanford, racks and racks of little wooden cages. When I was working for him, he pointed out a rat who’d found a way to leave his cage. You could tell because the rat had spread chow & ratshit over the top for extra shade, but he was still living in there. A lot of white people still think they aren’t living in cages… while black people usually get disillusioned early on.
John Holland wrote a lot about designs for ‘genetic’ computer programming. One useful concept was ‘tags.’ Different routines to be mixed and tested by a program would have some random string of binary digits associated with them, which they would ‘post’ when they ran… Other routines would be selected to follow, using the tags as a basis for responding to what had [probably] been done so far.
Many human beings use language in a similar way, ala “Four legs good, two legs bad!” in _Animal Farm_. Especially when stressed. What they read is whatever they’re expecting, nuances being an impediment to getting my reply out right now!
The Mate book I mentioned… advises parents, upset & desperately trying different power plays on their upset kids– to let short-term goals go, concentrate on communicating their wish to maintain a loving connection. And once that’s established, everyone listens better. Complications simplify. If people knew we all mostly mean well…
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You raise some great questions. You’re right – privilege is a loaded word, carrying lots of not-too-helpful baggage, almost impossible to discuss without endless attempts at redefinition.
I’ve been noticing how many words we have like that: feminist, evangelical, liberal, conservative, Christian . . .
I’ve been wondering: do we let the words go? Do we try to reclaim them?
And if we start over with new words, how quickly will those new words be abused in the same ways?
You end “we all mostly mean well . . . ”
Do we? Or are some of us busy twisting words and manipulating ideas so we can hang onto the power (and privilege) we aren’t willing to let go of?
Just wondering -
It’s probably more accurate to say that we all think that we mostly mean well. Whether that’s the truth or not, who can say? But I’ve found that it’s usually easier to start with a person’s own perceptions and work from there. Trying to get people to see that their own perceptions about themselves may be wrong is a nearly impossible task!
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Interesting post.
But as a white person I think there’s an important point hidden in the term “white privilege” that your replacement explanation of what we’re worried about doesn’t get at.
A lot of what racism is about is just minorities being denied their rights…not that white people have unearned privileges that they didn’t deserve, but that non-white people get treated in unacceptable ways that *they* don’t deserve.
But there’s also this fact: if you’re in a society where a significant sector of the population is discriminated against and disadvantaged, that gives you advantages. If the folks at the jobs I’m applying for, or trying to get promoted in, subconsciously discriminate against black applicants, I am in fact MORE likely to get a job there than I deserve, or to get promoted, because without that discrimination it might have gone to a better-qualified minority instead.
Alternately, I can expect my race to be considered “standard” or “normal;” the fact that I have a race at all and that it’s only one of many possibilities becomes nearly invisible.
The truth is that the overall system of racism does end up providing certain systematic undeserved advantages to white people. And I think this fact, unrealized, ends up serving subconsciously as the source of some resistance to anti-racist efforts. Sometimes, it might actually happen that an anti-racist effort takes something away from me that I would have gotten before, however trivial. And because human beings all tend to interpret everything we have had in the past as ours by right, when something is threatened to be taken away from me, I will feel like I’m being unjustly attacked, that I’m losing what was rightfully mine, and that it’s minorities who are unjustly pushing for special privileges. (See also the behavior of Christians in America–and I’m a Christian too, so I mean no offense–who will often very sincerely, genuinely feel that their right to religious freedom is being attacked, when in fact all that is happening is that other people are asking for their OWN right to religious freedom be respected, which unfortunately means that Christianity cannot maintain its unjustly privileged status in the public sphere.)
The term “white privilege” DOES tend to be upsetting to white people, but maybe there’s no way around that. If we’re going to be able to respond to the problem of racism sensibly, white people need to realize that NOT everything they have historically gotten by being white was a right. Some of it was unjust privilege.
I agree with what you’re saying, actually. And I think you’re right that this blindness to the advantages that come with being a white American allows a lot of racism to go unchecked. My husband disagrees with my position on the use of the word “privilege”, but the word that we can both agree on is advantage. It’s both accurate and a less loaded word. However, “white advantage” just doesn’t trip off the tongue so well!
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