I often hear Americans say that someone has to “check their
privilege” or they say you have “White Privilege” as if the term requires no
explanation for it is self-explanatory. When they do try to explain it, it is
without any irony and in complete ignorance of Rudyard Kipling. He spoke of the
White Man’s burden, the original “White Privilege” except Kipling meant racism,
imperialism, and colonialism to improve the world. My fellow White Americans,
mainly liberal, would be aghast at such a reference, they would shrink from
wanting to identify themselves with such a figure, idea, or image. Yet, that is
*exactly* what they have done by their belief that as White Americans they continue
to possess a privilege that needs to be shed or if it cannot be shed, they must
use it to bring justice to America. In their behaviour I am reminded of James
Baldwin’s prophetic words in
The Fire
Next Time:
There appears
to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes
who are eager to be “accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them;
they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites
every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country
will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and
each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may
very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no
longer be needed. (p.21)
At that basic level, the term White Privilege insults Americans, especially Black Americans, as it suggests there is yet another thing other
citizens have to wait for White Americans to do for them. From the perspective
in the UK, where I live, the focus on privilege, white or otherwise, seems
misguided. To know privilege they need to come to the United Kingdom.
I am a commoner in
the UK, privilege is reserved to the Crown.
I am a White American who lives in the North East of
England. The area where I live is 96% white. I have no privileges based on my
race, I am simply one of the many whites. As an American I have even less
privileges for I have no status beyond what the law allows me. As an American, I
cannot vote but I pay taxes.
In the UK, though, privilege is more than an idea
or a convenient explanatory trope
,
it exists in law and practice: The Royal family and those with royal blood have
privileges set in law. By right and law, the Queen is my superior. She is the
source of law and therefore exempt from nearly all the laws. That is privilege.
The Royal Household is also exempt from many laws. That is privilege. The Queen
and the Royal Household have the privilege to withhold assent to any law. That
is power, that is privilege. They do not have to check it. They own it. As a
White American, I am a commoner. In that status I have a kind of equality. I am
equal to other commoners in our relation to the Queen. I have no privilege
based on my race, my blood, or my nationality. I am the Queen’s inferior and
she is my superior through privilege granted by nature and nature’s God.
In the United States
we are equal before the law.
By law, no American can claim superiority over me without my
consent. By law, I cannot claim superiority over anyone without their consent.
No American is privileged by the law over anyone else even the President of the
United States must bow before the law. As Barbara Jordan explained her idea of
democracy, it was that as she would not be a slave neither would she be a
master. Anything that differs from this is not democracy.
Now I began this speech by
commenting to you on the uniqueness of a Barbara Jordan making a keynote
address. Well I am going to close my speech by quoting a Republican President
and I ask you that as you listen to these words of Abraham Lincoln, relate them
to the concept of a national community in which every last one of us
participates:
"As I would not be a slave, so I would
not be a master." This -- This -- "This expresses my idea of
Democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no
Democracy."
White Americans who fret about their privilege want to
assert their superiority, their privilege, so they can enjoy the ritual of
giving it away as if it goes away simply because they “check it at the door”. The
problem is that those same Americans, who create this image of White Privilege,
take it back up once they leave the room as they do not want to live as equals.
They want to live with the inequality, their White Privilege, their White Man’s
burden, so their life has meaning. They tell themselves they will use their
privilege for good.
Is White Privilege a
necessary variation of the Black Lives Matter theme?
Such a shallow, sad place America is becoming, as Americans
flee from justice based on equality of right, which is the true equality. The
American idea is based on, born, with the idea of equality. Yet, it is an
equality that requires equal civil rights, the public rights, that all share by
consent to the laws, which is justice. Americans appear to flee this equality for
it would require they accept who they are, their self-government, and live
justly, by recognizing and accepting their equality with their fellow black
citizens. Instead they retreat into a faux equality as they perform the
personally satisfying, yet politically meaningless, if not insulting, ritual of
“checking their privilege”, as if by their personal declaration they have ended
their personal inequality.
The privilege theorists who talk of white privilege
or white fragility appear to believe that by making everyone “check
their privilege” they will create a just society free of any contradictions.
They want a society ruled by a democratic tyranny where people will be
forced to behave equally, think equally, and check their privilege equally for everyone must be judged publicly
on the colour of the skin rather than the content of their character as expressed in their public behavior.
I have a dream that my four
little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
If you are white, you
have a privilege that must be checked, which is a sort of reversed Black Lives Matter, in which if you are black, you have
no privilege so you must wait for others to check theirs. Instead of living
their life justly so that colour of skin does not matter, that is without
regard to “white privilege”, the white privilege theorists distort themselves, and the community True privilege, the one granted by nature and nature’s God or by force and
fraud, would never be surrender or checked, which is why American fought a
civil war to settle that question once and for all, for all Americans. No Black
man or woman needs a White Person to check their privilege to make them feel better
or to have equality.
There's no white man going to
tell me anything about my rights. Brothers and sisters, always remember, if it
doesn't take senators and congressmen and presidential proclamations to give
freedom to the white man, it is not necessary for legislation or proclamation
or Supreme Court decisions to give freedom to the black man. You let that white
man know, if this is a country of freedom, let it be a country of freedom; and
if it's not a country of freedom, change it.
In the United States black men or women are not habituated by custom, practice, and the law to obedience
or deference to the “white privilege”. Through the United States
constitution and the Civil Rights Act, they can defend their equality if challenged in the public domain. By contrast, the UK is
based on inequality of privilege in which the populace is habituated by custom, practice, and the law to deference and obedience to the Crown and the Queen.
The Queen suffers no
remorse for her privilege which is true privilege
Unlike Americans who struggle with living with equality, the
Queen experiences no remorse or concern for her privilege. She knows it is a
fact of nature that she is superior and endowed with certain rights and
*privileges* open to no one else. By contrast, the Americans do not even
understand that their ability to speak of White Privilege, the very idea of
White Privilege, only comes about because of the American founding, the
revolution, that enshrined the self-evident proposition that all men are
created equal into a government, which rejected the idea of privilege. It is
only on the basis of that American idea, the idea of America, with its belief
in the equality of consent that we can criticize the idea of privilege.
When White Americans talk of their privilege, they do a double disservice, they
denigrate the American idea by their insistence on their privilege, which they
keep wanting to remove but seemingly cannot find a way to remove it as they do
not want to embrace the one thing that renders it meaningless-equality as
expressed in the American founding. And, they force Black Americans to endure
White Americans “checking their privilege” so they can meet as equals.
Perhaps the best way to move forward is to return to the
ideals of the American founding and live according to the truths enshrined in
the Declaration of Independence.
However, that may be too revolutionary of idea or it is simply too late for
America?
