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[1], 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 UK, though, privilege is more than an idea or a convenient explanatory trope[1], 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."[2]
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.
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.[3]
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.[4]
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.[5]
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.
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?
[1]
Consider the work by Robin DiAngelo, "White Fragility", International Journal of
Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3 (3) (2011) pp 54-70
http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116
in which Whites are simultaneously the
dominant race, itself a form of racism, but surprisingly, incomprehensibly,
unable to be dominant for they suffer from a lack of “psychosocial stamina that
racial insulation inculcates. I call this lack of racial stamina “White Fragility”.”
Thus, Whites are both dominant and fragile. p.56 It is almost as if DiAngelo cannot
find enough White Supremacists as Whites simply do not see themselves as racists so do
not engage in the analysis. She seems wistful that she cannot find White
Supremacists with the racial stamina to discuss and defend their white
supremacy. Perhaps, the real reason for the lack of “racial stamina” is that
White Americans do not see themselves as superior and see themselves as equal
to blacks. However, even the concept of being white is not even the colour of skin, as DiAngelo states being white is simply a social process “white and Whiteness ...describe
social process.” p.56
The deeper understanding of Whiteness studies is as
follows:
“Whiteness..signf[ies] a set of locations that are
historically, socially, politically and culturally produced, and which are
intrinsically linked to dynamic relations of domination. Whiteness is thus
conceptualized as a constellation of processes and practices rather than as a
discrete entity (i.e. skin color alone). Whiteness is dynamic, relationship,
and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices
include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported
to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded
to white people. Whiteness studies begin with the premise that racism and white
privilege exist in both traditional and modern forms and rather than work to
prove its existence, work to reveal it.”
This suggests that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has
been a failure since whites are the only ones who seem to have civil rights. We
are confronted with the facts that every year more whites are shot by police
than blacks while as a percentage of population, blacks are more likely to be shot. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/16/the-counted-killed-by-police-1000
This raises the question of why these whites are not afforded the rights they
are supposed to be consistently afforded. Are we to believe on this basis that
they have been judged by the content of their character, which is why whites
are shot, but blacks are shot only because of the color of their skin? Soon, we enter the Alice in Wonderland world
where so that until Whites understand they are White racists they will never develop
their racial stamina so that they can be re-educated to understand that they
are racists and as soon as they accept that they can begin to be healed. Until
then they will remain repressed racists who are to be judged by the colour of
their skin and not the content of their character for their skin colour
determines their character.
[5]
The UK institutions are based on personal loyalty oaths. The Army, MPs, and
Police, Courts, all take a personal loyalty oath to the Queen. They do not
swear an oath to the people or a constitution.
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.
ReplyDeleteQuite. Much of black activism, indeed, "black history," revolves around white oppression rather than black achievement.
And even worse when white academics check their privilege; you can barely swing a cat without hitting slavery, Jim Crow, or the 1960s, and indeed the heroes of these stories are usually unbenighted whites eerily just like themselves.
"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."
ReplyDeleteEquality is perhaps too much to ask of any people, particularly one where greatness has become so scarce that they find it in reality television. King George III's remarks, following the separation of his American colonies, come to mind:
"I pray that the United States does not suffer unduly from its want of a monarchy."
Britain's inequality was overt and proud. America hides its. We call those who rule over us our "servants," without irony, still convinced of the fiction we control them in some meaningful way. Americans overthrew the inequality of being "subjects," and perhaps for that reason they cannot muster the enthusiasm to cast out those they call their "servants."
This is the seduction of the Western mind: being painfully aware of the threat of tyranny everywhere and at all times, and yet finding none to hand, it succumbed to the lie that the West's ideology itself had become tyrannical. And so the West has put underfoot its formerly cherished principles of equality, democracy, liberalism.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteYou raise a good point that James Baldwin also mentioned in his book The Fire Next Time. The Black Muslim movement, with its separatist agenda, was also one for black supremacy not equality. Although it is too uncertain as to whether the seperatist agenda (the ballot or the bullet as Malcolm X argued) helped fuel the civil rights movement's success (LBJ was trying to hold together a domestic agenda and a foreign policy agenda), one thing is clear that such an agenda is un-American and intentionally un-American.
Supremacy either by Whites or Blacks or any group is to be resisted as Un-American. The challenge, though, is most people are simply unaware of this early history or the motives, that appear to be emerging with the BLM in that it is not enough to find civil rights, which are open to all, it is to find civil rights that are only open to Blacks. The problem is that the American idea is colour blind. This point was clear to me when Henry Louis Gates spoke at my college about 30 years ago.
Our school was about 98% white at the time and had our largest intake of black students. As part of that program to improve racial diversity within the campus, Prof Gates was invited to speak. I was fortunate enough to attend the reception after the talk. There I was in discussion with one of the black students. I pointed out that once he, and I, had our college degrees we could never go home again.
Professor Gates overheard the conversation. I am not sure what he made of it, but it fit within the topic of the day and the tension that education creates for racial politics. By attending college, I and the other student were different from the communities we left. We were not superior, but we were different. It was that difference that begins to allow for equality for we were both strangers in the strange land of the the life of the mind, the life of culture where true equality emerges.
It is this life of culture, that transcends colour, politics, religion, that is no longer defended. The American universities no longer defend the life of the mind or the culture, the culture of liberal arts, that is necessary to sustain the American idea. The BLM movement and those who wish to reject their "White Privilege" contribute to this decay for they do not see anything higher to skin colour, politics, or power. They do not seek to explore the life the mind. For them, and most of the academy, philosophy serves politics with the desire for faction to rule faction permanently without consent nor in the service of wisdom.