ON BEING BLACK WHILE PRACTICING WHITE PRIVILEGE

 REPOST FROM 2016

I've come to the conclusion that the word that best describes "white privilege" is "obliviousness."

White privilege is the ability to walk around oblivious to the fact that you are white because you're only around other white people 97% of the time seeing white images 98% of the time which is impossible for most of rest of us.  When you don't get to feel like a racial-other sometimes, you don't get to feel your race. You feel "normal" instead and like white is not a social construct as real as gendered behavior with very real social consequences like poverty, like stereotypes that kill you, or like stereotypes that your group uses to kill others, etc.  

The best part of white privilege is being oblivious to the fact that you can just walk around being you and never stop to think about your surroundings and how you are being judged just by walking around being you.

White people do not think of themselves as living in segregated neighborhoods, oblivious as they are of the fact that only 1 or 2 out of every 100 families is something other than white in their neighborhoods. So they are also oblivious to the fact that I might not want to water the plants in their home while they are on vacation, even though they don't live that far away, because I don't want to be shot on my way into the house or on my way out because their white neighbors know I don't belong there with my black self.


"White privilege" is the ability to be oblivious to the benefits of being treated like a normal person just because you are white.


So I decided to see what it's like to be white with regards to the Dallas Shootings of multiple police officers.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

To be specific, I practiced white privilege by deciding to just watch the headlines about these shootings go by and not investigate or read much beyond the initial shooting.  

This means I saw things on television or heard stories on the radio in passing said "tsk-tsk" to myself and thought "that's a pity about their families." I might have had mental blip and a corresponding feeling regarding "thoughts and prayers going out to the families" of the slain. But, I can't quite remember. 

I just acknowledged that the shooting of the Dallas Police Officers was bad. But I did not spend one second listening to President Obama talk about how terrible the shooting was. I did not read one article about one officer. 

• I don't know if they were in their 20s or in their 50s. 
• I don't know if the cops killed were single, married, or bigamists. 
• I don't know if they had kids, were planning to have kids, or childless. 
• I don't even know if the funerals have taken place yet. 
• I don't know one of their names* 

(*= still don't know anything, not even now that I've reposted this in 2018)

Therefore, I don't have any nagging feelings about how stressed the families of the dead are. The families of the dead are nothing more than abstract concepts to me, not real people.

And, I don't have to care about abstract concepts.

So is this feeling of oh-well-violence-happens the way the white privileged person feels when it bypasses and overlooks racism to the point that he or she doesn't bother to notice the pattern in the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald, Miriam Carey, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tarika Wilson, Walter Scott, Natasha McKenna, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Alesia Thomas, Yvette Smith, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile? 

I know it takes an effort to seek out your own privilege, to find the benefits you receive in life just by belonging to a certain group.  I mean, why would you investigate what you perceive as "normal?"

And oppressed groups (demographics) use their oppression to refuse to look into their own privileged positions. I observe this in my own groups all the time.

• White feminists don't look for their white privilege because they know as women they are oppressed. 
• Black men don't look for male privilege because they know as black people they are oppressed. 
• White gay male people --overtly racist as hell I've discovered and sexist too--  don't investigate their white privilege or their male privilege because they are oppressed due to being gay. 
• Black women don't look for Christian privilege because they are oppressed as black people and oppressed as women. 
• White men don't look for their white privilege, their male privilege, or their Christian privilege because every political and non-political decision was made among them for centuries and now they can't even call the shots as to who will be president. 

Even though I could only practice a small section of white privilege, I must say I can see its benefits. Life feels a lot more peaceful when you are only looking at one side of a problem, your own side. The thing I can't make-shift-experience is the belief that there is only one side, the white side that you don't acknowledge as being "the white side" because you kinda-sorta don't believe race exists anyway

--because race doesn't really exist for YOU personally--because you don't experience being a racial-other by being surrounded by people not-white--because you don't have close relationships with people of other races where you'd go their home and become aware of differences you'd have to RESPECT

While I tried to experience white privilege by choosing to be oblivious, I think what I really did was refuse to engage, what W.E.B. DuBois called, my double consciousness as a black person.  

That is, I didn't engage the part of my brain that is on the outside of blackness looking in.  

I decide to only have an awareness of black people's feelings from the inside, I only had awareness of being overwhelmed by the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. 

By choosing to be oblivious, I did not have to think about how white people looking at Dallas felt about Black Lives Matter, how white people probably feel unfairly targeted since they are pretty much OBLIVIOUS to the patterns of black deaths at the hands of mostly white police.

Whatever my little experiment was or was not, being oblivious felt a lot better than "being woke."

So I guess my next question is this: 

How do we make obliviousness more painful than being woke for the white privileged?

I think maybe Donald Trump may be part of the answer. He is causing a lot of psychological pain for some white people, but not enough pain and not enough white people are being affected. A lot of white people are still able to make themselves believe, SOMEHOW, that Donald Trump just sprang up out of the ground without any contribution from the white population at large. 

I think it's true that some of racism can be solved by radical love, as Sadie Smith said in an interview once. I believe this. I've seen this. 

I've seen white women, white mothers to black children wake up to racism when they start noticing the obvious about how black people are treated. Maybe you have to love to care, you have to love to desire to look. But a white mother loving her children doesn't always work.

Some white mothers of black children are more dedicated to protecting their whiteness and the privilege and their rosy cheeked world view than they are their children --because they think they can just bestow (what they have not identified as) whiteness on their children --and SOMETIMES these white mothers do so, with the encouragement of a black male spouse that married her for the status of her white skin more than love.  

But I think radical pain is the other solution, maybe the bigger part of the solution. 

So how do we make obliviousness radically more painful than being woke for the white privileged?

This is the question we must work on. Donald Trump is providing an ugly mirror and psychological pain for white people-- that they are still running from. I think the other part of the pain comes from hitting white Americans in their pocket at every opportunity. That's the pain that counts in this country. We just have to figure out a variety of ways to do it.

As far as getting white cops and white-wanna-bes who are cops off us, I really think making sure that police union goes broke trying to pay off victim's families is the first place we should go. 

Someone suggested police having to have liability to "practice" police work. That's a good idea. That's the method through which you can break the police union which negotiates that the city pay victim's families instead of the police union making payment itself. By making the police union pay for liability insurance, the more they screw up (murder unjustly) the more they pay. And that will break the police union and remove its ability to hire an expensive lawyer that gets these murderers with badges off.

Ultimately, we need to find ways to follow the money and get it out of the racists pockets. 

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