I sometimes feel like I have a front-row seat to the race battles in the US, in part because I am not from here, and in part because I have a partner whose racial history is … complicated. White people see a white man. Several African-American women have joked to me that they think he has what they called, “the tint”. My Mexican neighbors think he is Hispanic. I think he is just ‘American’ - a big mix of lots of stuff, genetically, that came out handsome.
My own life is like a textbook example of what it means to benefit from white privilege, because there is no question, looking at me, where my racial orgins lie - in frosty, northern countries with no sun and terrible cuisine, but I do get a glimpse of what it might be like sometimes not to benefit that way, which is why I enjoyed this op-ed piece so much: This is Your Nation on White Privilege.
A few of my faves:
- White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and then Harvard Business school, and yet, still be seen as just an average guy (George W. Bush) while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then to Harvard Law, makes you “uppity,” and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks.
- White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
- White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps.”