The discussion on race rages on, but still there continues to be misunderstandings about some of the terms being used. Take for example “White Privilege”. That seems to get a lot of white people upset or angry because the application of the phrase is taken literally and not understood in the context of racism.
This reaction as the author Reni Eddo-Lodge in her book “Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race” says invokes images of a life lived in the lap of luxury, enjoying the spoils of the super-rich. It does not mean that white people have it easy, that they’ve never struggled or that they’ve never lived in poverty.
Check out Wikipedia definition: White privilege really is short for white skin privilege and is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. With roots in European colonialism,[1] the Atlantic slave trade, and the growth of the Second British Empire after 1783, white privilege has developed[2] in circumstances that have broadly sought to protect white racial privileges,[3] various national citizenships and other rights or special benefits.[4][5]
As Reni Eddo-Lodge says, what white privilege is, is the fact that if you are white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way – and you probably will not even notice it.
Why won’t you notice it? Its because the phrase white privilege is trying to describe an absence. An absence of what exactly, you might say? Here are a few examples – the absence of:
- The negative consequences of racism
- Structural racism
- Structural discrimination
- Your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost
- Less likely to succeed because of colour
- Funny looks directed at you because you’re believed to be in the wrong place
- Cultural expectations on behalf of the rest of your race
- Violence enacted on your ancestors because of their skin colour
- A lifetime of subtle marginalisation
- Exclusion from the narrative of being human
- Being the other
- Not normal
Let’s take normal. What is normal when it comes to race? Its whiteness – the world is coded in terms of white is normal, it is the default, and so blackness is seen as not normal or other! Simples!!
White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelopes everything we know, like a snowy day. It is brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job or flat or whatever. It scares you into silencing yourself; you don’t get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences. It results in biting your tongue or gritting one’s teeth, part of the many coping mechanisms blacks resort to.
Challenging white privilege can have implications on your quality of life. You may lose out on job offers, school places, pay rises, promotions, and other opportunities.
White privilege is deviously, throat-stranglingly clever because it owns the companies that recruit you, owns the industries you want to enter, so that if you need money to live you’re forced to appease its needs.
The insidious stuff is much harder. You come to expect it, but you can never come to accept it. You learn to be careful about your battles, because otherwise people would consider you to be angry for no reason at all. A trouble-maker, not worth taking seriously, an angry black woman obsessed with race.
Thank you Reni Eddo-Lodge for being so eloquent about this. For me, the phrase that George Floyd (RIP) kept repeating “I can’t breathe” encapsulates the strangulation that structural racism continues to exert on blacks today in the UK and in the USA. Collectively we can’t breathe. We just need to get the structural knee of racism off our necks!