I’m a white guy. Whitey McWhiterson white.
I don’t say this as a dig against who I am — I’m stating it as a fact. I am, nearly, as white as they come. Like, “Can’t Tan” white. “Always Burn” white. “Prone To Sun Poisoning That Leaves Me The Color Of Undying Rage” white. But for the natural “Lightly Smoked Ham” pink hue to my skin, I’d be “I Live In A Dungeon” white.
Does that mean I’m uncouth, or socially oblivious, or blissfully unaware of popular trends, in the self-deprecating way a lot of white folks use the term “white”? No.
Well, no…mostly. I don’t “get” a lot of modern music, but that’s less a function of my ethnicity than my age.
I like to think of myself as a socially conscious white guy, as well. I grew up in a Manhattan, NYC neighborhood in which whites were definitely the minority. I’m a product of a public school education at schools where I was the unwitting beneficiary of exposure to a vast array of cultures, religions, foods, political ideologies, languages, philosophies, ideas, foods, music, foods, dance, foods, and foods.
And don’t get me started on the foods.
But to me, my friends and family are one group whose homogeneity is that they are my friends and family. Yes, my circle is diverse. No, it isn’t subdivided — for me — along socioeconomic, ethnic, national, gender orientation, ability level, sexual orientation, family status or religious lines.
I am lucky to have the friends and family that I have. And though my friends and family run the gamut in terms of their backgrounds, they’re my friends and family first. Those that have backgrounds different than mine are my friends and family irrespective of and without categorization by those backgrounds.
Though I am extremely adept at patting myself on the back for thinking I’m a very socially conscious (if extremely pale) white guy, and though I have been lucky to have grown up with a broad cultural (and culinary!) outlook, there is one thing I can never do: experience my entire life the way a person of color has.
I can go out to dinner (food!) with friends who happen to be persons of color hundreds of times here and abroad, and never notice the fact that the waiter or waitress will always ask me about my order first and always leave the check with me, even in places where whites represent a bare handful of the population.
I can look at a fashion magazine and know it will be with resplendent with people whose skin color is closer to mine than most other Earthlings.
I can read history books about people with my skin color without having to search for history pertaining to it because it’s a given that “history” already means “white history”.
I can live in neighborhoods that weren’t permanently destroyed by federally codified redlining of nearly 100 years ago that resulted in shoddy infrastructure and shoddier local services (like education).
I can trace my family history back hundreds of years because those records actually exist.
I can inherit wealth because that wealth has existed for more than my own generation.
And I can live a life free from “the talk” because I will always among the least likely of my fellow humans — by miles — to be pulled over, detained, searched/frisked, interrogated about normal behavior, arrested (per capita) (even if I’d committed a violent crime with a co-offender of another race), beaten/shot/killed by law enforcement or denied bail, convicted or given the maximum conviction by the criminal justice system. (underlined passages are hyperlinked to direct sources)
The many men and women in US law enforcement and the US criminal justice system are not part of some vast conspiracy or evil plot; they are exactly as ethical and honorable and good as any other Americans. But despite this, there is one major statistical factor between me and every other person who’s ever been involved with law enforcement or criminal justice that makes it better for people like me and worse for people like them: skin color.
It’s not a judgement, or an opinion, or a political statement. It’s not a slight or insult or criticism or finding of fault. It is mathematically objective truth: I am a beneficiary of my race.
I’ll have advantages non-white Americans don’t. Doesn’t matter if I’m rich, or poor, or middle class. I can have grown up in a crappy neighborhood or a small town or a penthouse or have been homeless. I can speak with a regional accent or none at all. I can dress casually, formally, or any style I like. I can be in any store or driving any vehicle or ride any public transportation I like.
No matter what I do, I’m not going to be shot in my sleep when a no-knock warrant gets served to the wrong address. I’m not going to be arrested on suspicion of breaking in to my own home. I’m not going to have three police officers kneeling on me or be held in illegal chokehold by several after I’ve been already been handcuffed, on live video, while I’m pleading for what turns out to be my last breath, even if I were to resist arrest. I won’t ever be beaten 50+ times with a nightstick even if I’m being subdued after having led police on a high speed chase, nor will I be sodomized with a nightstick while being held down in a local precinct bathroom. I won’t be shot over forty times reaching for my wallet. I won’t be the sole arrest target of a group of 5 I am broadcasting with on live television as I am literally trying to comply with police orders and displaying my press credentials. Nobody is ever going to call 911 on me to deliver on their threat to say “a European American man is threatening me!”. I won’t be found hanging in a jail cell because of a one-sided altercation over an alleged failure to signal.
None of these things are ever going to happen to me. But those are all big things, right? They’re all outliers. One can say they won’t happen me, because they won’t happen to most people.
If only that were where the benefits of being white in America ended.
All the possible results I might experience in civil as well as criminal court will be remarkably more favorable. My every interaction with bureaucracies, government agencies, bankers, merchants, Realtors — with people — will operate to my maximum benefit in almost every meaningful way at pretty much all times. That is my life as a white person in America. It is an advantage that is, functionally, an entitlement. Any Caucasian American will experience it without ever having to consider it or seek out or acknowledge that it exists. It simply is.
That is the reality of white privilege.
So what if the opposite were true for me. What then?
What if every dispute I was involved in could reasonably end in my arrest? What if every store visit brought suspicion, from the very first time Mom sent me across the street to get milk? What if every time I hung out with a group of visually similar friends literally everyone around us were in a state of fear? What if every nighttime ATM visit had to occur with great care to ensure the person at the machine ahead of me didn’t interpret my arrival behind them on line as an attempted mugging? What if every traffic stop brought genuine fear for my life? What if every news story of someone with my skin color being involved law enforcement could reliably have someone use the word “thug” or “gangsta” or “hoodlum” or some other synonym thereof at some point to describe the person? What if every everything were a legitimate potential risk to my safety?
What if I were a legitimate 2nd or even 3rd class citizen pretty much everywhere in my country? What would it be like to grow up with that as my reality? What if that reality had existed in varying degrees for my like-skinned citizens for hundreds of years — and still existed, even after “one of my own” had been elected President of the United States? What if it didn’t go away with one of my own being the “leader of the free world”? What if, in many, measurable ways, it had grown even worse since that election? What if I and people like me still experienced disproportionately negative outcomes with every level of law enforcement and criminal justice and banking and Uber drivers and waitresses and literally every other interaction despite having had one person of my race hold the highest office in the land, for two terms, in recent history?
What if even that president had to put up with his wife being referred to as “baby momma”, and his citizenship were loudly questioned by his successor — and that claim was unapologetically based on his race? The most powerful man on the planet, helpless against that same oppression?
What if I realized that this oppression was all around me, even now, in this very room, as I type this. What if I could see it when you look out my window or when I turn on my television. What if I could feel it when I went to work… when I went to church… when I paid my taxes?
What if there were no red or blue pills, but you couldn’t wake up from the nightmare?
And what if, in the middle of a pandemic which left the overwhelming majority of people like me unemployed, without a safety net, with an administration that seemed to think I held sufficient disposable income to ride out the additional processing time of presidentially autographed US Treasury checks, when the majority of people like me were already living in a deficit position well below the ‘paycheck to paycheck’ level — what if, in that moment, with all these other injustices that I and everyone like me would have put up with daily — what if I and everybody like me watched yet another person like me dying a torturous death while helpless at the hands of the police?
What might I do then? What might my people do then? What does one do when all rational actions to date still fail to redress hundreds of years of oppression that are still evident in every single thing I do today?
Well, let me ask you, reader. What would you do if society followed you and everybody like you around for your whole collective lives, poking at you with a stick? Would you grab the stick one day?
If you’re like me — extremely white — you will fortunately never have to find out.
