Honestly, who gives a shit? I've been around DK for a while now, and many lifers know me as an angry, black dyke. Some kossacks like that (I once got hit on in a PM by a particularly noxious kossack with a terminal case of liberal racism), and a lot of them don't. A lot of the people who don't are liberal racists, and a lot of the people who do are too.
I get it. The diary that inspired this one is right about these white folks. My question is, why do we care so much? One the one hand, when I read such posts, I can see that they're interventions. I can see that they represent a voice that is normally under-represented (or not represented at all), and in that sense, they're valuable. On the other hand, I can't help but think that such posts represent a constant need for white people to recognize their privilege, and I don't understand why people need that.
More below the croissant: the official pastry of white privilege.
Please hear me out. I'm black. I'm a woman. I'm gay as the day is long.(1) I used to have a drinking buddy who was an alcoholic queen whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. You can't really get whiter than that, and you can't really get more drunk than he used to get. Once, when he was hammered, he looked at me and said "fou, ... yooooou are on the bottom rung." I shit you not. I started to get really pissed off at this guy, and I was going to start telling him about his privilege and what not, but then I realized that such a conversation would be absurd. First of all, he was sauced. (That's WASP for drunk, isn't it?) Secondly, I realized that in that moment, he was kind of saying what was in the heads of all of these people in this ultra-fancy restaurant. It was in that moment that I realized that, in many contexts, there are very real advantages when one refrains from insisting that white people recognize their privilege.
In that moment, I realized that he was kind of giving away the store, in the sense that he was being candid in a way that afforded me a window into the way his privilege operated. He was telling me the way in which white men of his ethnicity and economic status (poor little rich boys) think of people like me when I'm not around. Paradoxically, that means that I'm the one with the power in that moment, because I'm the one who sees him. He's just rambling and drunk. If I'd started to insist that he acknowledge his privilege, then I cede his power right back to him. There's no sense in doing that.
So when I read diaries like the one which inspired me to write this, I think back on that moment and I ask myself why would anyone ask some anonymous fool on the internet to acknowledge his or her privilege? What's to be gained from it? The ostensible justification for such conversations is to open up a space where people can talk frankly about race, etc. But nobody ever does that. We're always having this bullshit conversation, and it never goes anywhere. Because everybody knows their roles. White people know they're supposed to demur, and acknowledge their privilege. And somehow, insisting that whites acknowledge their privilege is supposed to be an empowering speech act for an African-American (or other racial minority) to make? That's bullshit. How does it profit or empower me to insist that someone acknowledge that they have more power than I do? That doesn't make sense.
I find this conversation completely uninteresting. At best, such a conversation represents the awkward first steps of people who earnestly wish to ... I don't know .. have some kind of interracial dialog. (And honestly, if you need training wheels to talk openly and honestly to people of a different race, then what does that say about you?) At worst, it's a continuous circle-jerk of bullshit in which people who in reality have far less privilege than they'd like to think they have are allowed to enjoy the guilty pleasure of "acknowledging their privilege" to people who, for some bizarre reason, think it's a good idea to afford them this pleasure.
Honestly, what are you doing?(2) What are we doing when we have this conversation, over and over and over again? To me, it feels like we think that, if we reverse the roles (if whites somehow step outside of their privilege, and blacks feel empowered by this) that somehow racism is suspended. But that's not true. It's not true because we're still talking in terms of race, and there is no racism without race. There's no getting outside racism by having a conversation that naturalizes the terms black and white.
Institutionalized racism is quite real. White privilege, however, is only real in the sense that it's a fantasy used to justify institutional racism. Asking someone to acknowledge this fantasy privilege is complicit with institutionalized racism. "Enlightening" white people, or making them feel guilty about their privilege is a colossal waste of time. It's completely counter productive, and also strangely racist in the sense that, in some cases, it's a transfer of internalized racism and guilt onto a white person. The most powerful incentive for white people to abandon their privilege this: it's bullshit. Pure and simple. You don't need to make somebody feel guilty to understand that, and someone who feels guilty about their "privilege" is someone who thinks it's so real that they're never going to see outside of it.
Rand Paul is the poster boy for what I'm talking about. That guy is so dumb, and he's been allowed to drink his own Kool-Aid for so long, that his inbred privilege produces such hair-lipped insights as: "I have heard of many tragic cases ... of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." This fool is hella-cray, and he thinks it's a good idea to walk through the world with blinders of stupidity on because people let him.(3) Any reasonably intelligent person should recognize that that's not a good idea. Any reasonably intelligent person should recognize that the reality outside of their privilege becomes less forgiving the more they believe in the myth of their superiority, whether they know it's bullshit or not.
At the same time: I have a choice. On the one hand, I can choose to insist that someone with power over me acknowledge that power. On the other hand, I can refuse to acknowledge that they have more power than I do. I choose the latter. MLK would not have crossed that bridge if he stopped to insist that the cops acknowledge their power. No. He just walked, and we all benefited as a result.
So, yeah. That's my $.02. If you want to go beyond the bullshit, go beyond it and quit talking about it. The real problem is that that's hard for people to do. A lot of people, of all colors, rely on racism for some cheap sense of personal validation that isn't real. Fortunately, there is a space beyond that. Let's meet there.
1. I once met this really hot chick who had all my strikes, plus she was Jewish. This pissed me off, because nobody has more strikes than fou.
2. Or as my white, privileged Sassy Gay Friend would say: "what, what, what are you doing?!"
3. I give Rand props for his jheri curl,(4) though. Republican outreach at its best.
4. I misspelled jheri curl when I initially published the diary. I thought Jheri spelled his name "Jerry." h/t to otto for the correction!