Take some time and think back over your personal life, list the times that the color of your skin has been a personal privilege? And the times the color of your skin has been a personal disadvantage? Not another persons privilege or disadvantage, not some story you have heard of others. Yours personally, some you may qualify as a guess or perhaps a could have been so.
But seldom does anyone actually have someone else say I am giving you privilege or disadvantage because of the color of your skin! You can state that you could not see it, you were one out of a hundred people that applied for the same job. You did not see the other 99 so you have no idea who they were or the color of their skin. You might have got the job, but would have been the only white out of the hundred meaning the other 99 was a minority.
So, that means you should feel guilty of being the beneficiary of racism right? You should be recognizing that there is white privilege and that is a point made by a guest on the Dillon Ratigan show. Now since looking back, you personally, of all you have or had was it in your mind because of the color of your skin or because of your efforts?
On a personal level, I can not imagine anyone actually saying that the car in the drive or the roof over your head was because you are white. There is the problem that Torne said is the stumbling block to an understanding between the races. The refusal of the whites to acknowledge on a personal level that they benefit from ‘White Privilege.’ But like the guy who asked me if I felt guilty for what my people did to his people? When everything he could list is something I had not done and knew no one who had.
One of my best friends grew up in a family of five children, where each day one member had to not eat a meal and their mother only ate once a day because there was not enough food for everyone to eat. Over the years they lived in houses that were not much better then what people house their chickens in or store the mower in the winter. It is vulgar, but is the truest example of how poor this family was: “My friend’s family was so poor when he was growing up that if he did not wake up with a hard-on, he had nothing to play with the rest of the day!” For his third birthday, his mother gave him a broken alarm clock as his birthday gift. The rest of the story and one that is true of the rest of his life. He took it apart and made it work! And the alarm clock is an example of everything that life has given him. Whenever life has given him a broken alarm clock he has taken it apart and made it work.
Therein lies the problem, few if any of us can look back and point to any time that white privilege has worked in our favor. We have seen the story of our life from the inside out not the other way around. To tell my friend that because of being born with the color of his skin he has he was privileged. You would be expecting him to believe something that is invisible to him.
The same problem a Christian would have with a non-believer. Without an example in his life to point to, you can not convince him that he should recognize it being there!
The same goes with me, never have I ever felt like because of the color of my skin that I have been privileged. It was not until KAKE TV said it that I knew I lived in a “Socially-Economically depressed neighborhood”. Only on rare occasions did I ever feel like the color of my skin has been a disadvantage. In a life time everyone can and will feel that as an explanation for the outcome.
That your age was a matter, the color of someone else’s skin was a deciding factor, the gender you are was the matter. Sadly like the stories you hear of, it is the truth. Defecation occurs and life, people and society is far from perfect.
And like history, it can not be charged once written only the blank page of the future is write-able.
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