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White Privilege
Shapes the U.S.
By Robert Jensen
Department
of Journalism
University of Texas
Here's what white privilege sounds like: I
am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very
bright and very conservative white student about affirmative
action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.
The student says he wants a level playing
field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether
he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages.
Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a
world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is
something real and tangible we could call white privilege.
So, if we live in a world of white privilege—unearned
white privilege--how
does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask.
He paused for a moment and said, "That really
doesn't matter."
That statement, I suggested to him, reveals
the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge
you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means.
That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race
and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of
confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around
with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we
have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that
comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots
in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and
honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.
White privilege, like any social
phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all
white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly
racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such
privilege plays out differently depending on context and other
aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives
me other kinds of privilege).
Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has
played out in their lives, I talk about how it has
affected me.
I am as white as white gets in this
country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in
North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew
up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both
personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a
reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only
numerically significant non-white population, American Indians.
I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing
racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even
though I routinely
trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and
the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I
"fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through
the world with white privilege.
What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university,
apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look
threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those
things look like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection
of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I
smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even
when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all,
I'm white.
My flaws also are more easily forgiven
because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has
meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority
professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are
mediocre, though I don't know very many.
As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out,
if affirmative action policies were in place for the next
hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the
university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it
has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to
anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has
meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid
through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of
solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and
ideology.
Some people resist the assertions that the
United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the
racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have
long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of
them. I am not a
genius--as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the
drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've
published a reasonable amount of scholarship.
Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one
churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue,
actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that
I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my
office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished
something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.
But, all that said, I know I did not get
where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things,
white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job,
or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It
means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits
for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by
force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a
well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I
learned that white people like me made this country great. There
I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take
standardized tests written by and for white people.
All my life I have been hired for jobs by
white people. I was
accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired
for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of
Texas, which had a
white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a
department with a white chairman that at the time had one
non-white tenured professor.
There certainly is individual variation in experience.
Some white people have had it easier than
me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave
them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher
than me because they came from poorer families.
White women face discrimination I will never know. But,
in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege
somewhere in their lives. Like anyone, I have overcome certain
hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and
I work hard to stay there.
But to feel good about myself and my work,
I do not have to believe that
"merit," as defined by white people in a white
country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition
to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white
privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life
from certain hardships.
At one time in my life, I would not have
been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my
success in life was due solely to my individual talent and
effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged
individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's
mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to
those myths. Like
all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I
didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege
had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I
wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.
I let go of some of that fear when I
realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still
me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know
that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit.
I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have
complete control over their fate--that we can will ourselves to
be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes, we
should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or
anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we
will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets
us be.
White privilege is not something I get to
decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a
store at the same time as a black man and the security guard
follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from
white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in
which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is
clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day
white supremacy is erased from this society.
Frankly, I don't think I will live to see
that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I
continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human
beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first
step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit
that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean we
are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a
choice about what we do with our success.
copyright Robert William Jensen 1998
(first appeared in the
Baltimore Sun, July 19, 1998)
Jensen is a professor in
the Department of Journalism in the University of Texas at Austin. (Austin,
TX 78712) work: (512)
471-1990 He can be reached
at
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu * * * *
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update 7 October 2007 |
