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White
Privilege ,White Entitlement, and the 2008
Election
By
Tim Wise
For those who still can't
grasp the concept of white privilege, or who
are constantly looking for some
easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps
this list will help.
White privilege
is when you can get pregnant at seventeen
like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to
insist that your life and that of your
family is a personal matter, and that no one
has a right to judge you or your parents,
because "every family has challenges," even
as black and Latino families with similar
"challenges" are regularly typified as
irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of
social decay.
White privilege
is when you can call yourself a "fuckin'
redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend
does, and talk about how if anyone messes
with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass,"
and talk about how you like to "shoot shit"
for fun, and still be viewed as a
responsible, all-American boy (and a great
son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
White privilege
is when you can attend four different
colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did
(one of which you basically failed out of,
then returned to after making up some
coursework at a community college), and no
one questions your intelligence or
commitment to achievement, whereas a person
of color who did this would be viewed as
unfit for college, and probably someone who
only got in in the first place because of
affirmative action.
White privilege
is when you can claim that being mayor of a
town smaller than most medium-sized
colleges, and then Governor of a state with
about the same number of people as the lower
fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you
ready to potentially be president, and
people don't all piss on themselves with
laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator,
two-term state Senator, and constitutional
law scholar, means you're "untested."
White privilege
is being able to say that you support the
words "under God" in the pledge of
allegiance because "if it was good enough
for the founding fathers, it's good enough
for me," and not be immediately disqualified
from holding office—since, after all, the
pledge was written in the late 1800s and the
"under God" part wasn't added until the
1950s—while believing that reading accused
criminals and terrorists their rights
(because, ya know, the Constitution, which
you used to teach at a prestigious law
school requires it), is a dangerous and
silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.
White privilege
is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not
make people immediately scared of you. White
privilege is being able to have a husband
who was a member of an extremist political
party that wants your state to secede from
the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska
first," and no one questions your patriotism
or that of your family, while if you're
black and your spouse merely fails to come
to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with
her kids on the first day of school, people
immediately think she's being disrespectful.
White privilege
is being able to make fun of community
organizers and the work they do—like, among
other things, fight for the right of women
to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour
workday, or an end to child labor—and
people think you're being pithy and tough,
but if you merely question the experience of
a small town mayor and 18-month governor
with no foreign policy expertise beyond a
class she took in college—you're somehow
being mean, or even sexist.
White privilege
is being able to convince white women who
don't even agree with you on any substantive
issue to vote for you and your running mate
anyway, because all of a sudden your
presence on the ticket has inspired
confidence in these same white women, and
made them give your party a "second look."
White privilege
is being able to fire people who
didn't support your political campaigns and
not be accused of abusing your power or
being a typical politician who engages in
favoritism, while being black and merely
knowing some folks from the old-line
political machines in Chicago means you must
be corrupt.
White privilege
is being able to attend churches over the
years whose pastors say that people who
voted for John Kerry or merely criticize
George W. Bush are going to hell, and that
the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation
and the job of Christians is to bring
Christian theological principles into
government, and who bring in speakers who
say the conflict in the Middle East is God's
punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and
everyone can still think you're just a good
church-going Christian, but if you're black
and friends with a black pastor who has
noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S.
Department of Defense) that terrorist
attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign
policy and who talks about the history of
racism and its effect on black people,
you're an extremist who probably hates
America.
White privilege
is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is
when asked by a reporter, and then people
get angry at the reporter for asking you
such a "trick question," while being black
and merely refusing to give one-word answers
to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're
dodging the question, or trying to seem
overly intellectual and nuanced.
White privilege
is being able to claim your experience as a
POW has anything at all to do with your
fitness for president, while being black and
experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has
referred to it, a "light" burden.
And finally,
white privilege is the only thing
that could possibly allow someone to become
president when he has voted with George W.
Bush 90 percent of the time, even as
unemployment is skyrocketing, people are
losing their homes, inflation is rising, and
the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world
opinion, just because white voters aren't
sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya
know, it's just too vague and ill-defined,
unlike, say, four more years of the same,
which is very concrete and certain.
White privilege
is, in short, the problem.
Tim Wise is the author of
White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised
2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently,
publishing this month, also by Soft Skull.
This article
originally appeared in
Buzzflash.
Source:
BlackAgendaReport
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
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The Heart of Whiteness
By Robert Jensen
The
first, and perhaps most crucial,
fear is that of facing the fact
that some of what we white
people have is unearned. It's a
truism that we don't really make
it on our own; we all have
plenty of help to achieve
whatever we achieve. That means
that some of what we have is the
product of the work of others,
distributed unevenly across
society, over which we may have
little or no control
individually. No matter how hard
we work or how smart we are, we
all know — when we are honest
with ourselves — that we did not
get where we are by merit alone.
And many white people are afraid
of that fact.
A second fear is crasser: White
people's fear of losing what we
have — literally the fear of
losing things we own if at some
point the economic, political,
and social systems in which we
live become more just and
equitable.—Robert
Jensen
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
posted 17
September 2008
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