White Privilege, My Privilege

Like prejudices, privilege comes in a lot of different flavors. Take a look at the lists of privilege gathered on Barry Deutsch’s (aka Ampersand) blog:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/09/26/a-list-of-privilege-lists/

If nothing else, the hard and creative work done by these authors frees me to focus on a particular form of privilege, and here I want to focus on the constructed nature of white-skin privilege, as well as its profitability to whites.

White privilege is created and maintained in a society that disparages people who don’t have white skin and privileges those who do. It is a correlate of racial prejudice; almost its flip-side. Part of the reason racism is so hard to eradicate is because ultimately white people benefit in concrete and material ways from being white in a white-privileging/ person-of-color-oppressing society. We can bemoan racism and outlaw racist behaviors and practices, and white privileging behaviors can and do persist. Usually invisibly. That’s a key white privilege: not knowing white privilege exists. The “best” thing about not knowing white privilege exists is then you don’t have to do anything about it.

But, it is real, and it does exist, in both individual and institutional terms. Peggy McIntosh’s essay on the invisible knapsack of privilege describes the individual white privileges very well. If you didn’t click to it on the link above, you can read it here.

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html

It’s crucial to know white privilege is profitable to white people (because that’s what keeps these privileges, and racism, in place), and that these privileges were constructed (because that means they can be deconstructed).

George Lipsitz speaks of the profitability of white privilege when he says “Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educations allocated to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. I argue that white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power and opportunity. This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige and opportunity.” (Lipsitz 1988, viii)

Lipsitz mounts a compelling argument over the course of his book, demonstrating how notions of race have been constructed by the functioning of legal, financial, educational and religious institutions, constructed in ways that financially and materially benefit white people, at the expense of people of color.

Accordingly, any attempt to achieve racial justice is going to take not only the transformation of practices that oppress people of color, but equal and perhaps greater efforts to transform attitudes and practices that primarily benefit white people. Being white is a very profitable business, an insight I have come to hold even more strongly after a month’s work on the “history ‘n’ sin” chapter, researching how racial privilege has been constructed through the history of Texas, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley.

Centuries before “modern” race theory developed in the nineteenth century, Spaniards used racial disparagement to justify the exploitation or execution of indigenous peoples, to an extent that over 95 percent of the original population of the Americas was wiped out in the process of a huge transfer of American mineral wealth to Spain. Spanish conquistadors also had children with indigenous women, by means of relations that varied from rape to marriage, under the auspices of priests who advised peninsulares (Spanish colonizers) that it was better to marry an Indian woman than to burn (although the same priests and conquistadors were not above burning Indian men, women and children). Their children became the mestizo or mixed-race peoples, who later declared their people-hood and independence from Spain, as happened in Mexico.

This quality of mestizaje became a source of pride for Mexicans, but a rationale for disparagement by Anglo settlers in Texas, who described Mexicans as “mixed-breeds” with Spanish, African and Indian blood, and asserted Anglo Texans could never be governed by such a mongrelized race, thereby justifying the formation of the Republic of Texas and its later annexation by the United States. Once again, racial prejudices backed by social power – in the form of armies, banks, schools, legal declarations – determined who could be exploited or expelled or exterminated.

We can read these histories today and tsk-tsk over the language used, the unjust decisions, the murderous behaviors of the past. But the land that was taken and the profits gathered through low-wage peonage and sharecropping and tenancy farming went into what Lipsitz termed intergenerational wealth transfers. That profitability, once captured from the sweat of Indian and Mexican and African American brows, was held and passed down through white families and institutions. Where it remains today, the foundation for further wealth creation.

My father worked hard all his life to create an inheritance, to fund my parents’ retirement, with any remnant to pass down to my brother and me. But it wasn’t just my dad. His farm employees were all Mexican and Mexican American men, because of course they would work for less than white men would, and my father’s profits would thereby be greater. The sweat of these men contributed to my father’s accumulation of wealth; so did the difference in wage scale between what he paid them versus what he would have had to pay white employees.

I have wondered what I would do if I inherited this land, this wealth. I don’t have to wonder any more; this inheritance is helping to fund my studies, including the part of this year I am devoting to writing this dissertation.

I am complicit. That’s hardly a dismantling of white privilege. But, awareness is the first step. By the grace of God, there will be more.