White Privilege Never Existed in My LIfe

 In an interesting piece by HuffPo, so-called white privilege is addressed. The angle taken on whiteness is nothing short of offensive actually.

I am a white girl. I am mocked and belittled for going to Starbucks, for picking up my boyfriend’s dry cleaning, and even for driving an SUV. It is tiring for me. I don’t mock anyone for the color of their skin. Why are you doing it to me?

White people are supposed to ‘listen’ – i.e., sit down and shut up. We are supposed to smile and say nothing when we are mocked for being white, as if we do not have feelings. Here is news for you: If you want a comfortable space to talk about race, create one. There isn’t a comfortable way for anyone to discuss the issues with being white.

Whiteness was designed to exclude, and to simultaneously offer those of us classified as white certain comforts, privileges, as well as political, economic, and cultural supremacy. Because of this, whiteness harms those it excludes and classifies as others. Importantly, it does so on our behalf.

I have never experienced ‘white privilege’. I was born into a family with very little money. We struggled hard to survive. There were a lot of kids and not very much money. I wasn’t privileged then. Or how about when I had 2 teenage pregnancies? Yea, not then either. I lived in poverty.

The one thing I DID have was resolve. Resolve to not live that as a life style. Resolve to want better for my kids. So I worked 3 jobs and paid for college. I found a better job. I moved out of the ghetto where I was getting robbed every week. I made a life for myself.

There is no way for me to be able to compare to the ‘struggle’ of another person, who is black, because I am white. I cannot possibly know. But yet, I do. I know what struggle is. I know abject poverty. I know what ghettos are, and I have lived in one. I have feared for my children.

Rather than turning our focus to finding ways to “heal” ourselves and build a more positive self-image, white people need to sit with our “wounds,” which in reality simply means acknowledging and empathizing with as much of the pain that is inflicted on our behalf as possible. A good friend, artist and educator Charlena Wynn, recently reminded us of the old adage: white people talk about racism, black people and/or People of Color live it. So the least white people can do is to sit with as much awareness as we can muster, to talk about it, and try to truly revel in the heaviness of that pain without looking to excuse ourselves from its burden.

So please, spare me all this crap about how ‘the least white people can do is to sit with as much awareness as we can muster, to talk about it, and try to truly revel in the heaviness of that pain without looking to excuse ourselves from its burden.’ I have been in pain, I have suffered, and I don’t scapegoat it on my skin color.

We cannot choose the circumstances in which we are born, but we do not have to live with them in perpetuity. Skin color is only a crutch if you allow it to be.

Written by Katie McGuire.